Gnostic Reformation, Clear and Simple

Gnosis means knowing, and to be a Gnostic means that you are one who knows. It may appear as though I am spit-balling all of this. I’m not. I’m taking it out of an ancient scripture called the Tripartite Tractate. But more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God. That is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above. What I am attempting to do here on the Gnostic Insights podcast is to share the insights I have gained through this contemplation and thought, and to explain some of the more obscure passages in the Nag Hammadi scriptures.As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give much more understanding to our New Testament in the Holy Bible, because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council in the 300’s, under the direction of the Pope and the Emperor of Rome. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope, and none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. So it seems to me that we should have the freedom of mind to use our own discernment to decide for ourselves what scriptures are holy.If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray. You need to learn to listen to the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit to guide your understanding. I am not challenging the Father, Son, or Christ, but rather the right of the Emperor and the Pope and those first Bishops of the Catholic Church to edit truth out of the Bible, and that’s what we’re putting back in here at Gnostic Insights.For over 15 years now, I have written a secular blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything that offers a unique explanation of how the universe goes together. I’ve put the link here in the transcript.In A Simple Explanation, I developed paradigm-shifting concepts such as units of fractal consciousness and what I call the Simple Golden Rule that turn out to be completely compatible with the Gnostic Gospel, even though I had yet to read the Nag Hammadi when I developed the Simple Explanation. We need to understand the entire run of the Gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings, because, in terms of the Simple Explanation, we humans are fractal representations of the entire created universe.This is the meaning of that Gnostic expression, as above, so below. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called roots. As above, so below.The same is true with us humans. The nature of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God, also called the pleroma of God, is the same as our human nature, because we are their fruits—we are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a veritable fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform. Each lives their own life, and they lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true for all of the 37 trillion cells and 78 organs of my body. And all of these cells and organs level up hierarchically to form “me.”Whereas the concerns of the world often obscure my governing Self’s unit of consciousness, the unit of consciousness of a cell, having a fairly limited view of creation and few choices regarding their activity, is the least distracted by ego and the most attuned with its originating source. The point is this. Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father or the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of the very large, outside of our universe, if instead I turn inward and fall back, I am as near to God as the center of each of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering and grounding.When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man, the way I look at that suggests that the heart may be interpreted as the shared zero-point field that is at the center of our fractal units of consciousness.I am suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal, and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought, and it became the monad known as the Son—the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought, and it became the infinite number of Totalities of the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And the ALL became Self-aware and sorted themselves into the hierarchy called the Fullness of God. They gave themselves names, positions, places, duties, and we call them the Aeons, A-E-O-N-S, and that is how the Aeons came to be. And the Aeons are fractal iterations of the Son of God, and the Son is a singular expression that completely encapsulates the Father. And while the Father is unknowable because the Father illimitable, the Son and its iterations are knowable, and we are their descendants.The Father is not walking around in robes with a long white beard. That is not what the Father of consciousness is like. That is not what is meant when Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. If you know me, you know the Father.” Jesus was not referring to the personified God that was walking around in the Old Testament who was known as Yahweh or Jehovah. That God’s name in Gnosticism is called the Demiurge.In Simple Explanation terms, the enclosure of our material universe is a very large pattern at the outside edge of creation. I have identified that with the border that is spoken of in the Tripartite Tractate when it is said that after Logos fell and then quickly returned back to the Fullness, a boundary was thrown up around what was left behind of the broken pleroma of Logos down there, and that boundary encloses our material universe. The material universe is organized by the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the abandoned ego of Logos, left behind in the early chaos after the Fall of Logos.And drilling downward from the greatest to the smallest, the subatomic particles are the smallest fractal expressions of this universal set material set. And while the Demiurge is able to organize matter, from the subatomic particles up through the atoms, molecules, elements, and minerals, it is not able to touch our human souls because we Second Order Powers are fractal emanations patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, the Pleroma of the Fullness, and the Fallen Aeon Logos. The Demiurge may have power over the material that forms our bodies, but our ethereal Self comes from Above, not from the Demiurge.Now, because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of the Aeons apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of as above, so below. So, when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons, such as the Fall of Logos, and then the Aeons working together to redeem the Fall of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well. Logos fell because he forgot his place and proper function in the Fullness.The shadows of the imitation left behind by Logos when he fled back to the Fullness are the yin to Logos’ yang. Where traits of Logos came from the brightness of the Son and the ALL, Logos left behind darkness and shadows when he fled home. The deficiency left behind arose from presumptuous thought and overreaching of Logos, because that’s what Logos was doing as he fell. Logos overreached. He thought he was going to plug directly into the Father, but he wasn’t able to do that, and he fell. And that was an example of Logos’ ego falling out of harmony and unity with the Fullness. Logos left the Fullness in his mind. He was no longer in perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. He went out on his own with his own project, and that was the first example of ego apart from the Fullness. And it was ego that caused the Fall. And because of his presumptuous thought and his overreaching, every one of the fractals that formed as shadows of his pleroma down below all overreach. They are all built on ego. They do not remember their origin Above.Therefore, the material imitation is characterized by this presumptuous thought and overreaching, combined with the inverted traits of Logos. The values on the left, or the material values of the imitation, are in direct opposition to the values of the Father, those on the right, which is the psychical and the spiritual.So hate versus love, impatience versus patience, lust versus chastity, greed versus generosity, those sorts of things. We Second Order Powers resemble the First Order of Powers, which were the Aeons of the Fullness. We are also called those of the remembrance because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the hierarchy and their dream of paradise.We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the pleroma, whereas the phantoms of the deficiency are merely the broken ego of the singular Logos himself. The phantoms of the deficiency are smaller and of a lesser order. They are not fractals of the Aeons. They are shadows of the egoic consciousness of Logos.At this point in the Gnostic cosmogeny we can begin to see human nature emerging because, while this has been told as a creation story, it’s also the story of every human being. We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness by way of the pleroma of Logos. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect paradise as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father other than as an expectation of feeling loved or that we should be loved. And we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way.Those of the imitation defend and embrace the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. Those of the remembrance may or may not be religious folks, but they do all seek a higher consciousness. Religious folks call this higher consciousness God and the memory of the Fullness Heaven.Those of the remembrance who are not part of a religious body or the meme bundle of a religion are still spiritual because they do seek reunification with the One while rejecting the forms of religion. Others who hear the still small voice of God but can’t quite bring themselves to believe in “fairy tales,” are seekers that wind up at podcasts like this as they search for something to believe in. At some point during everyone’s life, each person decides for themselves whether to continue trusting their own presumptuous ego and align themselves with the Demiurge, or whether to heed the call from Above.We are happiest when we embrace the values of the Fullness, rather than embracing the values of the Demiurge as expressed through popular culture. Your heart needs remember that it comes from the Father and not from the Demiurge. That remembrance is what leads to repentance. We need to embrace the values that flow from the Fullness of God. Those values are called virtues. When we embrace the meme bundle of popular culture, we become lost and confused. This is the never-ending war between the memes of the left and the memes of the right. Repentance involves pushing away the memes on the left side of the popular culture because that is not the meme bundle of the Fullness of God. This is an essential step in coming to gnosis.Here is a chart I drew up that compares the values of the left and right. Ponder these for a while. Sit with them. Can you see how one side of the ledger leads to fractured relationships and misery?So repentance means, ah, I don’t want to do that anymore. Redemption means dwelling on the right side of the ledger through discernment and the grace of the Father and the Christ. This isn’t to take away our fun. It’s because joy is on the right side of the ledger. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. Therefore, in order to be happy, truly happy, joyful, we repent, and we are redeemed, and we embrace the virtues of the Fullness.It is likely that we humans are the only Second Order Powers that need this type of redemption by the correcting algorithm of the Christ. The other Second Order Powers seem to remember and understand their position, place, and function better than we do. Our cells and organs work without ego to build up our bodies. If they didn’t, we would immediately die. The flowers all remember to bloom and produce seeds. The trees remember to fruit. The forest creatures all follow their Aeonic inheritance and fulfill their role in our shared ecology. Our dogs love us unconditionally. And so forth and so on. It is only we humans who get caught up in the never-ending war and turn to egoic satisfaction over love, peace, and unity. This is why the Third Order Power called the Christ came in the form of a human—because it is us who most need redemption.The Gnostic call for redemption goes like this. Because the Second Order of Powers has gotten all gummed up chasing after each other in endless war, another fruit was required to bring peace. This time, the Fullness prayed to the Father individually and collectively for a champion to end the war. And this champion is called the Christ. Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate puts that:The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of the Fullness.In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms so that the one whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help as well as the one who brought it to him.In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is the correcting algorithm for Second Order fractals that no longer ring true. The Christ replicates all of the qualities of the All—that is, the full attributes of the originating consciousness in their pure form that existed prior to the Fall, with all of the confounding memes stripped away.When one accepts the gift of the Christ, one invites a correction to ego’s amnesiac memes so that the best functioning of the universal unit of consciousness may be re-established within yourself. The Christ also provides a homing beacon to the Son via a rooted love connection. Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from Above and that our Father is in heaven and to heaven we shall return.That’s all! Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of ego and this meme shroud of the imitation that we are wrapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines from within. That’s all! You cannot be taught gnosis, you must discover it inside of yourself. The Tao Te Ching in verse 21 puts it this way:This is accordingly how I know the ways of everything and the origin of all things—by observing what is within me.So here at the Gnostic Insights Podcast, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis, I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within my Self. You have this gnosis within your Self, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already in you and a remembrance of who you are and where you come from.So, onward and upward! I’ll see you next time. God bless.The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading The Gnostic Reformation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Let’s talk about pleromas. Pleroma is a common word in gnostic scriptures, and it has a particular meaning that only relates to Gnosticism. Today, I’d like to take another look at pleromas because they describe the flow of consciousness from the origin and tell us where we all came from, where we are, and where we will wind up at the end of days.I know that when I run through these various pleromas, people can get confused because it all sounds so complicated. But believe me, it isn’t complicated. All you really need to know is that we come from the Father and will return to the Father. That is the essential message of gnosis. What do we mean by the Father? The Father is the originating consciousness we all share. You could go with that and spend the rest of your life contemplating nothing more than its meaning and consequences. All of this detail I’m about to share with you is only an explanation meant to help you to understand the nature of the Father and then how that fundamental consciousness is packaged and distributed to the point that we can be sitting here today thinking about it.You see, the originating Father of us all is not simply empty awareness. The Father is not the null void. The Father consists of recognizable characteristics, with love being the foremost character of the Father. This love implies belonging. This love implies virtues like kindness and caring, truthfulness and fidelity, and a host of other virtues. These characteristics flow in an unending stream from the originating consciousness into every living receptacle of life, from the aeons and the angels down to the creatures that populate the cosmos. And each one of us who receives this gift of life, love, and consciousness also receives the gnosis of the One Who Gives and our relationship and responsibilities here within the structure of creation.Pleroma is a Greek word for “all that which is contained within a body or organization.” The Pleroma called the Fullness of God is the one we most often refer to here at Gnostic Insights. The Pleroma of the Fullness of God equals the sum total of all the individual characteristics and powers of the originating consciousness of the Father as manifested in the monad called 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. I picture the Pleroma of the ALL as a central star with rays going out in all directions, because the ALL is described as existing without personal identity within the single body and will of the Son. It is by giving glory to the Father that the Totalities of the ALL become self-aware and are able to name themselves and sort themselves into what is called 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.”This passage tells us that the aeon of the Truth—which is another word for the Fullness, or Pleroma, of God goes forth by way of fractal branching. You may review the concept of fractals by looking back to the Gnostic Insights episode called, “A Fractal Model of Human Nature,” posted May 18, 2021. which you can find at gnostic insights dot com under the tab, “Complete Episodes Library.” I’m also linking it in the transcript of this episode.The next pleroma is contained within the Aeon called Logos. Logos was the final Aeon produced when the entire Fullness gave glory to the Father all together. The Aeon Logos contains fractal copies of all of the other Aeons. The entirety of the Aeons of the Fullness exist as fractal iterations within the Pleroma of the Aeon known as Logos. The Tripartite Tractate describes Logos this way:“This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit; for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.”My illustration for the Pleroma of Logos shows Logos as a miniature copy of the Pleroma of the Fullness of God, sitting at the top of the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says:“This aeon was last to have brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude. And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…”Logos, being full and complete, carried the all of the characteristics of the Father and Son and Fullness and brought the entire glorious package of consciousness, love, free will, and gnosis along within itself on a journey, abandoning its position and place within the Fullness. This solo effort, this presumptuous thought, resulted in a Fall away from harmony with the other Aeons and created a new pleroma of shadows and ignorance.Here at Gnostic Insights I have identified the character that is known as the Demiurge in Gnosticism to be the wayward Ego of Logos, propelled away from its proper position and place in the Fullness. When Logos struck out on his own, his Ego took control and it was his Ego that caused the Fall into ignorance. The Self at the center of the Pleroma of Logos lost its authority and chaos ruled.“The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and which is.”The Pleroma of the Demiurge consists of the inversions of the Pleroma of Logos, broken out of the hierarchical pattern and scattered willy-nilly throughout the cosmos. The Pleroma of the Demiurge is not an orderly hierarchical stack, but rather a chaotic jumble of dark shadows.“Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be…”“They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being. They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be.”These unruly shadows, these inversions of the glory of the Aeons, still possessed a likeness of the Aeons of which they were imitations. And, it is that reflection of glory that became the Economy of our apparently material universe.“They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.”Logos was horrified by what he had produced because the imitations would not recognize his authority. Logos abandoned the deficiency below and quickly returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness.“Him who came to be in the defect” is the name we call the Demiurge and it is the authority that rules the defect. Those who came forth from him in an imaginary way are the archons of the deficiency as well as the inert material world.The reason we focus so much on the Aeons of the Fullness and Logos in particular here at Gnostic Insights is because the Pleroma of any living creature is the sum total of the Pleroma of the Demiurge—our material or hylic part that makes up our physical bodies—plus the Pleroma of Logos after his return to the Fullness, when he prayed alongside the Aeons to bring life to the deficiency he had caused.Since we Second Order Powers are fractal iterations of this Logos, newly restored to the Fullness, the path of remembrance is exactly the same for us as it was for Logos. We fractally replicate the Powers from which we were created.This Pleroma of ours is called the Second Order of Powers, and we proceed out of the Pleroma of Logos. We Second Order Powers were created through the Aeons of the original Fullness giving glory to the Father alongside Logos. Together, they prayed with an intention to send life into the fallen world below. We came forth as fruit from the Pleroma of Logos, and the Pleroma of Logos was itself a fractal of the Fullness. We are called Second Order Powers to distinguish us from the First Order Powers—the Aeons of the Fullness—out of which we are fractal iterations, twice removed. We are described this way in the Tripartite Tractate:“The beings of the thought which is outside are humble; they preserve the representation of the pleromatic, especially because of the sharing in the names by which they are beautiful.”Which is a very lovely way of saying that we Second Order Powers share the names and faces of the Aeons of the Fullness and, because of that, we are beautiful. Our Second Order nature is good, and “greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood.”Those belonging to the likeness are imitations of the Aeons, but lack their depth, powers, and nature. They are not fractals of the Aeon of Truth. And, while we come from the good thought, we tend to forget our true nature due to the “law of mutual combat” arising from this never-ending war against the imitations of the deficiency. Thus, we have forgotten our true Self and need to remember. The vehicle for our remembrance is Christ and the Third Order Powers within the next pleroma—the Pleroma of Christ.“The order which was his [in other words, the Pleroma of Christ] came into being from him who ran on high and that which brought itself forth from him and from the entire perfection. The one who ran on high [Logos who returned to the realm Above] became for the one who was defective [the Demiurge] an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist [again, that would be us Second Order Powers because we are emanations of that which exists Above].”And, because of the fractal nature of creation, the mechanism of redemption of the Demiurge is the same mechanism for our redemption, as well.“When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement, and with harmonious consent, to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.”“Not only did the aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which was written previously, but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.”So, you see by this passage, the Christ possesses fractals of all of the other Pleromas and Powers, from the Totalities as the undifferentiated ALL; from the Aeons of the Fullness as individual countenances; from the Father Above ALL Gods as His countenance—which is to say, the monad known as the Son; and from the Pleroma of Logos and all of his fractal faces as well as the Demiurge—his ego who fell. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Pleroma of Logos, plus the Pleroma of the Fullness, plus the monad of the Son, all together offering glory to the Father and praying for full salvation and restoration of the ego of Logos—the Demiurge—and we Second Order Powers. This Pleroma of the Christ is called the Third Order of Powers.“And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son… the one who is properly called “Savior” and “the Redeemer” and “the Well-Pleasing one” and “the Beloved,” “the one to whom prayers have been offered” and “the Christ” and “the Light of those appointed,” in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except “the Son,” as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?”In my illustrations, I picture the Christ as a singular light source that embodies the attributes of the Father and Son. The Pleroma of the Christ is known as the Third Order of Powers. These are not arrayed in a hierarchical stack like the Aeons of the Fullness, but rather as a central star that emanates rays after the pattern of the original ALL or Totalities of the Son, for they have no personal identities and only live to serve the mission of the Christ.The Tripartite Tractate says, in verses 123 and 124,“The final restoration, however, will take place after the ALL has manifested in him who is the Son, for the redemption began to be given among the humans who were in the flesh with his first-born and his love, the Son coming in the flesh, and the angels who were in Heaven having been found worthy of forming a community, a community in him on earth.”The Pleroma of the Christ on Earth brings with it fractals of everybody in the Pleromas of the Totalities, the Fullness, and Logos. Jesus Christ is the manifestation of the Fullnesses of the God Above All Gods—the Holy Spirit—born into the material body of the Demiurge.“As for the true baptism into which the members of the ALL descend and where they come into being, there is no other baptism except the one, and that is the redemption which takes place in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. After confession of faith has been made in those names and after one has believed that the things one has been told are real,”The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise initially dreamed by the Fullnesses, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies.When scriptures say that we will return to the paradise where Christ is king, that refers to our eternal place within the Pleroma of the all-encompassing Christ. Even those who currently align themselves with the Demiurge’s lust for power and domination will receive the recompense of good things.Here’s what the Tripartite Tractate says about the end days for those who currently deny the Father and the Christ:“as for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision, so they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice, that this is how things are, for the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration, even if some are exalted because of this Economy having been set up as causes for the things that happened, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them. They, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. These, too, will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency, and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the pre-existent.”The only forms banished to the outer darkness are those attributes of the deficiency that did not exist from the beginning—the shadows and phantoms of the imitation that bring nothing but death and destruction. These are shadows of the Aeons, so when the light comes, the light dispels the shadows and they vanish.And there you have the completed cycle of Gnostic cosmology. The place Above that we Second Order Powers dimly remember as Paradise and to which we will return, will be within the Pleroma of the Christ. That eternal place is called the Third Economy. The First Economy was the Pleroma of Fullness of God. The Second Economy is a mixed creation of the Pleromas of Logos and his fallen ego—the Demiurge. The Third Economy will be an ongoing Paradise where there is no death or destruction. Where peace reigns supreme and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In Paradise there is nothing but life, and so the grass is always green, the flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily with their family, pets, and friends.Well, thank you for being with me on this ride through the entire Gnostic cosmology, focusing on the various pleromas that have constituted this journey. I hope you’re not hopelessly lost. If you are, listen to it again. Read the transcript. I’m sure you’re going to get it. This is the gnosis that we were all born with, and this is the gnosis we will remember.Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward!Thanks for reading The Gnostic Reformation! This post is public so feel free to share it.The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I’ve been sharing these Gnostic Insights for a few years now, and I’ve discovered that the one topic that flares people up, the most controversial aspect of Gnosticism, doesn’t really have anything to do with the nature of God, or the Archons, or where we go after we die. Believe it or not, Darwinian evolution is the thing that really gets under people’s skins when I say, I don’t believe it, I believe in intelligent design–that we are second order powers sent from the Fullness of God, fully loaded with everything we need to know, because we carry within us the consciousness of the Father.So let me step through this notion once again—try to explain it in a way that will make sense—and if you find yourself just going livid with reaction against what I’m saying, well, that’s what I’m talking about. This is the hot button topic.I remember when I was taught evolutionary theory, and they said it took thousands of generations of minute changes to populate a beneficial mutation to the stage where you could say it had evolved. For instance, in 2012, Michigan State University researchers were very happy to demonstrate the evolution of citrate-eating E. coli bacteria after only 56,000 generations. 56,000 generations!I remember the day in elementary school when I first learned about evolution. There was an illustration in the textbook mocking the concept of Lamarckian evolution. Lamarck had promoted the idea that giraffes who stretched their necks to reach the leaves on higher branches gave birth to calves with longer necks. No, no, Darwinians said, natural selection is the way it happens, as only long-necked giraffes survived the lean years to give birth to more long-necked calves like themselves. And that logic was supposed to have settled the argument concerning Darwinian evolution.The reason Darwinian evolutionary theory won out over Lamarck’s theory of epigenetic trait inheritance was that Lamarck’s type of evolution requires learning and volitional repetition, whereas Darwin’s creatures were either born lucky to have long necks or were doomed to be short-necked losers. Even as a child of ten or so, I recall wondering, if long necks were so valuable as to have evolved into our familiar high-nibbling giraffes, then why don’t all large grazing animals have long necks?Then I came up with my own Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything and developed a theory of evolution in keeping with the Simple Explanation. My theory of evolution reinserts learning and choice into the equation and removes the element of dumb luck.Seriously, who would ever look around themselves at the varieties of natural adaptation and believe that dumb luck at the material level accidentally brought it all about? It just doesn’t even make sense. It defies the basic rule of 52 pickup. You’ve heard of that, right? 52 pickup is, if you throw a deck of cards in the air, it never comes down stacked and in order. It never does.In other words, randomness cannot lead to an organism such as we humans that can contemplate and comprehend the universe. It is completely illogical to think that randomness can account for intelligence.Did you ever hear that old expression that given enough time a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typewriters could draft a copy of Shakespeare or the Bible? That’s preposterous. It would never happen.Now consider how much more complex our biosphere is at all scales. The interior of a cell is extremely complex in its interconnected functions and parts. Then scale that up to the functions and parts of an organism and scale it up again to the interconnected ecology of forests and again to the interconnected biosphere of the planet. It is simply impossible to achieve without the guidance of an intelligent design.Stop and consider. Please use logic.So here is my Simple Explanation of evolution. First, we accept that the basic matrix of our universe is consciousness. The Simple Explanation’s model of evolution is information driven rather than happenstance driven as the conventional model would have it. What I mean is that the Darwinian model we’ve all been taught relies upon the brute force of superior survival mechanisms that allow the superior creature to procreate and thereby pass on their superior genes. And after a tremendous number of such superior generations, the inferior fade into extinction and the superior organism becomes the new normal.In the Simple Explanation, there is an ontological pull upward toward more complex aggregations of consciousness. Darwin’s model is, on the other hand, a case of the blind simply bumbling by happenstance, by lucky accident, by dumb luck to be a superior adaptation from the norm. Where I find it unlikely is that there would be countless such bumblings in the same direction that by dumb luck keeps heading in the upward and onward direction. The Simple Explanation would say the patterns of superiority are few and they are fractal. So the wheel does not need to be reinvented over and over. The golden rule and the hierarchical distribution of increasing complexity and responsibility cover much of it. And due to the transpersonal nature of universal knowledge, basic mechanisms like hands and eyes only need to be invented once and then deployed or copied as needed.There are no such mechanisms in Darwinian evolution. There is no way for one creature to transmit the importance of the development of an eyeball to a different creature in a different part of the world. They don’t believe in transpersonal consciousness. They don’t believe in fractal knowledge or the golden rule.Consciousness is not a byproduct of the human brain or even of a complex system of any sort. Consciousness is the ground state of reality. Think of consciousness as the medium upon which is written the formulae of our universe. The Simple Explanation refers to this ground state as the metaverse. And by the way, the Gnostic gospel (jumping ahead) refers to this consciousness as the Father. You might think of it as God. And it contains every law of the universe as potential expression that manifests when and where appropriate. Smaller derivative units of consciousness are fractals of the originating units of consciousness that express themselves in every single material expression of our universe.In the Gnostic gospel, we call those the second order of powers of which we and all living creatures are a part. The most ambitious units of consciousness, or we would say second order powers, continue to find themselves occupying larger and more complex physical forms. Some of the units of consciousness that started in Earth’s primordial soup have remained in the soup, never attaching themselves to anything more complex than a single-celled organism. The most ambitious little life forms found themselves returning to slightly more sophisticated organisms with each incarnation. Lessons learned are carried forward, always incarnating more and complex structures and occasionally jumping to a more complex hierarchical level, driving the evolution of planetary life via memes accrued through karma.Was my self-unit of consciousness ever a single-celled organism? Probably so, beginning about four and a half billion years ago on this planet. Was my unit of consciousness ever a jellyfish? Good chance it was, since the toroidal-shaped jellyfish is the oldest multi-organ animal on Earth, swimming our seas for the last 700 million years and surviving countless planetary die-offs that killed other organisms.Was my unit of consciousness ever a dinosaur? Well, maybe, but maybe not. I’d imagine the dinosaur memes and karma informed the development of reptiles and birds, not my mammalian lineage. The first mammals are thought to have descended from a different lizard called therapsids.Was my governing unit of consciousness ever a lemur or a chimpanzee or a bonobo or perhaps an australopithecus or a neanderthal? Probably was, since their proto-human memes and karma would have informed human development and the self-unit of consciousness is attracted to familiar patterns.In the Simple Explanations evolutionary model, no war is needed between natural selection and creationism, between science and religion. My Simple Explanation proposes that everything in the cosmos is created through metaversal principles embodied in all units of consciousness and that each governing unit of consciousness evolves according to personal inclination and ability through established patterns of meme acquisition and adaptation and the utterly fair and impartial mechanism of karma.In the Simple Explanation evolutionary schema, I am currently a human and probably have been for a long time. Does that make me more evolved than my dogs? No, not really. The family dogs are at the same level of hierarchical sophistication as the humans. The dog’s aggregate units of consciousness and their Self units of consciousness have all made decisions every step along the way that steered them into this life as these dogs.Every governing unit of consciousness is an integral part of one aggregate or another, hierarchically upline and downline. Every slot needs to be filled. The most you could say of my state of evolution is that ambitious meme collectors evolve into ever more complex instantiations. And my unit of consciousness and those of my aggregate units of consciousness that make up my body are attached to some highly ambitious collections of memes. But whether or not this is anything to brag about is debatable.Now all of that theory that I’ve been sharing with you comes from my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was published many years ago. And you can still pick that up on Amazon or through the Gnostic Insights website. It’s entirely consistent with the Gnostic view of evolution, as I came to discover many years later.So let’s look now at the Gnostic view of evolution in particular. We are what are called second order of powers. The first order of powers are the Aeons in the Fullness of God. We are the fruit of the Aeons. We are the second order of powers. We’re also known as those of the remembrance.And I suggest that what was sown in the second order of powers that lifted them above the imitation was the remembrance. And for life forms, that remembrance is contained in our double helix DNA. We also have a pure remembrance of the Fullness of God, our aeonic progenitors, contained in our Self with the capital S. But at our cellular level, the DNA is carrying the remembrance forward.As it turned out, the second order of powers became infected with the same lust for dominion that had infected those of the imitation due to the law of mutual combat. And the two orders began a never-ending war over resources in the limited ecology of our early earth. The second order of powers are also known as the likenesses, because we are alike the Aeons. We resemble the original Aeons of the Fullness, but we lost ourselves in the confusion of earth.The Demiurge and its archons are the other entities of the fall that we haven’t talked about yet, since we have only been talking about the physical universe, and archons are immaterial. They are not physical. They are influences. So when we talk about the never-ending war with the living forms, it’s the archons doing battle with the living forms. And those influences of the archons on our material bodies are death, aging, illness.Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, verses 84 and 85,The powers of the remembrance were adorned with the names of the pre-existence whose likenesses they were. [And that’s the Aeons of the Fullness.] The order of this kind was in harmony with itself and with each other. It fought, however, the order of those of the imitation.And the order of the imitation is the forces of the archons, which include entropy and death. Quoting again,It fought, however, the order of those of the imitation because that order waged war against the likenesses as they were producing various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers mixed with one another and in great number. Now the whole establishment and organization of the images, likenesses, and imitations has come into being for the sake of those who need nourishment, instruction, and form so that their smallness may gradually grow as through the instruction provided by the image of a mirror. That, in fact, is why he created the human last after having prepared and provided for him the things that he created for his sake.So do you hear how that verse from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi says that second order powers develop from the smallest to the largest and that the humans were the last to develop? It goes along with this notion of evolutionary development because we humans couldn’t have just been plopped right into the middle of the primordial soup from the get-go. Look around you. We needed the smaller creatures to come before us to create this environment, this ecology in which we could thrive. And I’m not simply saying it’s all for us humans because every creature that comes along is providing through the Simple Golden Rule all of the needs of all of the other creatures.Let’s talk about the Simple Golden Rule before we end this discussion of evolution. Our job is to reach out to others with love, aid, and information for the betterment of all.That’s, again, another theory from my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. So if you’ve never read that book you might like to go back and read it.This goes for all units of consciousness, all second order powers from the cells and organs up to the organisms and to the ecosystems beyond. Every physical manifestation links up with others of its kind in this universe. Cells link together to make organs. Organs link together to make organisms. Organisms link together to create societies and so on. And these are the building blocks of the next level of hierarchical aggregation. This is re-instantiating the hierarchy of the Fullness in this bounded material universe.And this is what is called the new ecology. It was a way to put the consciousness of the Fullness—the Aeons—into a physical form and manifest them on this earth. And then this will go forward and become the next ecology. The first ecology was the hierarchy of the Fullness. The second ecology is this material universe of ours. And then once this universe is fully redeemed by the Christ it will become the next hierarchical organization—the third ecology. And the way this happens is to reach out to others with love, assistance, and information for the betterment of all.I hope you’ve enjoyed this review of my Simple Explanation Theory of Evolution and how it is logically superior to Darwinian evolution and how it all fits into Gnosticism and the Gnostic Evolutionary Theory, as presented by the Tripartite Tractate.Until next week, God bless us all and Onward and Upward!Please pick up your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel and leave a review!Thanks for reading The Gnostic Reformation! This post is public so feel free to share it.The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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

Today we’re going to talk about how the Aeons of the Fullness of God were generated. And the reason we talk about the Aeons so much is because we are downstream from the Aeons. We are representatives of all of the traits of the Aeons—we second-order powers, and we humans in particular, since I am a human talking to other humans here. So everything I say about the Aeons and how they relate to the Father and how they relate to the Son and to each other, we have that nature inside of us as well, because it is a flowing stream of consciousness that begins at the Father, passes through the Son, passes through the totalities and into the Aeons, and then down into us. So let’s review this basic Gnostic wisdom here.The instant the all became self-aware, the all fell out of their unthinking, blissful union as one, and arranged themselves into what’s called the Fullness.“Each one of the Aeons is a name, that is, each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names.”By this point in the Tripartite Tractate, the Son comes to be referred to as the Father, because the Son is the Father of the third glory, that is, the Aeons of the Fullness. We see here that the Son, although a singular monad, is still a unity of many Aeons. The Son becomes knowable through the innumerable properties and names of the Aeons.What does it mean by names? I think that these names are the first appearance of what we would come to call ego. These disparate identities include names like flower, tree, dog, human, even parts of living bodies who themselves are alive, like kidney cells. They’re not names like my name or like Frank or George. They are not those types of identities. These are functional identities.The Aeons then arrange themselves into a hierarchy of,“minds of minds, which are found to be words of words, elders of elders, degrees of degrees, which are exalted above one another. Each one of those who give glory has his place and his exaltation and his dwelling and his rest, which consists of the glory which he brings forth.”Now, the hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the fractal patterns of our universe. Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, as Thomason’s translation puts it, refers to the personalities and how they relate to one another. Elders of elders and degrees of degrees refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered—first, second, third, superior, inferior, and so on. Each with its own place, exaltation, dwelling, and rest reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own unique place in the grand scheme, its own personal expression or exaltation, a location different than its neighbors, thus possessing its very own point of view.So it’s not about hierarchies of men the way humans tend to think of it. It’s not about, well—look at the hierarchy of government or the hierarchy of the Catholic church. It’s not about the peons at the bottom, and then you come a little higher into the elders, and then you have the priests, and then you have the cardinals, and bishops, and the pope. That isn’t the kind of hierarchy we’re talking about. It’s the way that our bodies go together, for example. Our cells are smaller than our organs. Our organs are smaller than the organism. They stack upward, and part of the Gnostic gospel is the higher the fewer precept.You hear that a lot in Gnosticism, the higher the fewer. That simply refers to how a hierarchy stacks, like a pyramid. There’s more objects at the bottom and fewer as you go up and up until you culminate in one. So that is what it means to be the hierarchy of the Fullness. The Fullnesses at the bottom are more akin to the cells in our bodies, and then as you go up and up the pyramid, you finally arrive at the organism.“It is he, the Father, who gave root impulses to the Aeons, since there are places on the path which leads toward him, as toward his school of behavior. He has extended to them faith in and prayer to him whom they do not see, and a firm hope in him of whom they do not concede, and a fruitful love which looks toward to that which it does not see, and an acceptable understanding of the eternal mind, and a blessing which is riches and freedom, and a wisdom of the one who desires the glory of the Father for his thought.”The originating Father continually emanates a holy spirit out through the Son that entices its generations to seek out their source. The Tripartite Tractate says,“It is by virtue of his will that the Father, the one who is exalted, is known, that is, by virtue of the spirit which breathes in the Totalities, and it gives them an idea of seeking after the unknown one, just as one is drawn by a pleasant aroma to search for the thing from which the aroma arises, since the aroma of the Father surpasses these ordinary ones, for his sweetness leaves the Aeons in ineffable pleasure, and it gives them their idea of mingling with him, who wants them to know him in a united way, and to assist one another in the spirit which is sown within them.”And remember, all of this applies to us humans as well. This is the way we are to seek the Father, the way we are to relate to each other. It is said that although the Father put an unquenchable thirst to align themselves with the one into the minds of the Fullness, he did not reveal to them the Father’s ineffable nature and the impossibility of reuniting with him and surviving to tell the tale. This was doubtless to keep alive the hope of reunification with the Father as a motive for continually giving glory. Now all of this has been from Tripartite Tractate verse 75.“The Aeons of the Fullness sat in perfect equilibrium in their hierarchy of ranks, stations, and names. They were a congress of one accord,”meaning they agreed on everything and they cooperated together to bring about a single dream of paradise. You could note one difference between the ALL and the Fullness is that while the ALL sings their songs in blissful union, the Fullness sings their songs in perfectly tuned, multi-toned harmony. In addition to their identities,“the Aeons of the Fullness were all given wisdom,”which is the ability to reason with logic and prudence. You see, by the way, they weren’t given emotion, which is the ability to get passionate about things whether or not it’s reasonable or logical. So we are to follow the path of logic and prudence. Prudence means knowing to do the right thing at the right time.“They were given a thirst to seek after the originating consciousness of their creator and a desire to align themselves with the Father’s will through the process of giving glory.”And they were all creative geniuses, able to dream up a fully functioning mental paradise where whatever they willed in the Father’s name happily happened. This dream of paradise is our foretaste of heaven shared by cultures around the world.The generation of the Aeons was not a one-and-done deal. And by the way, generation used in this sense of the word, it’s not generation like I am one generation and my parents were a different generation. It’s not that kind of generation. It means to generate, to create, to emit. The generation of the Aeons was not a one-and-done deal. After their initial emanation out of the ALL, the Aeons continued to generate more and more Aeons through various combinations of Aeons giving glory.The pattern by which these younger Aeons were generated was the same as the manner by which the original Aeons of the Aeons were generated as an exchange of love and admiration passed between the Father and the Fullnesses. The Aeons of the Aeons praised the Father together and together they received the Father’s reflected glory.You see, these Aeons of the Aeons, what we are calling the ALL, did not have self-identity. They were all for one and one for all. You can remember it that way. This exchange of praise from the Aeons and reflected glory from the Father resulted in the generation of new aeonic emanations.As we have already noted, the exchange of admirations and glory between the Father and son was like,“the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good insatiable thought. The kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses.”And like all fractals, this pattern replicated itself throughout the generations that followed. These kisses first formed the generation of the ALL. Then the ALL, also known as the Totalities of the ALL, procreated,“innumerable Aeons also in an uncountable way. They too beget by the properties and dispositions in which it exists. For these comprise its association, which they form toward one another and toward those who have come forth from them, toward the Son, for whose glory they exist. As a result, just as they were brought forth in glory for the Father, so too, in order to appear perfect, they appeared acting by giving glory. Since each one of them individually does not exist so as to give glory in a unitary way to him whom he loves. The fruit of the third glory, however, consists of honors of the will of each one of the Aeons and each one of those properties.”This is saying that the entire system of the Aeons has a love and longing for the perfect, complete discovery of the Father, and that the Father,“grants that he be conceived of in such a way as to be sought for while keeping to himself his unsearchable primordial being.”So this is why we have a desire to seek after the Father, you see. We aren’t ever going to reach the Father. We’re not going to plug back into the Father in a mindless, self-effacing way, the way that, for example, Hindus or Buddhists might think. We will retain our identities because, as you are about to find out, the Aeons of the Aeons gave birth to Aeons who had self-identity.The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that the Father,“gave root impulses to the Aeons since there are places on the path which leads towards him as towards a school of behavior. He has extended to them faith in and prayer to him whom they do not see and a firm hope in him of whom they do not conceive and a fruitful love which looks toward that which it does not see and an acceptable understanding of the eternal mind and a blessing which is riches and freedom and wisdom of the one who desires the glory of the Father for his thought.“They have begotten for he has knowledge and wisdom and the Totalities knew that it is from knowledge and wisdom that they have come forth. They would have brought forth a seeming honor, the Father is the one who is the Totalities, if the Aeons had risen up to give honor individually. Therefore, in the Song of glorification and in the power of the unity of him from whom they have come, they were drawn into a mingling and a combination and a unity with one another. They offered glory worthy of the Father from the pleromatic congregation, which is a single representation, although many, because it was brought forth as a glory for the Single One and because they came forth toward the one who is himself the Totalities.”This verse describes how the Aeons mingle and combine with one another to give glory to the Father. All possible combinations of Aeons are needed in order to express the complexity of the otherwise ineffable Father. Each and every Aeon combined and recombined and the glory they gave the Father was returned to them as additional Aeons, earning their designation as the Fullness of God.“Those of that place are ineffable and innumerable in the system, which is both the manner and the size, the joy, the gladness of the unbegotten, the unnamed, the unnameable, the inconceivable, invisible one. It is the Fullness of paternity so that his abundance is a begetting of the Aeons of the Aeons. They were forever in thought for the Father was like a thought and a place for them.”In their desire to give glory to the Father, that is to align their wills with the Father’s will, Aeons of the Fullness were required to follow these three simple rules. They were to only,* give glory to the Father, not to the Fullnesses. Aeons were to remain aligned with the Son and not shift their focus to the Fullness as a whole.* give glory to the Father, not to individual Aeons. Aeons were to remain always mindful of the Father and not to give glory to themselves and their talented neighbors as individuals.* give glory to the Father to the best of their own ability. Each Aeon was to give glory from its own location in the hierarchy. They were not to sidle up next to an Aeon who appeared closer to the Father in order to borrow that Aeon’s station to give better glory. Rather, the individual was to develop its own voice and talents through the process of giving glory to the Father.These rules come from the Tripartite Tractate, verse 74.By following these rules, the Aeons kept their focus on the Father and their motivations pure. While this may be a description of Aeons and how they think and feel, it is also a description of us, because we are the fruit of the Aeons. So every characteristic that the Aeons possess, we also possess.In other words, we are supposed to give glory out of where we are, who we are. We’re not supposed to adopt the gnosis of a master or a leader or a pope or a priest or a person in a workshop that you’ve run across on the internet. We have our own wisdom. We are to look inward for the gnosis that we bring to the table, and we give unique glory from our point of view.The final Aeon that was produced as an emanation of the Pleroma of the Fullness arose by all of the Aeons giving glory together. The Fullness thus produced a final Aeon whom the Tripartite Tractate calls by the name Logos.Because Logos was produced through the entirety of the Pleroma giving glory as one, this Aeon possessed within itself all of the characteristics of the entire Pleroma. Logos was not the equivalent of the Pleroma, though. Rather, Logos contained within itself a fractal iteration of all the other Aeons. Because of this, Logos in his entirety resembled a model representation of the hierarchy of God, a fractal level down from the Aeons. That’s why in my illustration of the Fullness, I depict a large pyramid of golden orbs, those being the Aeons, topped by a smaller pyramid resembling the entirety of the Pleroma. That smaller pyramid on top is Logos.And, like Logos, we also carry fractals of the Fullness of God within our Selfs, and that’s Self with a big S, Self, to contrast it with the ego. The ego is our designation, it’s our address, it’s our duties, places, positions, things we do in the world. Ego is what relates to others around us. Ego is what brings us the things we need to sustain our bodies. But our big S Self is the fractal of the Fullness of God within each one of us, and within each part of ourselves. It’s within each one of our cells. The way we have DNA, we also have the fractals of the Fullness of God. And these are the fractal consciousness that has come down to us.People sometimes say to me, oh, this is all so complicated. But hey, if you’ve read the Nag Hammadi or any other Gnostic traditions, you will find out that this is way simpler than those are. It isn’t complicated as long as you remember and realize that our consciousness is a direct emanation from the Father above, passing through these various stations, that’s all. And each time consciousness passes through one of these stations below it, it branches out. It keeps branching out into a more tangible form, until it reaches us down here in this material world. It’s the same consciousness as the Father we carry within us, the Fullness of God.And as long as you remember where you come from, and you remember that this world we live in is temporary, and the death and destruction and disappointment that we experience down here is a result of the fall away from the Fullness, then we have hope. We have that fragrance of the Father drifting us back upward for reuniting with our parents in the Fullness of God. So I’m just describing this all to you, but it’s not like you really have to know it. It’s nothing you need to memorize.All you need to know is that you come from above, that you are loved, that you carry the very consciousness of the Great Father, the God above all gods within you, and the love and joy and sweetness of the Father. And then if we live our lives down here as the Aeons do, all will be good, not governed by ego, but governed by that One Self that we carry within us, the love, the consciousness, the sharing, the simple golden rule of reaching out to our neighbors with love, information, and assistance for the betterment of all. And that none of us can do it on our own, because we’re just one small fragment way downstream from the Fullness and the Father.God bless us all, and onward and upward!The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading The Gnostic Reformation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

On today’s episode, we’re going to talk some more about fractal stories and archetypes. These fractal stories make up our lives. We have very little original material in our lives. It’s as if we are each a character in a play. And this play was written by the Aeons of the Fullness before time began. These are archetypal stories. And when Logos fell and broke open all these stories into the world, and then we came down and populated the world from the Fullness, it is these stories we are reenacting.Everyone’s life is different and unique because we each have our own point of view in the entire scheme of creation. We are monads, which means a singular point of view. We are monads out of the Fullness of God. And each of us, with our own point of view, are like actors cast in a play. We have free will. Everything in the universe does have free will. Well, all second order powers have free will. And we are free to react within the stories we find ourselves freely. We can go with the flow of the story and fully embody the archetype that is cast, such as a scorned woman screaming and railing at her man who has done her wrong. We can do that. Or we could choose, and this is the difficult part, to break the story and step back and observe the story unfolding without such active participation on our part. These are called complexes in Jungian psychology, these complicated interactions of archetypes and wills and powers that we find ourselves in.And you know you’re in an archetypal fractal story by the tremendous force and power it seems to have all on its own. There you are, just cruising along, minding your own business, and suddenly you turn a corner and here you are in a fractal story. And you can feel the difference in the power. Or you can just blindly go along and play your part and then wonder why you’re so miserable. Oftentimes I have thought, boy I’m really doing well. I’m really cruising along here. Everything’s going great. Boy aren’t I enlightened or whatever. And then boom, I walk right into a fractal story and complexes are stirred up.One fractal story that is very popular right now, because it is being pushed upon us, is this notion of victimhood. Victimhood is a fractal story. It’s an archetype. But the deal is, it causes powerlessness in the person who then takes on the mantle of being the victim. Oh everything’s against me. How am I supposed to get ahead? What can I do? I’m just a victim here. Oh man I’m so upset. I’m so frustrated. But if you refuse the title of victim, then you’re no longer constrained by the requirements of being a victim. You’re no longer weak and powerless with no freedom of will and no ability to move forward. You can reject that box. Step outside of it and then carry on without being a victim. Have a more powerful life.I had a marriage of 38 years that seemed to be absolutely a wonderful marriage. And it was consecrated as far as I could tell. We actually spent every morning, first thing, doing yoga together. We would open up a holy book, either the Bible or the Tao Te Ching, and we would read out loud. We would discuss the principles involved and we would pray out loud together. And then I came to find out around the 30th year of that long marriage that this husband was actually cheating on me the whole time. Now being a cheater is a fractal archetype. And when I say a woman scorned is a fractal archetype, believe me, I understand it from the inside out. Because one minute I’m this calm, happily married wife doing all of my wifely duties in a most happy way. Dutiful, yet happy. And then come to find out about the cheating. And then it was nothing but outbursts and fights and tears and screaming for the next eight years. And just on the flip of a switch, this husband and I were plunged into the midst of this maelstrom of the fractal of the scorned woman and the cheating man. And the scripts are already written, the words that come out of your mouth when you are in the midst of one of these things.You see it in movies, you read it in literature, you hear other people doing this. And once you are in that complex, then it is quite easy to recognize the complex when you see it in other people.When I had my bed and breakfast in Ashland, I had a number of repeat guests, right? They’d come every single year to come to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. And they’d stay for a week or two at the bed and breakfast. One year, this couple came up in separate cars. And they stayed in the same room, but they never sat with each other at breakfast. And all she ever did was shoot daggers at him whenever she looked at him. And I couldn’t understand then what was going on. But now, having been in that particular complex myself, I can look back and say, ah, he must have cheated on her in that year. And they had still carried on, they had their reservations, they had their tickets to the theater, they had their reservation to the bed and breakfast, but they were no longer in harmony whatsoever. They were in the midst of this archetypal story of the scorned woman. That is what I imagine as I look back upon that situation, having been in that situation myself.So you may be finding yourself in the midst of some sort of fractal story, not of your choosing. Victimhood, addiction, bad marriage, disappointing children, whatever it is—just realize that these are gigantic forces that were written before you came along. You do not need to completely inhabit that story. You can step out of it.Okay, after having revealed all of that about myself, let’s take a look at some of these typical fractal stories. These stories are typically referred to as archetypal, and they’re generally credited to Carl Jung and his concept of Jungian archetypes. However, I don’t know if you know this yet or not, but Carl Jung actually purchased one of the first books out of the Nag Hammadi after they were discovered in the 1940s. He purchased one and had it translated into German, and it is from his reading of this ancient Gnostic text that he came up with his notions of archetypes, from the Aeons of the Fullness.So what it is, is that there are major events and characters that appear in all of humanity’s different stories of origins in their different mythologies. Common archetypes are birth, death, leaving home, initiation into a new thing, marriage, the union of opposites. Archetypal characters include mother, father, child, God, the wise old man or the wise old woman, the trickster, and the hero. Some of the archetypal motifs are apocalyptic visions, the flood, and creation. We actually enact these stories, these gigantic world-embracing stories, in our little lives over and over and over again.Here are some of the archetypal characters of literature. The caregiver, often a parent character, desiring to protect and care for others, usually associated with compassion and generosity, sometimes martyrdom. The creator is a creative and imaginative character, could be an artist, an inventor, a writer, a musician, an innovator, a visionary. The explorer, who wants to experience new things and freedom, self-discovery explorations or physical journey explorations, seeking a more authentic life, not conforming to the status quo. Adventure around every corner, could be pilgrims, an individualist, or a physical wanderer about the earth or the cosmos.The hero character is very common in our movies and television and stories. That is a person who seeks to prove their worth through courageous and heroic acts. I think here of the American Ninja Warrior television program, and the incredible feats of physical prowess those ninja warriors exhibit as they go through the obstacle course, that each time they go through the obstacle course, it’s a hero’s journey. Warriors, rescuers, soldiers, police, team members, these are heroes.There is a character called the innocent, an optimistic person whose worst fear is doing something bad. The innocent is always seeking to do the right thing, and there is a certain naive innocence about them. They can be in a romantic dreamy place, always dreaming about perfection and wonder. I would characterize myself as one of these innocents.The jester wants to enjoy life and have a good time. They like to joke around, make people laugh, make the world a happier place. The jester also includes the trickster, or could be a fool, or a comedian, a comic.Another archetype is the lover—the loyal companion. The fear is not being loved, not being wanted, so the lover is passionate and committed and wants to be very attractive to others and to please other people. So they could be a people pleaser, as well as a romantic partner, a good friend, or a spouse.The magician is a visionary. They understand the way the world works. They like to find win-win solutions to problems. They can be manipulative. The magician can be portrayed as a shaman, a healer, or a charismatic leader of some sort.The orphan is a character who wants to belong more than anything in the world. They fear being left out and alone. They are often down-to-earth and empathetic, but they can easily lose their identity while they try to fit in. This can be the everyman, or the girl next door, or the guy next door. I’m thinking of Tom Hanks in The Castaway.The rebel believes that rules are meant to be broken and wants to change something that isn’t working. They might start out with a good goal in mind, but they can easily cross the line from rebellion to crime. So the rebel can be portrayed in literature as a revolutionary or a misfit. You know, like the motorcycle movies of the old days, Rebel Without a Cause, or the outlaw movies of the westerns. A lot of people that are rioting in the streets nowadays are enacting the rebel mode.The ruler is an archetype that wants control, wants to be the top dog in a successful community. Their fear is being overthrown, and so because of that they have a tendency to become authoritarian and to not delegate any roles to the people that are supposed to be advising them, or to, for example, Congress. They like to be the boss, the king, the queen, the president, the politician, or the role model that people look up to.The sage is a truth seeker who uses their intelligence to analyze the world. Their greatest fear is being seen as ignorant, and they spend a lot of time studying and reflecting upon the self. Sometimes they are subject to analysis paralysis, which means you study, study, study, but you’re afraid to go forward, you’re afraid to enact. The sage is a scholar, a philosopher, an academic, a teacher, a Gnostic.I am both innocent and a sage, and I’m pretty sure a lot of you listeners are also sages, or else you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast. So these archetypes, they’re not singular and pure. You can combine them in various combinations. I just said, for example, I’m a sage, and an innocent, and a woman scorned, for example. Well, complicated type of personality there.We humans have been using the same major archetypal characters in our large mythologies, our cultural mythologies, our origin stories, and our literature since the beginning of recorded history, and they’re the same archetypes. They’re popular because this is the human condition, and we’re not inventing it as we go along. We’re stepping into these roles and these stories, and that’s what I mean by them being fractals. And when I consider this logically, it seems to me that these stories must have been imagined in the minds of the Aeons of the Fullness.I always imagine the Aeons sitting there in their golden stack of cannonballs, but in their minds, they’re all dreaming the same dream. They’re writing these plays, and they’re casting these imaginal characters, and they’re sharing one dream that’s kind of like a big movie, a big walk around. And our world is a physical enactment of that dream of the Aeons, because it was in the mind of Logos when Logos fell. And also, it’s in our DNA, because our DNA has encoded all of the messages of the Aeons of the Fullness. We have the Fullness of God fully within us, and therefore we have this imagination.And I’ve said on this Gnostic Insights podcast before that our imagination of heaven, our foretaste of paradise, is the dream of the Aeons, literally. And the reason this world of ours is so disappointing is because it’s fallen. We want to be in paradise with the Aeons. We want to be enacting these stories, but we always want the happy ending. We want them to be happy and to be going along on the positive side. We don’t want them to flip to negativity. And of course, in the Fullness of God, it is all positive by definition. The Fullness of God does not embrace shadow, darkness, disappointment, or death. And so, our expectation of love, fidelity, success, courage, all these stories, they are actually in their perfection in the dreams of the Aeons. And that’s why we expect it, because it’s in our DNA.Okay, that’s enough for today. This has been my take on fractal stories and an introduction to the Jungian archetypes, although I don’t need to credit Jung with that, because they do pre-exist. It’s just that if you want to read more about archetypes, you can do some reading with Jung.Onward and upward. See you next time. God bless.Thank you for subscribing. Please share these posts with others.The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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

There will be a tipping point when all of us second-order powers believe in the mission of the Christ, which brings us the salvation and remembrance of the Fullness and the Son and the Father. The Christ comes to us all. Jesus, the Christ, was the first incarnation of Christ here on the Earth. But whenever one of us accepts the Christ, it comes into us the same way it inhabited Jesus, although the Christ inhabited Jesus to perfection, because Jesus never erred. He was born with the Christ and he lived his entire life embodying the Christ. We all embody the Christ when we accept the Christ into our hearts. That is where we get the true power to overcome the Demiurge and the problems and confusion of this world. And when we have that realization, we’re able to exit this material plane.And as my Greek mother taught me to say, Ο Χριστός ανέστη. Αληθώς ανέστη. O Christos anesti. Alithos anesti, which means Christ has risen. Truly He is risen.Happy Easter. Remember the Christ. Remember the Son and the Father. Remember your Aeonic parents above. God bless us all and onward and upward.The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading The Gnostic Reformation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week, I had a good conversation on the telephone with my brother that I thought I’d share that with you today. It’s another aspect of what I call Gnostic Psychology that my brother Bill, Dr. Bill Puett, and I have been developing. He wanted to share with me an article about psychopathy and his Gnostic insight about the article.These conversations started when I was probably about four years old, and Bill was a young teenager at that point. He was already a philosopher, and he and I would have these conversations together. So I grew up with these sorts of interactions with my older brother concerning the nature of reality, God, physics, astronomy, psychology. We’ve been talking about these things now for well over 60 years.When I became a PhD, I imagined that I would be able to have these sorts of conversations with other people, especially with other professors at the universities I taught at. I expected that this is the nature of conversation, to have this give and take, this interaction, this sharing of information, interrupting each other, getting excited, moving on. But I haven’t found that with anyone else except my brother.I think that when we pass out of this particular material life and return to the abode above, I expect this sort of conversation to be happening up there. Well, certainly in the philosophers’ cafes, if there are such things up there. You know, my vision of the afterlife is very much like what we have here on Earth, because this is, after all, a deficient copy, a deficient imitation by the Demiurge of the land above. And so I expect that we will have these sorts of communities and churches and experiences, but without any of the death, destruction, disappointment, the negative memes, the vices, that will not be there. It’s all going to be good. It’s all going to be on the up and up. And so what I’m hoping for, what I’m expecting, is that there will be gatherings with people like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, and of course, Christ. Jesus is going to be there, no doubt. And we’ll be having these interesting conversations about things.So let me bring you up to speed with a thumbnail sketch of what Gnostic psychology is. What I have gleaned from the Tripartite Tractate and other Gnostic books is that we are all fractals. We all carry the Spirit of God within us. We are made in the image of God, it says in the Old and New Testaments.And that image of God, as I see it, is the pleroma of the Fullness of the Hierarchy of God, which itself is a breaking out into all of the variables contained within the Father and the Son, but broken out into their individualities. So if you can imagine that the Father or the Son knew all of music and all of mathematics and all of everything, right? Well, the breakout personalities of those knowing everything would be the philosophers, the mathematicians, the musicians of various types, and everything else.All other personalities are represented in the Fullness of God. And not only the personalities are in the Fullness of God, and by the way, we probably refer to those as angels. Angels are not in the Tripartite Tractate—we use the word Aeons. Those are the inhabitants of the Fullness of God, and they are each one a particularity of the Son, and they have come to self-awareness. But the Fullness of God is not only those personalities, those angels, as we think of them, but it’s concepts like mathematics, like music, like dynamics—up and down, in and out—chemistry, physics. Every concept that can be broken out into a particularity is also part of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God.Okay, so back to the psychological aspect. Each of us second-order powers, and I’ll talk about us humans since we are humans sitting here, we have a fractal copy of that Fullness of God– the image of God as they put it in the Bible. So we have that pure, idyllic self that is a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God.So it’s all good, it’s all loving, it’s the consciousness of the Father and the Son, it’s the purity of talent. So for example, when someone is in the zone, if someone’s a great basketball player, and they’re in the zone in the game, and they’re sinking those baskets like nobody’s business, that’s an aeonic trait of the great basketball player in the sky, you could say. It’s like that, but for every particular skill, for everything that humans are, we each represent constellations of those personalities that are represented in the Fullness of God.We’re each unique in the distribution of those talents. We have the Fullness within us, but certain parts of ourselves are highlighted, and those are our personalities. And so that’s what I call the capital S self. In a lot of spiritual writing, they call that your spirit or your soul. We also have an ego, and the ego is not a negative thing. Even the Aeons above have egos, and the ego is simply your designation. It’s your particular place, position, power; it’s your talent, it’s your duty in the hierarchy. And so when we are born into this material world, we bring that identification of our particular ego with us.Now here’s where the Gnostic Psychology comes in, once we’re in this material world and we are attached to the molecules that make up our body, which are not from above—they come from the Fall. In Gnosticism, this materiality of the cosmos, this materiality of our physical space, is a demiurgic construction based on the Demiurge’s blueprint memory of the Fullness of God, except that the Demiurge doesn’t realize that. The Demiurge thinks he cooks it all up.The Demiurge believes itself to be the only pre-existent consciousness. The Demiurge thinks consciousness began with it when it woke up, and that it is now God. And look all the things it can do. It can create the heavens and the earth. It can create all of the minerals and elements. It can build rocks and crystals and mountains. But it thinks it came up with it. It doesn’t remember it fell from the Fullness of God. It doesn’t remember it is the ego of the fallen Aeon. And here at Gnostic Insights, we identify that fallen Aeon as the Aeon known as Logos. And Logos was the last Aeon to be created in the Fullness of God. And it carried within itself the entirety of the Fullness in a fractal form.When we are sent into this world as a conscious birthing choice by the Aeons above and by our pre-existent spirit, we are melded onto that material, that mud of the Demiurge. Because the Demiurge can build stuff, but he can’t bring it to life. The Demiurge doesn’t contain the life, the light, the love, the memory of the Father and the Son and the Fullness. We bring that into this world when we are born here. So our physical part of our human body, the purely physical part underneath the cells, the molecules, the amino acids, the chemicals, even the processes, these are demiurgic. And we, our Fullness spirit and our ego, that is what is melded into the physical molecules. And then we grow up with those molecules and build up through the stages of gestation and become born as a fully-fledged second-order power. So we’re one third material. We’re also about one third ego identification. Who we are—those are our proclivities, those are our talents and our personality, our recognizableness. We are also perfect Self with a big S. Our Self, which is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So all three of those parts walk around with us.Now, the Gnostic Psychology part is how it is that our ego and our Self share the consciousness of this body. And it’s not just our ego now, because once we’re in the world, especially once we’re in the culture of the world, we start picking up memes. A meme is a unit of information. So we pick up these memes, and the ones we love, the ones we like a lot, get stuck to our egoic structure, like strings wrapped around our egoic structure. We start acquiring memes throughout our lifetime from the culture around us, from our parents, from the books we read, and our education. We not only collect the memes we like, such as, I like dogs. That’s a meme. Obey your parents, that’s a meme. Vote, that’s a meme. I’m an American, that’s a meme.You see, every thought we have, every discrete unit of information is a meme, and we wrap those around our bundle of the ego. But not only the ones we like, we also pick up the memes we don’t like, the things we are completely repelled by and hate. We carry that hatred wrapped around us as well. So things that stir you up, your triggers, your baggage, those are memes that are wrapped around your ego.And then this idea of vices and virtues. Virtuous memes are the memes that come from the Fullness of God, the virtues that we think of, such as love, belonging, helpfulness, caring, honesty, all that sort of thing. All the good, good things. Those are virtues. They all have inverses down here. They all have opposites, because in Gnostic philosophy, down here is the shadow of above. So what was a virtue originally is a vice down here, and it’s the opposite. So we have hatred, and lying, and dishonesty, and lack of trustworthiness—these sorts of things. Those are the vices that are shadows of the virtues.So that is the entirety of our psychological makeup: The perfect Self that is at the core of our being, and the ego, which is who we were born as, who we were meant to be in the personality sense. Your innate talents.Who are you innately? Are you really good at something? That’s part of your ego that you were born with. And then we have this meme bundle that’s wrapped around our ego. And the things that cause us discomfort, the things we’d like to get rid of, the things that weigh us down, and dishearten us, and make us cry. Those are negative memes that have stuck onto our ego. And we can drop them by deciding to. I’m not going to do it. I’m quitting smoking this time. I’m never going to pick up a cigarette again. That is a decision, for example, to drop that I love cigarettes meme. And so if you can drop these negative memes on your own, and everyone can, if you realize it, decide it. Because we have a very strong willpower. We have free will. Free will is a characteristic of the Father, the Son, and the Aeons. We were born in that line of inheritance whereby we have free will. We just forget about it down here because of the confusion in the world. But if you enable your free will, you can drop your negative memes.If you can’t do it on your own, you can do it through prayer by appealing directly to Christ to help me. Please, Lord Jesus, take this burden from me. Heal me of this alcoholism, or whatever the thing is, right? You can do it through prayer. It can happen in a miraculous second.Or you can do it through therapy, if it’s good therapy. The idea in good therapy is to peel off those memes one at a time. Get rid of those negative memes through therapy, not through pharmaceuticals. You can’t peel off memes from pharmaceuticals, either self-administered pharmaceuticals or psychiatric drugs. That doesn’t peel the memes off of you. It just throws a wet blanket on them, but you’re still carrying them around. The best type of therapy is where you realize the negative meme and you decide with the therapist’s help to drop it. That could be something like rational emotive therapy. It can be hypnotherapy.Before I go any further, let me share with you this article my brother was citing. It’s from the blog known as Aeon. The article is called, There Are No Psychopaths: Virtually everything you know about psychopathy has been thoroughly debunked. Why does this zombie idea live on?Quoting the article,Psychopathic personality disorder, or psychopathy as it is commonly called, is one of the oldest and most researched mental health diagnoses. In modern science, psychopaths are typically described with reference to concrete symptoms, like a lack of empathy, remorse, and conscience, or more explicit behavioral signs, like predatory violence, pathological lying, and impaired impulse control.The psychopath has also become a well-known figure of fascination in popular culture, frequently portrayed in best-selling novels and cinematic thrillers, [such as the movies No Country for Old Men and Natural Born Killers]. However, there’s a problem with this idea of psychopathy. While it has been researched across hundreds of empirical studies, especially since the explosion of research in the late 1990s, there is still remarkably little evidence that corroborates popularized claims about the diagnosis.Despite enthusiasm among researchers in the 1990s and 2000s, the past two decades have been sobering. Today, virtually every claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings. Psychopathy may not exist at all.I’m jumping all around in this article. The article is much longer. The link is included in the transcript to this episode, if you want to go look it up.In the vast majority of tests, [89% of all tests], no clear distinction can be made between psychopaths and control groups.That is extremely strong. So there you go. Hence the title of the article, Psychopathy Does Not Exist. This author produced a study of all the other studies of psychopathy, and this is his conclusion.An alternative answer to this question, that has so far received little attention, is the possibility that psychopathy may be an instance of what scientists colloquially refer to as a zombie idea. Ideas that have the quality of being intuitively appealing, but the idea itself is essentially a fallacious misconception of reality. Just like zombies, when these ideas have been falsified, known to be dead ideas, they somehow still manage to stubbornly stick around in the halls of prestigious universities, only to once again infect another generation of young scientists.He says,The aggregation of scientific evidence does not corroborate the idea of psychopathy. If anything, it throws the whole notion into doubt.And by the way, psychopathy is included as a personality disorder. I couldn’t think of that word when I was talking to him on the phone, but the word I was searching for is personality disorder, and those are pretty much agreed to be impossible to treat. A person is a certain way, and that’s the way they are.At this point in the episode, I had planned to share about 10 minutes of the phone conversation my brother and I had on this topic but we decided to pull that segment. We felt it was possibly too lighthearted for such a serious topic and that our joshing around might be misunderstood. So we’ll leave it at this.I hope you have enjoyed this look at psychopathy and a review of Gnostic psychology, and how my brother and I both agree that so-called psychopathy is a collection of memes that have stuck onto a person’s personality, because they were not born that way. It’s not part of their eternal aeonic personality. It’s a bundle of negative memes. And like any other memes, they can be pulled off if you understand the psychology in this manner.So until next week, God bless us all, and Onward and Upward!The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 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

A lot of people are stuck in the muck. There are so many cravings and attachments down here. Cravings for sex, drugs, social media, whatever the thing is. Even popular culture is something that people get stuck in. You have to conform. You have to dress just so. Your hair has to be just so. These are all attempts at happiness, right?I mean, most people want to be happy. And generally you feel that if only you got your point across, if people understood what you understand, then the world would be a better place. Then you could be happy because we’d all get along. Say, wouldn’t it be nice if, for example, the utopian vision was coming true here in our world? Wouldn’t it be oh so nice if we all were taken care of by the government, like our big mama, and that she’s going to wrap her arms around us. And they’re going to come and they’re going to give us free food. They’re going to make sure that we’re housed in nice places we like. They’re going to give us walking around money. And then everything will be nice and we’ll all get along. But this isn’t going to happen, folks. It can’t happen in this world because this is a fallen world.The governments aren’t here to serve us. Ideally, they’re supposed to be here to serve us. You know, we’re the boss. They work for us. But no, because the people that go into this sort of political service are there to serve themselves primarily. They’re in there for power and control. I would think that most of them could care less about you and your happiness, seriously. But they want the world to be just so. And they think if the world were only here and like this and like this and like this and like this and we’ll make them do this and we’ll put them in this box and we’ll make them do that, then everything would be all right and we could all live happily ever after.But it’s never going to happen through politics, folks. Jason Mraz is a singer I like a lot. And in his first album, he had a song that said, “in the order of the primates, all our politics are too late,” which means that we primate type of animals, we humans, can’t be controlled by the politics. So religions that say, Oh, yeah, politics may not be able to do it, but the religion can. Look, all you have to do is follow our rules, read our books, believe exactly what we believe, and march in time and sing with the choir, that then you’ll be happy. And then at least those in our religion will be the happy ones.But it usually doesn’t work out there either, does it? Because of the same thing. People who are in control, people who crave power, are corrupted by power. For people who crave control, control becomes the end, not the means. And we can’t be controlled. The Demiurge learned this. You know, the Demiurge doesn’t like us. The Demiurge doesn’t love us.So you can’t look to politics to save you. You can’t look to the government to take care of you. You can’t look to your religious authority, that particular human-led hierarchical control mechanism, to bring you the love and joy and peace and happiness. Because there’s a lot of miserable people sitting in church. Because it’s our culture, which is our collective meme structure, that influences more than anything else, unless you are plugged into the Father above. Unless you are redeemed by the Christ who came to redeem you. Unless you prefer virtue to vice.So our goal, as we progress through this life and we mature, if we want to be happier, if we want to be more loving, if we want to become enlightened, you have to drop the earthly memes that come from the Demiurge and the culture, and you have to actually hold onto and believe in and put to use the godly memes that come from above, those being the virtues. 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

I had the children’s book converted into an animation, set to my narration of a previous episode. Here’s the audio only link of that previous episode. Same material. The animation is alright, but I bet that within a few months AI will have developed to the point where the animation would be quite a bit more polished. We did the best we could with the tools at hand. I hope you enjoy this experiment and find the overall effect to be pleasant and educational.This animation of the book is not aimed at children, but pitched to your adult level of understanding. I removed the simple text bubbles that appear in the book so you only see the underlying cosmology. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.First I have to tell you, what was lost has been found. I went back to White City VA yesterday and had an acupuncture treatment. And on my way out of the building, I saw a maintenance man, a custodian at his cart with his broom. I thought to myself, well, if anybody should be able to find something, it would be this guy. I told him I lost a book two weeks ago, somewhere between 201 and 209 in a lady’s room on a windowsill.And he says, “Well, what was the name of the book?” And I said, “Culpability.” And indeed, the recognition went across his face. He said, “I have seen that book. I have dusted that book every day for two weeks.” And I said, “Why didn’t you turn it into lost and found?” He goes, “Well, it’s not my book. It belongs to somebody. So I just left it there.”So then we had to look for the restroom that he had found it in, because he cleans a lot of ladies rooms in that big span of buildings. I told him it was on the second floor, that it was somewhere between 201 and on my way to the chiropractor in building 209. And so we went upstairs together and he took me right to the bathroom. And there was the book where I had laid it down.I was absolutely overjoyed. I thanked him profusely for his assistance. And I asked him if I could give him a hug. And he said, yeah, sure. So I gave him a big hug and it was wonderful. It was just wonderful. We went back downstairs together. I proceeded out the door and he proceeded with his cart down the hall. I was ecstatic. I should mention that his name was Lester. That way we can all give a blessing for Lester. Thank you, Lester!*****************************Now, the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked about this Gnostic Reformation here at Gnostic Insights. My Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you is not different than classical Gnosticism, but it is a further refinement. It’s a proceeding onward. We don’t go back into history. We go forward into the future.Today, we’re going to talk about the Demiurge and how this view of the Demiurge that I have is slightly different than the view that a lot of people have. See, most people think of the Demiurge as malicious, as an evil being. And when I first was studying Gnosticism, I was pretty much along those lines as well. I thought that the Demiurge was a very bad guy. But over the past few years, I’ve come to see that the Demiurge isn’t a bad guy. That he’s doing his best. He is the, as I like to say, he is the god of this world. So he’s done a pretty darn good job. He’s done better than you and I could do building a world.But how did he do that? Why is he thought to be malicious? I mean, I often speak of him—and again, I say him, but it’s really an it. Because first off, let’s remember, the Demiurge is not a stand-alone entity. The Demiurge is the separated ego or identity—the presenting face of the Aeon known as Logos, the Aeon who fell. And when Logos fell because he overreached, his ego overreached and thought it could become plugged back into the Father the way the Son is plugged into the Father. Logos mistook himself for the Son, you could say. You could also say he mistook himself for the Fullness.Because there he is sitting right there at the very tippy top of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God–the very top. He was the final Aeon to be produced by the commingling of all of the Aeons giving glory to the Father and the Son.So Logos was sitting way up there at the tippy top. He didn’t have any neighbors to his left and right because he was the capstone. He didn’t have anybody over above him other than the Father. And the rest of the Pleroma was down there beneath him because he’s sitting as a capstone on the hierarchy of the Fullness of God, which looks like a pyramid. So I think that Logos simply mistook himself for the Son or mistook that he could go ahead and plug in to the Father. He’s right there. He’s so close.You know, we have echoes of that same Fall in the story of the Tower of Babel where the humans built this incredibly tall tower reaching to the heavens, reaching to God. And God, [and in this case it was probably Jehovah, probably the Demiurge because we’re downstream here in the cosmos], thought that was not a good idea. And so he cast them into confusion by a proliferation of languages that they couldn’t understand each other and they stopped building and the tower fell.Italian humanist manuscript late 15th centuryIt’s also the story of Icarus where he made wings and he flew too close to the sun, S-U-N in that case. And when he flew too close to the sun, it melted the wax that was holding his wings together and Icarus fell. These are other examples of falling.18th century engraving by Bernard PicartSo in this case with Logos, Logos wanted to go up to the Father with his Pleroma, which was perfect because the Pleroma of Logos is a fractal of the Fullness of God. It’s a fractal copy of the entire hierarchy. Logos had within its Pleroma a fractal, one level down, of all of the other Aeons. He had a full and complete Pleroma. He had the entire plans. He knew everything to put together paradise, to put together the cosmos.But that wasn’t his job and so he overreached. His ego got out of control and it was his ego that impelled him to overreach, which caused the Fall. The Father couldn’t allow Logos to plug back into him because, well, that space is taken by the Son. But not only that, the Father is too immense, is too illimitable, is too powerful for a lowly Aeon to be able to plug directly in. No one can control that much power. No one can hold that much energy except the Son. So Logos was repelled by the Father to save him from becoming cinders in the light of his immensity.And he fell and he broke apart down here outside of the Pleroma of the Fullness. And it was his broken bits that became the quantum foam of this cosmos. Logos couldn’t get it back together. He couldn’t stuff it all back in. He couldn’t contain the chaos that erupted from him once his ego took over.And I hope, as I talk about the Demiurge, that you can hear the parallels to our egos when our own egos get out of control. That’s when all hell breaks loose.The Aeons were designed to stay in the glory beam of the Father and the Son. They each had their position, place, duty, name in the hierarchy. And Logos overreached his position, place, duty, name. His ego took over. That’s why he fell. And then it was nothing but ego down here. The best part of Logos, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, was horrified. And it abandoned the chaos below and returned to the Aeons in the Fullness. But he was broken. He left half of himself behind.So let’s look at this Demiurge that was left behind. The Demiurge is not a character that stands alone. The Demiurge is the shadow of the Fallen Aeon. The Demiurge is the shadow of Logos. Because when his ego took over and separated, all that was left was the shadows. So the Pleroma of the Demiurge is a shadow of the Pleroma of Logos.We know that the Pleroma of Logos is a fractal level down from the hierarchy of the Fullness. What does it mean to be the shadow of that Pleroma? That’s what makes up the body and energy of the Demiurge. So there’s two questions that Gnostics have often wrestled with over the years, particularly the Sethians and then the Platonists in the Greek strain of thought. And these were the questions. How can the Demiurge be ignorant without being evil? And how can the cosmos be orderly yet spiritually deficient?This is answered by thinking of the Demiurge as the shadow of the Fallen Aeon. This means that the Demiurge is not malicious; he’s not autonomous either. He is not the source of being. The Demiurge is a distorted reflection of the higher principle that was Logos. When we think of the Demiurge this way, we can preserve the goodness of the Father and the integrity of the Son and the cooperative nature of the Aeons. Evil didn’t fall from the Father. Evil is nothing but another word for chaos and shadow—lack of goodness.So falling out of the pleroma of the hierarchy of the Fullness created our material cosmos as a shadow place. There is a cosmic deficiency hard-baked into this material universe. And that is, by definition, separation from the Father and the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Ignorance is a shadow. It’s not a substance. It’s a lack. Again, ignorance is part of the shadow. It’s the ignorance of not knowing God. It’s the ignorance of not remembering where you came from.My Gnostic insight is that the role of the Demiurge is to bring order to chaos, bring order to the quantum foam that was bubbling in and out in and out of existence down here. This is a way different place than the ethereal space. And in order to impose control upon the quantum foam, the Demiurge imposes strict physical laws like a puppet master. He controls physics through laws of physics. Strictly, there can be no deviation or there would be no material universe. That’s a principle that comes right out of physics.The laws of our universe are strictly precise and any deviation causes catastrophic failure. So it was necessary for the Demiurge to impose strict physical laws on both physics and then higher up on the chemistry of how things go together. Bonds, chemical bonds.And the Demiurge knows how to do this because it is the shadow of all of that fractal knowledge of Logos. So it has the pattern, but it’s a dead pattern. It’s like he has the blueprints but he doesn’t have the life. He has a little small shadowy model of the way things ought to be. So he knows how things go. He creates structure, but doesn’t understand the meaning or the wisdom behind it.Now, after we second order powers came to Earth to try to remind the Demiurge of love and the Father and the Son and the Fullness above and his better half Logos up there with the Aeons begging for him to come home, praying for him to come home, we second order powers were sent down to try to bring that remembrance to the Demiurge. But we have failed because we get caught up in this never-ending war down here.And you know, it’s not just a never-ending war against the other political party. It’s not just a never-ending war against other people that frustrate our desires. It’s a never-ending war between entropy and creation. It’s a never-ending war between life and death, between material and ethereal. We get lost in the battle and we forget to stand within that beam of glory that comes directly down on us from the hierarchy above.So the Demiurge tries to also impose laws and strict order upon us second order creatures, thinking that we are just wayward molecules because it doesn’t remember where we came from. It doesn’t remember where it came from. The Demiurge does not understand free will. Free will is not allowed in the Demiurgic universe because if the Demiurge allowed any free will in the material, things would fly apart. Things would not hold. So the Demiurge is trying to impose order upon us second order creatures and we are very unruly because of the free will that we inherited from the Aeonic realm and we just do not obey. That’s why the laws in the Old Testament and the Quran are so strict. There’s no deviation allowed because the Demiurge is trying its best to impose order upon us, thinking of us as simply disobedient pieces of material.So in this Gnosticism that I am sharing with you, the Demiurge is cut off from the first principle of knowledge, wisdom, love, consciousness, life. And it’s down here all on its own in this dark and dreary place. The Demiurge is competent. He created this world that we live in. He created the stars in the heavens. He’s doing his best. He’s earnest, but he is spiritually amnesiac which limits his power and understanding. He’s not just a tyrant.In the Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you, the goal has always been to restore the Demiurge back to the Pleroma and slap it back onto Logos, restoring his ego and making Logos whole. Because until the Demiurge returns to the hierarchy of God, there is an Aeon in that hierarchy who is not whole. And that diminishes the Fullness of God. We are actually joining in with the prayer of the Aeons to restore the Demiurge back to the Fullness, to restore the Demiurge back to Logos, which will then restore Logos, which then restores the Aeons of the Fullness.So we don’t discard the Demiurge but seek to heal the Demiurge. We are not merely trying to escape this material cosmos but we are part of the plan of redemption for the cosmos. The Aeons are not isolated from this universe but they become reconciled with the universe when the Demiurge is restored to Logos.And as I was telling you for the last couple of weeks, humanity isn’t divided into those who are elect and therefore saved and those who are not elect in any of the religions that want to say that only their believers are the elect. Everyone is restored when the Demiurge is restored. And when everyone is restored, then the Demiurge is restored. Now we can’t be restored—we second-order powers already fell when our ego is in control and it is usually in control down here. It’s all a fractal system. It’s all resonating downward. So we resemble the Demiurge when our big S Self is not in control, our Self being a fractal representation of the pleroma of Logos. We failed in that and that is the purpose of the third order of powers which is Christ because we can’t do it on our own. We’ve tried. We’ve tried for millennia. We can’t seem to climb out of that egoic trap that we find ourselves in and therefore the Christ came to redeem us and to redeem the Demiurge.The Christ is a later solution to the Fall. Second-order power was not enough. Send in the third-order powers and the Christ does have all the power necessary. The Christ has all the mojo of the ethereal plane. Nothing’s missing and it has the full blessing of the Father. We are all elect within the pleroma of Christ. So Christ is the restorative agent to the Demiurge, to us, to all of creation. Christ is the harmonizer. Christ is the healer of the Fallen Aeon and the revealer of the Father and the awakener of the Demiurge and the teacher of humanity.Christ didn’t create the cosmos. Christ restores the cosmos. Christ does not impose law. Christ said he came to replace the law. He takes the law away from the hands of the Demiurge and instead rules through meaning and love. The Christ didn’t come to dominate the Demiurge, to kill the Demiurge. Christ came to enlighten the Demiurge.I have come of late to feel more compassion for the Demiurge. The Demiurge is an innocent victim of the Fall. He’s a limited being that can only rule through strict control. He’s redeemable through the power of Christ, who restores the cosmos.So let’s go through this again real quick. The Son is the primal image of the Father, the first expression of the Father, the first emanation of the Father. As soon as the Son was formed, his component parts were identified and those component parts—those are the Totalities, who then became Self-aware and now we call them the Aeons. They express the Fullness of divine life. See, the Son is one big entity, but the Aeons are all of the Son in smaller approachable forms. It’s like thinking of all of the humans on the planet as one giant mass and trying to relate to humanity as one thought, one thing. Well, that’s not true. We’re each individuals. We’re each a part of humanity and it’s that kind of relationship that the Aeons have to the Son.You see, one Aeon falls and in this Gnosticism, we call that Aeon Logos and his shadow emerged, which is the Demiurge. The Demiurge orders chaos through strict laws, but lacks any spiritual memory and the Christ then, formed cooperatively by the Son, Logos and the Aeons, descends into our cosmic space to heal the Fallen Aeon, to enlighten the Demiurge, to awaken humanity and to restore cosmic harmony.God bless us all and onward and upward.Here is a chart that very neatly displays today’s Gnostic Insights.THE FATHER(Transcendent Source • Beyond Being • Silent Origin)│Emanation flows downward (pure gift)▼THE SON(First Emanation • Direct Image • Perfect Intelligible Form)│Expression flows outward (intelligibility)▼LOGOS(Articulate Intellect • Pattern of Order • Fractal Pleroma)│Differentiation flows into multiplicity▼THE FULLNESS OF AEONS(Harmonic Community • Modalities of Divine Life • Stable Radiance)│(One aeon turns inward (self‑regarding Ego) Logos/Sophia)▼THE FALL SEPARATION FROM THE FATHERAEONIC DEFICIENCY ARISES(Ignorance • Misalignment • Loss of Orientation toward the Son)│Shadow flows from the deficient Aeon Logos▼THE DEMIURGE – EGO PERSONIFIED(Shadow‑Image • Earnest but Amnesiac • Competent yet Unillumined)│Hidden influence flows from the LOGOS(quiet guidance, unrecognized by the Demiurge, shaping his ordering activity)│Ordering flows from Logos into the pre‑cosmic chaos/quantum foam▼COSMOS ORDERED BY THE DEMIURGE ALONE(Physical Laws • Chemical Necessity • Biological Imperatives •Governmental Structures • Order without Meaning)│Human souls do NOT arise here. They descend from the Aeons above.▼DESCENT OF HUMAN SOULS FROM AEONS(Soul-stream flows downward • Each soul carries a spark of theaeonic harmony • Enters the cosmos under conditions of amnesia due to bonding with the Demiurgic material.)▼HUMANITY(Divine Origin • Cosmic Conditioning • Spiritual Amnesia • Longing)│Compassion flows from the higher Aeons▼CHRIST(Restorative Agent • Cooperative Emanation of Son + Logos + Aeons •Bridge Between Realms • Physician of Ignorance)│Healing flows upward and downward▼CHRIST’S RESTORATIVE ACTIVITY• Heals the fallen Aeon• Illuminates the Demiurge (reveals the Logos behind his work)• Reveals the Father to humanity• Softens strict law with mercy and wisdom• Restores harmony among the Aeons• Awakens the soul’s memory of its aeonic origin• Opens the path of universal return│Reconciliation flows back toward the Source▼UNIVERSAL RESTORATION(Demiurge Enlightened • Aeons Reharmonized • Humanity Awakened •Cosmos Transfigured • All Return Through the Son to the Father) This is a public episode. 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Last week, I started talking about the nature of this Gnostic Reformation that I’m describing here. It turns out that the approach to Gnosticism that I am sharing with you here at Gnostic Insights is a reformation of what is understood to be Gnosticism. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode yet, it would be really good for you to start there. Go back and listen to or read the episode called, This Gnostic Reformation.I didn’t read any books about Gnosticism; I actually read the Nag Hammadi itself. I used my own method of discernment, my own model building method called the Simple Explanation to understand what I was reading. We all do that. We all have internal structures that help us to interpret what we understand about the world around us, what we understand about the nature of anything, whether it’s God or people or oneself.I had already previously come up with a very coherent system for understanding the things around me. That’s what I call A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That book is available. You can check it out. I’ll put the link here in the transcript.When people say, “My goodness, your Gnosticism is so different than what I have come to understand Gnosticism to be,” that’s because I didn’t take it from secondary sources. I took it from the original sources. Then of course, Valentinian Gnosticism is an early form of what has come to be called Christianity. Christianity diverged immensely from the original message around the 300’s and on up, when the gnostic books were taken out of Orthodoxy. Those folks that are called heresiologists are the people that went around slapping heresy labels on the early Christianity—the early Valentinian Gnosticism. They weeded it out of the official sacred texts that made their way into the New Testament.The main book of the Nag Hammadi that I relate to is called the Tripartite Tractate. I believe it to be the purest form of gnosis. It has very little in the way of mythologies, of extraneous characters, of the names of things and the numbers of things and the astrology of it all.Valentinian Gnosticism from the Tripartite Tractate is unique in that the fallen Aeon is not called Sophia, a female character. In the Sethian mythology, the female character—and by the way, that presupposes that there’s genders among the Aeons in the Fullness of God, but that really doesn’t make much sense because there’s no sex. That is not the way that Aeons procreate. Aeons procreate by giving glory to the Father in various combinations, and it’s those various combinations of giving glory that produce amalgamations of those combinations. It’s a logarithmic progression of Aeons. It keeps growing as various Aeons recombine with one another and give glory to the Father and the Son—upstream, as I like to call it. That has nothing to do with gender. It has to do with giving glory to God with your friends and neighbors.See, we have gender because it has to do with procreation, and this is what is causing all the gender confusion going around now. Differences among us—what we typically call masculine or feminine—these are personality traits. They don’t have to have anything to do with your sex. So the idea that you have to change your physical sex to reconceive of your gender or reconceive of who you are or your personality—this is a false teaching. You are who you are. You are a combination of various Aeons. You are the fruit of those Aeons, and it really has nothing to do with gender.The Father is not a male figure. Barbelo is not the mother. These are gendered identifications, but they are not truly gender because they’re not sexed. Does that make any sense?So last week we talked about the first emanation. In Sethianism, it’s Barbelo, the mother figure, the womb of all, the matrix of divine life. In Valentinian Gnosticism, that first figure is the Son, and in most of the Valentinian texts, the Son is conflated with the Christ.Oh, by the way, Christians get very bent out of shape about calling Christ the Christ. They say, if anybody—and I heard this from a radio preacher not long ago—“If anyone says ‘the’ Christ, you know right off they’re not saved. You know right off they’re not Christians, because ‘the’ Christ is a made-up figure, whereas Jesus is Christ, and Jesus is the Son of God.” Well, Jesus is a human being, so we know that Jesus is not the originating Son of God, which an ethereal figure. The Son, in Valentinian Christianity, was the immediate self-expression of the Father. The Father emanated the Son, and the Son entirely represents the Father. Jesus is way downstream here, along with the rest of us humans.He was called the perfect human because he expressed the Father and the Son in his human personality. Jesus came to be well downstream, along with the rest of us humans.In Sethianism, the Barbelo, the first expression, isn’t the Savior. She’s the source of the Savior. She’s the mother of Autogenes, whom they call the Christ.In Valentinianism, the Son is the immediate self-expression of the Father. There’s no Barbelo figure, and the Son is the primary mediator of divine knowledge. The Son is fully expressive and representative of the Father, and he stays plugged into the Father—or it stays. It’s difficult when speaking English not to use gendered pronouns, because that’s the way our grammar works. So, forgive me for saying “he” when I speak of the Son or the Father, but “it” just seems so impersonal. And the Son is personal to us. The Son is our Father, our Abba.In Sethianism, Christ, also known as Autogenes, is not the initial revelation of the Father. He’s the restorative agent who repairs the damage caused by the fall of the Aeon. And in Sethianism, the Aeon who fell was a female figure, Sophia. Christ is often paired with Seth, and Seth is a character out of the mythology of Sethianism that is the heavenly archetype of the Gnostic race.Sethianism has distinctions amongst humans. There are the elect and there are those who are not elect. There are those who are called hylic-only, which is material only. And so, if you’re a Sethian Gnostic, you don’t believe that all of the people that you see around here are carriers of divinity. You believe that only Gnostics are carriers of divinity, much like Christians only believe that those who have come forward and professed belief in Jesus Christ are the elect, and they’re the only ones who are saved. Gnostics have the same type of distinction, only they think only the Sethians are those who are saved. And that really doesn’t have to do with Jesus. It has to do with Christ and Seth—that Christ’s role is to descend and rescue the elect, and the elect would be Sethians. Now, in Valentinian Christianity, you don’t have that kind of distinction. Christ is the direct image of the Father.Most of the books of the Nag Hammadi, the Valentinian as well as the Sethian, still identify Sophia as the fallen Aeon; they still have a gendered pleroma of the Fullness of God. This is one of the big, big differences between the Gnosticism that I share with you and these more ancient Gnostic strains of thought. I do not think that Aeons are gendered. It’s an unnecessary step of confusion, the idea of syzygies and marriages and pair bonds. No, that’s not necessary. At least in the Tripartite Tractate, if you read it, nowhere is anything like that mentioned. There’s no gender identification mentioned at all.In Valentinian Christology, which is what it’s called when you study Christ, outside of the Tripartite Tractate the rest of the books that talk about Christ say that Christ is the direct image of the Father. His incarnation is intentional, therapeutic, and as a teacher, and he brings knowledge of the Father, not merely rescue from the Fall.Christians generally believe that Christ brings knowledge of the Father because he talked about the Father, or he taught—that he’s a pedagogical character. He’s a teacher, but that his actual salvation came from dying on the cross, from death and then overcoming death. He brings everyone who believes in him forward in overcoming death.Now, the Tripartite Tractate doesn’t put it that way. The Tripartite Tractate explains how Christ came not to die and not only to teach, but salvation lies in the very fact that Christ came to Earth in the perfection of the Father. Jesus said, “If you see me, you see the Father. He who loves me loves the Father, and he who loves the Father loves me.” That was Jesus speaking as the embodiment of the Christ. Jesus embodied the Fullness of the Christ in his human body walking around on the Earth, and so he built a bridge between the ethereal plane and the material plane. He brought them back together for the first time since Logos fell out of the pleroma. He brings them back together, and he brings restoration in that manner.There’s another primary difference between Sethian Gnosticism and Valentinian Gnosticism, other than Barbelo being the first emanation or the Son being the first emanation. In Sethianism, Christ’s role is as a cosmic rescuer, and in the Valentinian tradition, he is the revealer of truth and the healer. Sethians tend to think of the world as completely hostile and alien. This material world is a prison. It’s a trap. Everything’s wrong down here.Now, in the Valentinian system, it is also thought that the world is wrong. It’s fallen, but it is redeemable, and so salvation comes through transformation of what is around us, whereas in the Sethian system, salvation comes by escaping the trap. The goal in Sethianism is to return to Barbelo, and the goal in the Valentinian system is to return to the Father.So, Sethianism is much more apocalyptic. It’s about crashing the world and getting out because there’s nothing good down here. Valentinian is more therapeutic because it believes in transformation through love and spreading the gospel–the good news. That’s what gospel means. The good news of Christ, the good news of the Father, the good news of eternal life beyond materiality.In the Gnostic Reformation that I am proposing here, we can combine somewhat the two schools of thought. This is a bridge Gnosticism between Sethianism, Valentinianism, and Christianity, although churchgoers aren’t going to like any of this, right? Because they’re fine in the system that they believe it to be, and I think that’s okay. If you’re a non-hypocritical Christian who goes to church and prays, and you’re in touch with the Father, and you embody the Christ, that’s great. No problem with that.And did you know that Valentinian Christians were accepted as full Christians for the first 300 years? They were side by side, sitting in the same churches, giving the same prayers, sharing in the same rituals. It was only after the Nicene Council and the takeover by the Catholic Church that Valentinians were excluded from Christianity. So I’m not trying to crash Christianity. I’m only trying to bring a correction to the hypocrisy and misunderstandings of Christianity. Well, we know there’s a ton of hypocrites.I’m an idealist. That’s my nature. So when I discuss these things, it’s in their ideal form. It’s the way they ought to be. It’s the way they’re described. It’s the way they were designed by God and the Aeons. If you take your knowledge from what you see around here in this fallen world, then you have got a very poor idea of what it is. And you may sit in a Christian church, and you may go through the motions of being a cultural Christian. But unless you are in touch with the Father, and unless you are embodying the Christ, you’re taking your guidance from the world. And this is how it is that many people nowadays think they’re doing good, when actually they’re doing bad. And even worse than that, people who say they’re doing good, and they know they’re not doing good, they know they’re doing bad. That’s hypocrisy. That’s what hypocrisy is.So when I describe these systems, or I describe the nature of the Christ, the nature of the body of believers, the nature of love, the nature of the Father, the nature of our aeonic or heavenly home in the pleroma of the Fullness of God, I’m describing it in an idealistic manner, in the way it’s designed to be. And that’s what we aim for. We aim for the ideal. You cannot take your cues from this earthly realm. And make sure that you don’t take your cues from teachers who are themselves fallen and not embodying Christ.In this Gnostic Reformation that I’m sharing with you, the Son is the primal emanation, the direct image of the Father. He stays fully plugged into the Father. He has all of the direct knowledge, wisdom, love, consciousness of the Father–life. While Christ is a later restorative agent, formed through the prayers of the aeons, the Son, and the Logos after Logos returned back to the Fullness. They prayed for help to come to the mess that Logos made down below when he fell. They pray for help to rescue the Demiurge, which is part of Logos—it’s his ego. It’s his presenting face.They want the Demiurge to come out of its amnesic state and remember the Father, remember the Fullness, remember Logos, its better half. And when that happens, that is when the big roll-up can occur—when all of the shadows will disappear. Because when the Demiurge comes to awareness, to Self-awareness, as being part of the Logos, as being part of the Son, then all of the shadows that have come out of the Demiurge—all of this material construction—will just vanish. Dissolve like snow, as the old hymn says.There’s nothing in the Nag Hammadi like Armageddon. Christian theology culminates with a great bloody battle called Armageddon, where all the sinners are killed and only the elect remain. And only the elect are up there in heaven then. And that’s why it’s all good, because they killed all the bad people, and they all went to hell, and they’re locked down there in eternal torture.Well, that does not sound like the Father Jesus spoke of. And that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Nag Hammadi. The way we Valentinian Gnostics do battle is not with swords and bullets and fists. We are to do battle with love. We love them. That’s what we’re supposed to do. We demonstrate love.We are called the second order powers. All creatures on the earth are second order powers. The Aeons above are the first order of powers. We are their descendants. We are their children. We are their fruit. And we are called the second order of powers.We were sent here to remind the Demiurge of love and life and consciousness. See, the Aeons and the Logos–this was their plan. They cooked it up. We were sent here to bring love and remembrance to the Demiurge. Restoration in that way. It didn’t work out, because we get caught up in this material life; because we get caught up in the never-ending war. You can’t remind people of good through evil. You cannot remind people of love through hatred. Only love breeds love.Now let’s look at how all of this affects Christology, the study of Christ. In the Gnosticism that I am sharing with you, the Son is the primal emanation. He’s the direct image of the Father. He represents divine Self-knowledge, and he is stable, he is eternal, and he is not fallen.The Christ is a later emanation. He’s a third order power. He’s generated for the purpose of restoration. He is shaped by the Son, Logos, and the Aeons, praying together to the Father for help to come to the Fall. He is the agent of healing, reconciliation, and revelation.So we have a Son, which is the first emanation, and we have a Christ, which is the restorative agent that comes after the first and second order of powers. Christ teaches the soul to recognize the Son. Christ repairs the cosmic imbalance caused by ignorance, and salvation flows from the Father, through the Son, through Christ, and into our souls and the Demiurge’s soul—his ego.You see, we all have a perfect Self that is an embodiment of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. All of the first order powers are within us as they were with Logos, within him in a fractal manner, and then we are further fractals of Logos. It’s a nested hierarchy.So when the Christ comes into the cosmos to bring perfection and healing to the Demiurge and to us, it’s very similar, because the reason we feel less than perfect is because we have both an ego and that perfect Self, as did Logos. And it was the ego of Logos that became the Demiurge. Well, our fractal version of that same exact phenomenon is when our ego is not in alignment with our Self.And when the ego is not in alignment with the Self, when the ego has forgotten its origin, like happened to the Demiurge, when the ego has forgotten that it’s not the boss—our boss is our big S Self because that has the direct connection to the emanations of the Father and the Aeons above. Consciousness, life, love, all come from above, and that comes through our Self.Then when we are melded onto this material world, to the molecules of the egg, the zygote that is now splitting, splitting, splitting, and leveling up to become the organism, we become lost in the materiality of this cosmic space. And it’s harder for our Self to shine forth through the material. And our egos are more than willing to identify with the material, with the Demiurge, because the Demiurge is pure ego. And so our egos come to resonate with the Demiurge.Even the Aeons have egos. Even the Son has an ego. Ego is merely your address. It’s your name, your rank, your function in the overall hierarchical pleroma of the Fullness of God. That’s what your ego is—it’s your ID. The Aeons in the Fullness all have their position, place, power, function. So ego in and of itself is not a bad thing. It is easily led astray once we are in these material bodies down here on the earth.And so Christ’s function is to remind us of the purity of God, the purity of the soul, the purity of our Self, where we come from, and where we will be returning to, and what our job is down here. Because it’s only then, through the Christ, that we can feel the love, that we can embody the love, in order to share it with others and with the Demiurge. Consciousness and life only comes from above. The computers come from below. Life cannot jump into the molecular level.Okay, we’ll come back around to all of this one more time next week. Please leave me your thoughts. Let’s have a discussion on these things. We’ll pick it up again next week.God bless us all, and onward and upward!A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel puts it all together for you. Please purchase the book and don’t forget to leave a review! This is a public episode. 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I occasionally get comments from people that the Gnosticism I’m sharing with you here at Gnostic Insights is different than the Gnosticism they’re accustomed to or the Gnosticism they see elsewhere on the internet. And that is very true, and that is why the Substack is called the Gnostic Reformation.This Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you—yes, it comes out of my own personal gnosis. It is a compilation of both Valentinian Gnosticism, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, but also I’ve combined it with my own Theory of Everything called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, the blog which has been up there at Blogspot for over 15 years by now. It is a true Theory of Everything that lets you examine any philosophical model or any social model or scientific model.It’s a way of examining model structures and how they fit together, particularly our universe and particularly psychology, sociology, and theology. So when I ran across the Nag Hammadi and began to study it many years later, I was able to interpret it through this lens of A Simple Explanation that I had already developed. For example, the Simple Golden Rule comes directly out of my model, and that is a reformulation of what all religions around the world talk about as an ethical model of behavior.And it’s this: It begins with the concept of units of consciousness—and I use the term units of consciousness because this applies not only to human beings, but to plants and animals and bacteria, cells in your body; in a way, it applies to the atoms and molecules and the elements as well–and in the Simple Explanation, I used to give them consciousness. But since coming to my gnosis, I believe that what the physical parts—the elemental parts—of our universe actually are, is the imitation of the way things go together in the Fullness. And it’s an imitation because it’s down here in this so-called material world. It’s the Demiurge’s best effort to reconstruct Paradise.So now I don’t think that the molecules and atoms and subatomic particles are actually conscious the way I used to. The consciousness resides in the Demiurge, and the Demiurge is controlling them because the Demiurge is the god of this universe, and he can control down to the smallest subatomic particle, all of the elemental parts of our universe. But when it comes up to the living parts of our universe, that is where the life, consciousness, love, wisdom, all of that comes in through the Father, through the Son, through the Aeons, through Logos, into our otherwise fallen and amnesiac universe.So the actual consciousness of the Aeons, and upstream from that, of course, the Son and the Father, that is where the consciousness comes into the living things in our universe. That’s what makes the difference between the hard and rocky places and the wet and meaty places, because there’s definitely a difference.Anyway, I was talking about the Simple Golden Rule, and that is where units of consciousness, so that could be anything from a cell in your body all the way up through all creatures, although, not the viruses—the viruses are not alive, they are molecular machines controlled by the Demiurge—but up through the bacteria, which are different than viruses, bacteria are little living creatures—on up through all the plants and the animals, and then into us. Those are the units of consciousness.I am a unit of consciousness. You are a unit of consciousness. We say units because consciousness actually is the ground state of our matrix. Consciousness is the mind of God, and we are units of that. So my Simple Golden Rule has always said, even before I came to the gnosis, the Simple Golden Rule says,Units of consciousness reach out to others like themselves at their own level of complexity. So cells reach out to other cells, people reach out to other people, etc. Units of consciousness reach out to others and hold hands to join together to build the next level up. They join on a project. So like your family, let’s say, the people in your family hold hands with one another and level up to the family structure. Each thing that is at the same level reaches up to the next level to build something together that none of them could do on their own.So if we take the cells in your body, your skin cells reach out to other skin cells and level up to the organ called skin. The other organs reach out in the same way. The heart cells reach out to other heart cells, make the heart. Lung cells reach out to other lung cells, make lungs, etc. And all of the organs reach out to each other to create an organism.Everything builds up in the same way at the molecular level. The Demiurge’s copy of this process is subatomic particles reaching out to other subatomic particles to make particles. Particles reach out to make atoms. Atoms reach out to make molecules. Molecules reach out to make elements. Elements reach out to make minerals. Minerals become the rocks and stones and the hard rocky places that we see. But it is not conscious, and that’s the difference, other than the nature of the consciousness of the Demiurge that controls it.Whereas each of the living parts of our universe, from the cells on up, is conscious, does have thoughts, is a direct part of the consciousness of God.That is different. You don’t see that in the Nag Hammadi. That’s because I have brought that part of it in from the Simple Explanation.I admit that my reading of the Nag Hammadi is filtered through my personal interpretive system, but that’s what we’re all called to do. You have your own personal interpretive systems, or it’s fine with me if you adapt mine. But you have to come to this understanding, this gnosis yourself. The bottom line of the gnosis, by the way, is this. It all boils down to one sentence:We come from above and we will return to above.That is the nugget of Gnosticism. All of the rest of it is explanations that people have offered of the system of how it goes together. How is it that we come from above? How is it that we return to above? And how do we interact with the above space, that is the pleroma of the Fullness of God, when we’re down here trapped in this material world?That was the query that actually kicked off most of my own personal gnosis, even before I read any of the Gnostic books. I used to wonder, as I played with my dogs down by the river and I stood barefoot in the mud of the river, how does the consciousness of God flow through me and the mud surrounding the river make up my body and how do they connect? That’s the beginning of the Simple Explanation.So I’ve been doing some research in this time off I’ve had and I can answer exactly now in a philosophical way how it is that this Gnosticism that I am sharing with you differs from what people who consider themselves to be Gnostic teachers generally teach.Most Gnostics, by the way, are thinking of themselves as what are called Sethians. They believe that they are offspring from the prototypical human Seth and there’s a lot of mythology built around that system. The Nag Hammadi books are mostly Sethian. That’s why you have so much mythology in there. That’s why you have the names of angels and the counting of positions. You have the laying out of the hierarchy and all of these elect systems within it and how they have to be.But keep in mind, the people that wrote those books are really no different than I am or than you are. They’re people writing their interpretations of the system of how God can inhabit matter and where we are in that process and do we belong here or do we belong somewhere else. And if we belong somewhere else, how do we get out of here? That’s where such words as the trap come from—that this material world is a trap. Some Sethians go so far as to believe that the way teachers have shared with us to escape the trap is itself a trap. Have you heard this? “Don’t go into the light. The tunnel and the light, they’re just the trap.”That is someone’s interpretation of the system. That’s all that it is. You need to commune in silence with the Father yourself to discover what is true and what is not true. You can’t believe teachers, even Gnostic teachers, especially out there on the internet, who claim to have the truth and want to share it with you as if they were prophets. They are not prophets any more than I am a prophet. Everyone filters truth and reality through their own lens of discrimination. And your background, including your past lives and the memes that you bring forward into this life, all influence what you interpret of what you see going on around you, the words you use, the structures you use to make it make sense.What I am sharing with you here goes beyond the ancient Valentinian systems that we find in the Nag Hammadi. This Gnosticism that I’m sharing, this Simple Gnosticism, or Reformed Gnosticism that I’m teaching, fits into the space between Sethian and Valentinian systems. It’s a bridge cosmology. Neither tradition fully says this, but both hint at it. And what I’ve done is tease out the structural possibility that the ancient systems didn’t quite say out loud. And by the way, this is where my Simple Explanation model helped me do that.And here is the Simple model: What we call the Son is the primal emanation that is the direct image of the Father. The Christ is a later composite restorative agent formed through the cooperation of the Aeons, the Son, and the Logos. So, the Son and Christ are not exactly the same character as taught in Christianity. They are not interchangeable names. The Christ came after the Son. The Son is the direct emanation of the Father, and we use those gendered terms simply because that is the traditional way to say them. We could instead call the Father the ground state of consciousness, or the Great I Am, and its emanation, instead of calling it the Son, we could simply call it the First Emanation. The Son stays plugged into the Father. It doesn’t branch off and float downstream like a spore. It is not that. It stays plugged into the Father at all times.So, the Son and the Father are co-existent in their knowledge, and their wisdom, and their love. But the Son, or the offspring, is a monad, whereas the Father is infinite and illimitable, uncontainable. That’s why we say it’s the ground state. It’s a force, a power. It’s not a person. Oh, that might upset the Christians there. But the Father only relates to the Son. The Son is the first person, and in Valentinian Gnosticism, the Son is often called, then, the Father, our Father. Our Father, who art in heaven, is actually the Son, because He is our Father, and we all emanate out of the Son directly. This is not an insult to the Great Father, the Great I Am. The Son was emanated for this purpose. So, it is a fulfillment of the Son’s role to say He is our Father of consciousness and love. He is the one we can relate to, whereas the Father is so illimitable, is so infinite and magnificent and great, we cannot wrap our heads around it. The Son represents everything that the Father is.Now, in Sethian Gnosticism, they call that first emanation Barbelo. Rather than the Son, they call it Barbelo. That’s its name. What they call the Son is the second emanation out of Barbelo. So, the Barbelo is the female figure, the mother, the womb, and the Son comes from Barbelo. The Son, in Sethianism, is also called Autogenes, genes, like our genetics. It’s the same root word. And then the Christ, in Sethianism, is a further emanation who brings restoration and reveals truth to us. That is Sethianism.Now, as I said, in Valentinian Gnosticism, the Son, also known as Nous, is the first emanation from the Father. And the Christ is a later figure who descends to heal the pleroma after Logos’s fall and deficiency. Most Valentinians and Valentinian books say that the Aeon who fell from the pleroma and created our material existence is called Sophia, and it’s a female figure. I don’t like that because it’s a mythological upstream version of Adam and Eve. Let’s blame the woman. Let’s say females are inferior. We don’t need to go there because it turns out that one of the most mysterious books, as they say, in the Nag Hammadi, names the Fallen Aeon Logos. And Logos is not a female, and Logos doesn’t have a child named Yaldabaoth.When Logos falls out of the pleroma of the Fullness of God, he cracks open. He breaks. He is rent in two. And a shadow version of him spills out all over, like guts on the ground. That is not a child. That is a shadow of Logos. And we call that shadow, you got it, the Demiurge. And in the Tripartite Tractate, Logos looked around at the results of the Fall with horror. Horror! And he tried to get it all back together, like grabbing his guts and sticking them back in his abdomen kind of thing. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t grab it all together.And it spread out and would not listen to him. And it was disruptive and a disturbance and chaotic. So he abandoned the results of the Fall down below and hightailed it back up to the pleroma, to his “brothers”—the other Aeons in the pleroma—that we also call the Fullness of God.But Logos has never been fully cut off from the shadow down here, from what we call the Demiurge. And it is the knowledge that came from Logos that informed the Demiurge how to put the chaos in order. The Demiurge was left down here as part of the chaos, but it got itself together. It reconnected its mind with the mind of Logos, but it didn’t realize that. The Demiurge is called the amnesiac god, the god who does not remember, is because the Demiurge doesn’t remember that it came from the Father and that it will return to the Father. The Demiurge does not realize that it is part of Logos.And I have identified that part as the ego of Logos. The Tripartite Tractate says that the best part of Logos returned to the Self, his big S Self, which, in the case of Logos, was a fractal amalgamation of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. What the Demiurge is, is the presenting face, the presenting part of Logos. He doesn’t remember Logos. He doesn’t know his true Self. He doesn’t remember the Father, or the Son, or the pleroma, or the Aeons.He doesn’t remember any of that. He woke up down here amidst chaos, separated from the Fullness of God, and surrounded by chaotic quantum foam, is my interpretation of this. And with the way that Logos knows how to order things, the Demiurge set about ordering the chaos of the Fall. And he was able to build it up through the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals, up to the mud. But he couldn’t get any life into it. He couldn’t get his little mud figures to come to life.He had the pattern, he had the blueprint, but he didn’t contain the life. And consciousness is life. Consciousness is love. The nature of the Father above, the nature of the pleroma, is love, consciousness, and life. And it’s all good. It’s all good.We’re going to pick this up next week, because I’m on a roll now. We’ll probably be following this train of thought for the next two, three weeks. So welcome to the Gnostic Reformation, where we’re going to infuse Gnosticism with love, consciousness, and life.God bless us all, and onward and upward.Buy now at amazon.com 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

Lost in a liminal space 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m going to do my best to wrap up this review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It’s not to tear down Christianity. It’s to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity.And so this talk of universal salvation is a necessary component of believing in the glory of God. Because universal salvation of all souls, not only all humans, but the dogs, the cats, the birds, the grasses, all living things, have to return to the Father, or else the Anointed loses power. The Father loses parts of himself.Okay, let’s get back to David Bentley Hart. So we’re going to run through these four meditations that are the body of his book. The first meditation is, Who is God? He says,The New Testament, to a great degree, consists in the eschatological interpretation of Hebrew Scripture’s story of creation, finding in Christ as eternal Logos and risen Lord, the unifying term of beginning and end.There’s no more magnificent meditation on this vision than Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the progress of all persons towards union with God in the one pleroma, the one fullness of the whole Christ. All spiritual wills moving, to use this loving image, from outside the temple walls to the temple precincts, and finally beyond the ages into the very sanctuary of the glory as one.Okay, let me jump in here to say, do you notice that the New Testament words, when you use the correct translations, are the same as the translations in our Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi? Logos is the eternal spirit of humanity and the risen Lord. The Fullness is the one pleroma, the whole Christ. And in this statement, it’s saying that all that is spiritual, which includes the spirits that reside within each of us, will all move as one into the pleroma of the Christ. That’s who Christ is to us. He’s the head of our pleroma. And when I speak of pleromas, I always picture that pyramidal shape, that hierarchical shape, and the capstone is the head. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us.When Paul spoke of this, he was applying it literally to the temple in Jerusalem, where there were the walls of the temple, and most of the people were outside of the walls, and some of the people were in the temple precincts. And finally, the very sanctuary of the glory, where only the priests were allowed. These are the three parts that were mentioned, and these are archetypal of the movement of humanity, Hart is saying, from the outside of the pleroma of the Christ, into the pleroma of the Christ, and then into the very glory of God through the Christ.On page 90, Hart says,If one truly believes that traditional Christian language about God’s goodness and the theological grammar to which it belongs are not empty, then the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not and cannot possibly be the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ. If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him.And that’s the end of the chapter, Who is God? And that pretty much states my basic belief on why everyone is going to heaven, because we all come from the Father, and therefore we all must return to the Father because the Father cannot be diminished in any way. And if he lost us, he’d be diminished. Do you see?The second meditation is, What is Judgment? And the subtitle is A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology. And eschatology, that’s one of those big theological words that just means the end times, the end of time. On page 93, Hart says,There’s a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament. And yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus as even the thinnest shadow of a hint, nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts.There is one verse in the Gospels, Matthew 25-46 that, traditionally understood, offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea, but then now Hart’s going to explain how that can’t be true. And then he says there are also perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation, and he says nothing’s clear in Revelation, so he’s not going to go there. But,What in fact the New Testament provides us with are a number of fragmentary and fantastic images that can be taken in any number of ways, arranged according to our prejudices and expectations, and declared literal or figural or hyperbolic as our desires dictate.It’s why people can make the case for eternal damnation, but you can also make the case for not eternal damnation, because it’s so metaphorical. On page 94, Hart says,Nowhere is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were some kind of Chthonian god. On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul’s writings, that appear instead to promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms.How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination, while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality? If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.And then he lists a number of verses from the New Testament that speak of universal salvation, over 20 of them at least, and I’ll give you just a couple.Romans 5.18 says, So then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings.And jumping in from the Gnostic sense, he doesn’t say the fall of one human, he doesn’t say through Adam, he says one transgression—and we would call that one transgression the Fall of Logos, the fall of the Aeon, which is a higher order being than we are.Or Corinthians 15.22 says, For just as in Adam all die, so also in the anointed Christ all will be given life.I would say where it says for just as in Adam all die, it’s not because Adam ate the apple, it’s that we humans who are outside of the Christ, we’re outside of the walls of the temple, we are in the pleroma of Adam—we are in the pleroma of human beings. When you accept the anointed, then you move into the pleroma, or you nest up higher into the pleroma of the Christ. That would be the Gnostic way of saying that.Second Corinthians 5.14 says, For the love of the anointed constrains us, having reached this judgment, that one died on behalf of all, all then have died.And of course that one is the Anointed, and He died on behalf of everyone.Or even Romans 11:32, For God shut up everyone in obstinacy, so that he might show mercy to everyone.And there’s a long discussion in the chapter about how God’s chosen—the original elect, that being the Hebrew nation—has been obstinate about accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the Anointed. And so he’s saying that everyone is shut up in obstinacy, that’s the Hebrews, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And that is, they’re temporarily set up in obstinacy so that the message of the Anointed can be preached far and wide, before death and after death, we Gnostics would say, and not be just constrained to only the Hebrews. That’s why the Hebrews are set aside for the moment, so that those outside the temple walls can also come to Christ.And then there are 19 more verses after this, and he lists them all between pages 96 and page 102. And if you are a theological scholar or a concerned Christian that wants to know if this is heresy or not, I really suggest you buy the book, That All Shall Be Saved, by David Bentley Hart, and read it carefully from cover to cover. Jumping to page 116, Hart says,There are those metaphors used by Jesus that seem to imply that the punishment of the world to come will be of only limited duration. For example, “if remanded to prison, you shall most certainly not emerge until you pay the very last pittance.” Or, “the unmerciful slave is delivered to the torturers until he should repay everything he owes.” And Hart says it seems as if this until should be taken with some seriousness.Some wicked slaves, moreover, “will be beaten with many blows, while others will be beaten with few blows.”Hart says, of course, everyone will be “salted with fire.” This fire is explicitly that of the Gehenna. But salting here is an image of purification and preservation, for salt is good. Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom from the Old Testament, and that is where, outside of the city of Jerusalem, the refuse was burned, and even carrion and bodies were burned. And that is why it is considered to be a hellish place. And it has become a metaphor in the time of Jesus for the purging fire, the Aeonian chastening for the good.Hart says we might even find some support for the purgatorial view of the Gehenna from the Greek of Matthew 25:46, which is the supposedly conclusive verse on the side of the Infernalist Orthodoxy, where the word used for the punishment of the last day is kolasis, which most properly refers to remedial chastisement, rather than timoria, which more properly refers to retributive justice. So, the fire of the judgment. What is judgment? The fire is the chastening fire, the fire of personal guilt and remorse over the sins one has done, that causes one to repent and turn to redemption. Hart says,It is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel, [and the fourth gospel, that’s the gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], it is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel foretells any “last judgment,” in the sense of a real additional judgment that accomplishes more than has already happened in Christ. To see His words as pointing toward and fulfilled within his own crucifixion and resurrection, wherein all things were judged and all things redeemed. The kingdom has indeed drawn very near, and even now is being revealed. The hour indeed has come. The judge who is judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days. . .Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest, for being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to.And he attributes that concept of hell being only a shadow to Gregory of Nyssa, although we would attribute it to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi which came before Gregory of Nyssa.Hell exists so long as it exists only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul.This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to Come, [and that’s capital A, Age, which we would interpret as the Aeons to Come, the Aeonian Pleroma to Come], and beyond all ages, all shall come to the kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world.And that’s the chapter, What is Judgment? The third meditation or chapter of Hart is called What is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image. It says over and over in the Bible that we are made in the image of God. Man is made in the image of God. That is the divine image. On page 131, Hart says,Christians down the centuries have excelled at converting the good tidings of God’s love in Christ into something dreadful, irrational, and morally horrid.[And we covered that in depth in the previous three episodes, if you want to go back there.] On page 132, Hart says,I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace, starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say, that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the Gospel.Aboriginal guilt, predestination, (ante praevisa merita), the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of vessels of wrath, and so on. All of these odious and incoherent dogmatic motifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have been ascribed to Paul. And yet, each and every one of them, not only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul’s proclamation of Christ’s triumph and of God’s purpose in election, but is something like their perfect inversion.Well, isn’t that interesting? Because we already know that the archons represent the inversions of the Aeons of the Pleroma. And so, although Hart doesn’t realize he’s implying this, to say that what has come down to us in Christian tradition through Augustine is the perfect inversion of what Paul was actually saying about universal salvation, which means, by definition, that it’s the demiurgic or the archonic version of salvation. Isn’t that interesting? I mean, that is what I have been implying, that what has been taken to be Christian tradition for the last couple of thousand years is actually a diminishment of the power of Christ and the power and love of the Father. By saying that people can be lost and condemned to eternal torture, that is sacrilegious to me. That is the heresy. And that is what Hart is saying here. He goes on to say on page 133,This is all fairly odd, really. Paul’s argument in those chapters is not difficult to follow. What preoccupies him from beginning to end is the agonizing mystery that the Messiah of Israel has come, and yet so few of the children of the house of Israel have accepted the fact, even while so many from outside the covenant have.And Paul wonders, how is the promised Messiah rejected by so many, yet so many outside the temple walls have accepted the Messiah? There are far more Christians than there are Jews at the moment. Why is that? Paul was wondering. Hart says,Paul’s is not an abstract question regarding which individual human beings are the saved and which are the damned. In fact, by the end of the argument, the former category, [that is the saved], proves to be vastly larger than that of the elect or the called, while the latter category, [that is the damned], makes no appearance at all.Jumping down the page, he says, “so then what if,” so now he’s going to go ahead and quote Paul here, Romans 9:19, Paul says,So then what if God should show his power by preserving vessels suitable only for wrath, keeping them solely for destruction, in order to provide an instructive counterpoint to the riches of the glory he lavishes on vessels prepared for mercy, whom he has called from among the Jews and the Gentiles alike.For as it happens, rather than offering a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form, at the very brink of despair. He does not stop there, however, because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It is so obviously preposterous, in fact, that a wholly different solution must be sought, one that makes sense and that will not require the surrender either of Paul’s reason or of his confidence in God’s righteousness.Hence, contrary to his own warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God’s justice, and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the provisional answer, the vessels of wrath hypothesis, altogether, so as to reach a completely different and far more glorious conclusion—God blesses everyone. Romans 10: 11, 12.And by the way, in Gnostic gospel, we would say the law is actually the Demiurge’s rules for human behavior, because our self-will makes us otherwise uncontrollable. Because to the Father above, the only law is love. When we act out of love, all else follows.Going on, Hart says,As for the believing remnant of Israel, [Romans 11:5], it turns out that they have been elected not as the limited number of the saved within Israel, but as the earnest through which all of Israel will be saved. They are waiting for the Anointed to come and take the place of the King of Israel, King of the Jews. The King of the Jews is one of the titles of the Messiah. That means the capstone of their pleroma. You see? It’s all of these pyramidal shapes that are first designed up there in the Fullness of God, the pleroma. What Paul is saying is that the Jews that are in the pleroma of Israel, it’s their remnant that makes them holy. It’s their remnant that is the spiritual part, the higher part, the called part, the elect part of the pleroma of the nation of the Hebrews. And it is through those elect that all of the Jews will be saved, ultimately.Hart says,For the time being, true, a part of Israel is hardened, but this will remain the case only until the ”full entirety” [that is the pleroma] of the Gentiles enter in. The unbelievers among the children of Israel may have been allowed to stumble, but God will never allow them to fall.Hart’s just saying that Israel’s reluctance or slowness to believing that Jesus is the Messiah is just slowing down the progress of history to give everyone else a chance to catch up to it. Quoting Hart again,We’re still in Romans now, 11:11.This then is the radiant answer dispelling the shadows of Paul’s grim what if in the ninth chapter of Romans. It’s clarion negative. It turns out that there is no final illustrative division between the vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy. That was a grotesque, all too human thought that can now be chased away for good. God’s wisdom far surpasses ours, and his love can accomplish all that it intends.“He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone.” [That’s Romans 11:32.] All are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy. . .That Paul’s great attempt to demonstrate that God’s election is not some arbitrary act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons, has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite literally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths explicitly to reject. . .Yet this is still not my principal point. I want to say something far more radical. I want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim, but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that make us who and what we are.Oh, this is a very interesting portion. Okay, listen to this. Jumping to page 149.No soul is who or what it is in isolation, and no soul’s sufferings can be ignored without the sufferings of a potentially limitless number of other souls being ignored as well. And so it seems if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.But Christians are obliged, it seems clear, to take seriously the eschatological imagery of scripture. And there all talk of salvation involves the promise of a corporate beatitude, a kingdom of love and knowledge, a wedding feast, a city of the redeemed, the body of Christ, which means that the hope Christians cherish must in some way involve the preservation of whatever is deepest in and most essential to personality rather than a perfect escape from personality. But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances. They are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves.And then Hart summons up the idea of a single recurrent image, he says,That of a parent whose beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who remains a parent nevertheless, and therefore keeps and cherishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delightful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that damaged soul. Is all of that, those memories, those anxieties and delights, those feelings of desperate love, really to be consigned to the fire as just so much combustible chaff? Must it all be forgotten or willfully ignored for heaven to enter into that parent’s soul? And if so, is this not the darkest tragedy ever composed? And is God not then a tragedian utterly merciless in his poetic omnipotence? Who or what is that being whose identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child?[Skipping to page 153] Personhood as such is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing. And it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not an action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller or a retreat into a more impoverished existence. And so, as I said in my first meditation, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances.A person is first and foremost a limitless capacity, a place where the all shows itself with a special inflection. We exist as the place of the other, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Certainly, this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection. That we must rise from the dead to be saved is a claim not simply about resumed corporeality, whatever that might turn out to be, but more crucially, about the fully restored existence of the person as socially, communally, corporately constituted. Each person is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ.Well, that’s pretty neat. See, we are nested fractal hierarchies of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. And if you’ve been with me a while, you know what that long and complicated sentence means. Picture a pyramidal shape, picture every living part of your body as building up the pyramid, and your conscious self is the capstone of that pleroma that makes up your body. Now, you are then nested along with all other humans into the pleroma of humanity, the body of humanity, also called the body of Adam. Just the way our cells nest up into building us, we nest up into building the great body of humanity.And then, Hart is saying this body of humanity exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ, because when we then nest up and make Christ the king of our pleroma, we are nested into the Fullness of Christ. And that is what the final salvation resting point is. When we all finally pass through the final judgment and nest up into Christ, then we’re all nested up into the pleroma, we’re all nested up into the Son. And there we are. And we will still have our lives the way the Fullness has their lives. They dream together as one of paradise. And that’s where we’re headed. Hart says,Our personhood must truly consist not only in the immediate love of those close at hand, but also in our disposition toward those whom we, by analogy, care for from afar. Or even in the abstract, for the most essential law of charity, of love, when it is truly active, is that it must inexorably grow beyond all immediately discernible boundaries in order to be fulfilled and to continue to be active.And all of those in whom each of us is implicated, and who are implicated in each of us, are themselves in turn implicated and intertwined in countless others, and on and on without limit. We belong of necessity to an indissoluble co-inherence of souls.And I think that down here on the physical level, on the material plane, the demiurgic version of that shared coherence of all souls together is quantum entanglement. That’s the Demiurge’s material version of how we are implicated and intertwined with every other soul. And now he goes on to say something that’s very Gnostic. On the next page, Hart says,There may be within each of us—indeed there surely is—that divine spark, that divine light or spark of nous or spirit or atman that is the abiding presence of God in us, the place of radical sustaining divine imminence, nearer to me than my inmost parts. But that light is the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existence, in and with one another.Oh, hey, there it is. That’s what I’m always saying. This one spark, that’s what we call the big S Self. And the particularity of our personal existence is what we here at Gnostic Insights label as our Ego. So we are made up of the Self that we share with all others and that we share with the Son, but we are also our own individual existence. That’s why we can’t just blink out into nothingness and not be missed, because we have our particularity, and it has its own place in the hierarchy. Then Hart says,But then this is to say that either all persons must be saved or that none can be. [He says,] God could, of course, erase each of the elect as whoever they once were by shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of hell and then raise up some other being in each of their places, thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of the loves that made him or her this person, associations and attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. If that were the case, only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal destiny, tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether.[Jumping to 157, he says], I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If then anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. . . For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair, and hence the love that has made all of us who we are and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.Amen. And that’s the end of the third meditation. Now the fourth meditation, we just don’t even have time to get to. It’s called, What is Freedom? And if you want to hear the fourth meditation in depth, please text me in the comments and ask for more David Bentley Hart That All Shall Be Saved. But as for now, this treatise on what is freedom? I’ll actually just jump to the last page and skip all of the explanations.The fourth meditation, What is Freedom? is all about free will. I guess I’ll include it in some future episode about free will and just quote Hart extensively in that episode. But to close it out, Hart says,It would make no sense to suggest that God, who is by nature not only the source of being, but also the good and the true and the beautiful and everything else that makes spirits exist as rational beings, would truly be all in all if the consummation of all things were to eventuate merely in a kind of extrinsic divine supremacy over creation.But God is not a god, [or as we would say, the God Above All Gods is not the Demiurge, is how we would put it in Gnostic terms]. And his final victory, as described in scripture, will consist not merely in his assumption of perfect supremacy over all, but also in his ultimately being all in all. Could there then be a final state of things in which God is all in all, while yet there existed rational creatures whose inward worlds consisted in an eternal rejection of and rebellion against God as the sole and consuming and fulfilling end of the rational will’s most essential nature? If this fictive and perverse interiority were to persist into eternity, would God’s victory over every sphere of being really be complete? Or would that small miserable residual flicker of Promethean defiance remain forever as the one space in creation from which God has been successfully expelled? Surely it would, so it too must pass away.All right, that ends this long episode, because I was trying to wrap up the entire book, which I almost did. Write to me, tell me what you think of this sort of thing. I’d especially like to hear from people who used to be Christians, or who were raised in the church, and who fell away from the church because of some of these very problems and conundrums that we’ve been talking about for the last four episodes.God bless us all, and onward and upward!If you find these gnostic insights meaningful, please donate to the cause. Cyd pays for these podcasts out of her retirement money, and the well is running dry. If I am to keep this up, I need your financial assistance as well as your good company. I thank my (very few) paid subscibers from the bottom of my heart to the top of my pleroma. Please help. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today is part three of my book report on David Bentley Hart’s book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. The past two weeks we covered the beginning of his book, the Introduction.I’m going to begin this section by reading out of his final remarks, because he does a good job of simplifying his arguments here at the end of the book. So we’ll start with that. Hart says on page 201,It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of the early church that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations.Belief in universal salvation may have been far more widespread in the first four or five centuries of Christian history than it was in all the centuries that followed, but it was never, as a rule, encouraged in any general way by those in authority in the church. Maybe there are great many among us who can be convinced to be good only through the threat of endless torture at the hands of an indefatigably vindictive god. Even so much as hint that the purifying flames of the age to come will at last be extinguished, and perhaps a good number of us will begin to think like the mafioso who refuses to turn state’s evidence because he is sure he can do the time.Bravado is, after all, the chief virtue of the incorrigibly stupid. He goes on to say, I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the Infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves.And to remind you, if you didn’t hear the past two episodes, Infernalist refers to the notion that there is an unending hell of pain and torture for the unregenerate or the unrepentant. Further down page 202, Hart says,I honestly, perhaps guilelessly, believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical for the simple reason that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity, [which is equivocation], so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains.To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that, on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose or to permit the imposition of eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a complete contradiction. All becomes mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious ability to believe impossible things.[Jumping down the page, he says,] Can we imagine logically, I mean not merely intuitively, that someone still in torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her sufferings have, in a sense, only just begun, and, in fact, will always have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence, not to mention simple good taste, to make this horrid notion seem palatable to ourselves.And all because we have somehow, foolishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we must believe. Really, could we truly believe it all apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe.So, what he’s saying here, what I’ve been talking to you about, is the idea that God, the God Above All Gods, what we call the Father in Gnosticism, would condemn people to everlasting torment, everlasting torment, with no other goal than to punish, because they’re never going to get out of it. That’s what everlasting means. And so it’s just punishment for the sake of punishment, and that that great, unlimitable God would impose this punishment on little, limited, finite beings who only lived a brief millisecond of time in the great span of time of God. That God would create these people for the purpose, basically, of condemning them to everlasting torment.You see, that is not even rational. It doesn’t make any sense. Not if you believe God is good. It’s impossible. Now, if you think that God is evil, well, then that’s not God, is it? By definition, if you believe that God is cruel and vindictive and unreasonable, well, that’s not the God Above All Gods. And this should come as relief to those of you who think you can’t believe in God, because God is so cruel and vindictive.Perhaps you were raised in an extremely cruel household with extremely vindictive parents, or schoolteachers, or somebody got to you and, in the name of God, inflicted cruelty upon you. Then you have come to accidentally transpose their human cruelty onto God, because they told you to. But that’s not God, by definition, you see? And when I say, by definition, that means, like, cold is not hot, by definition. Cold is cold. And if you’re going to start arguing, oh no, cold is hot, well, then you’re not talking about cold, you’re talking about hot. Do you see what I mean? And if you have been rejecting God, the God Above All Gods, because you have this view of God as merciless and vindictive, cruel, illogical, unfair, unjust, take comfort, because that’s not God you’re talking about.Now, it may be the small g god of this world. It could be the guy whose best friend is Satan, because remember, that is a small g god of confusion. And its main job is to cause you to forget that you come from transcendent goodness, that you come from above, from the God Above All Gods, and that you do have freedom. You do have free will. You are meant to inherit joy. You are meant to do good works, and to be happy, and to be in love, and to love everybody else.Don’t let some evil archon, or evil Demiurge, or evil human, redefine God in such a way that you reject God, because that’s the mistake. That’s a categorical error. And that’s why I say, take comfort, have joy, receive the love that was meant for you.Okay, back to the book. On page 205, Hart says,It was not always thus. Let me at least shamelessly idealize the distant past for a moment. In its dawn, the gospel was a proclamation principally of a divine victory that had been won over death and sin, and over the spiritual powers of rebellion against the big G God that dwells on high, and here below, and under the earth. It announced itself truly as the good tidings of a campaign of divine rescue on the part of a loving God, who by the sending of his Son into the world, and even into the kingdom of death, had liberated his creatures from slavery to a false and merciless master, and had opened a way into the kingdom of heaven, in which all of creation would be glorified by the direct presence of big G God, [or the Father, as we call him in Gnosticism].And by the way, this paragraph that I just read about early Christianity, that entirely is consistent with this Valentinian Christianity that I share with you here. That is the entire purpose of we second-order creatures being sent down here below, to bring the good tidings of life and love and liberty to the fallen Demiurge, and now subsequently to all of the people who have been hoodwinked by the Demiurge and Satan into believing in the false god that does not incorporate love. Hart goes on to say,It was above all a joyous proclamation and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures. Rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity. Nor was it a religion offering only a psychological salve for individual anxieties regarding personal salvation. It was a summons to a new and corporate way of life, salvation by entry into a community of love. Nothing as yet was fixed except the certainty that Jesus was now Lord over all things and would ultimately yield all things up to the Father, so that God might be all in all.Now we’re going to go back into the earlier part of the book to explain some of these concepts in more depth. Hart has broken his book into four meditations, or four subjects we could call it.The first meditation is, who is God? The second meditation is, what is judgment? The third meditation is, what is a person? And the fourth meditation is, what is freedom? A reflection on the rational will. So in the first meditation, who is God? Hart explains to us that,The moral destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely inseparable. As the transcendent good beyond all things, God is also the transcendental end that makes every single action of any rational nature possible. Moreover, the end toward which He acts must be His own goodness, for He is Himself the beginning and end of all things. This is not to deny that, in addition to the primary causality of God’s act of creation, there are innumerable forms of secondary causality operative within the creative order. But none of these can exceed or escape the one end toward which the first cause directs all things.And so what he is saying here is that the first causality is the expression of God’s goodness, the purity of God reaching out through the Son and into the Fullness of God—emanating. That is the principal causality. That is the prime mover of all things, what we call the base state of consciousness, the matrix.But then there is a secondary causality that takes place subsequent to that. And I guess the first act of secondary causality was probably the fall, in that it was the first act of will prompted by ego that apparently deviated from God’s original plan, although the Tripartite Tractate does say we shouldn’t blame Logos because the fall was the cause of the cosmos which was destined to come about.But whereas the Father is the prime mover and remains shielded in purity and fullness and goodness—you see, all the love emanates from the Father, evil doesn’t swim back upstream. It’s all emanating from the Father, and it’s all good.But we do have secondary causality down here in the created cosmos, primarily due to the actions of the Demiurge and the never-ending war that runs amuck down here. Hart says, page 70,First, as God’s act of creation is free, constrained by neither necessity nor ignorance, all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision. And second, precisely because God in himself is absolute, absolved, that is, of every pathos of the contingent, every affect of the sort that a finite substance has the power to visit upon another, his moral venture in creating is infinite.One way or another, after all, all causes are logically reducible to their first cause. This is no more than a logical truism. In either case, all consequence are, either as actualities or merely possibilities, contingent upon the primordial antecedent, apart from which they could not exist.In other words, all the things that happen down here in the cosmos couldn’t have happened without God giving it the first start, without the Father giving it the initial emanation. He goes on to say,And naturally, the rationale of a first cause, its definition, in the most etymologically exact meaning of that term, is the final cause that prompts it, the end toward which it acts. If, then, that first cause is an infinitely free act emerging from infinite wisdom, all those consequence are intentionally entailed, again, either as actualities or as possibilities within that first act.And so the final end to that act tends is its whole moral truth. The traditional definition of evil as a privation of the good, lacking any essence of its own, in other words, what we would call in Gnosticism, evil is the shadow of the good. Evil is the shadow of Logos. It’s not a thing in itself. It’s the absence of the love and the light of the Father. It is also an assertion that when we say God is good, we are speaking of Him not only relative to his creation, but as he is in himself.All comes from God, and so evil cannot be a thing that comes from anywhere. Evil is, in every case, merely the defect whereby a substantial good is lost, belied, or resisted. For in every sense, being is act, and God, in his simplicity and infinite freedom, is what he does. He could not be the creator of anything substantially evil without evil also being part of the definition of who he essentially is, for he alone is the wellspring of all that exists.Jumping down the page on 71, Hart says, “God goes forth in all beings, and in all beings returns to himself.” That’s how I describe as we all carry the Fullness of God within our being, and within every cell of our being. And since we are carrying the Fullness of God within us, we will have to return to the Fullness of God ultimately. We can’t be lost in everlasting torment, because we are the Fullness of God, and God cannot torment itself. Hart says,God has no need of the world. He creates it not because he is dependent upon it, but because its dependency on him is a fitting expression of the bounty of his goodness.Doesn’t that remind you of, in the beginning, the Father was alone, and he admired his goodness and beauty and love. He was full of love and beauty, and gave birth, so to speak—He emanated the Son. And the Son and the Father gave glory to one another. And in that giving of glory to one another, then the Son emanated the Fullness. And then in giving glory to one another in the Fullness and to the Son, the Fullness emanates us, the second order of powers.And it’s all because you can’t love without having an object to love, even if it’s only in your own mind. Love requires an object of devotion, and giving glory is the reciprocal of love. We give glory because we were first loved. It’s a fitting expression of the bounty of goodness, as Hart puts it. Then he goes on to say,This, however, also means that within the story of creation, viewed from its final cause, there can be no residue of the pardonably tragic, no irrecuperable or irreconcilable remainder left behind at the end of the tale. For if there were, this irreconcilable excess would also be something God has directly caused.Now, in our Gnostic gospel, there is a remnant “left behind at the end of the tale.” And that is the shadowy archons that were never a part of the original creation because they did not come from the “first cause” discussed earlier. The shadows of the Demiurge did not come from the Fullness or the fallen Aeon, but are only the absence of the qualities of that Aeon, this is why they are referred to as shadows. They are figments that do not have a reality outside of the Deficiency. Therefore, they have no home to return to in the Fullness of God. They are not from the Fullness.And he talks a bit about Hegel’s system and dismisses it, and I’m not going to go into it. Hart says,The story Christians tell is of creation as God’s sovereign act of love, neither adding to nor qualifying His eternal nature. And so it is also a story that leaves no room for an ultimate distinction between the universal truth of reason and the moral meaning of the particular, or for any distinction between the moral meaning of the particular and the moral nature of God.Only by insisting upon the universality of God’s mercy could Paul, in Romans 11:32, liberate himself from the fear that the particularity of that mercy would prove to be an ultimate injustice, and that in judging His creatures, God would reveal Himself not as the good God of faithfulness and love, but as an inconstant God who can shatter His own covenants at will.Hart reminds us that down through the centuries,Christians have again and again subscribed to formulations of their faith that clearly reduce a host of cardinal Christian theological usages, most especially moral predicates like good, merciful, just, benevolent, loving, to utter equivocity, and that by association, reduce their entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness.[On the next page, 75, he says], consider, to begin with the mildest of moral difficulties, how many Christians down the centuries have had to reconcile their consciences to the repellent notion that all humans are at conception already guilty of a transgression that condemns them justly to eternal separation from God and eternal suffering, and that in this doctrine’s extreme form, every newborn infant belongs to a massa damnata, hateful in God’s eyes from the first moment of existence.Hart loves to throw in Latin. Massa damnata obviously means that the masses would be damned.The very notion of an inherited guilt is a logical absurdity, rather on the order of a square circle. All that the doctrine can truly be taken to assert, speaking logically, is that God willfully imputes to innocent creatures a guilt they can never have really contracted out of what, from any sane perspective, can only be called malice. But this is just the beginning of the problem. For one broad, venerable stream of tradition, God, on the basis of this imputation, consigns the vast majority of the race to perpetual torment, including infants who die unbaptized.And may I point out that in Gnostic Christianity there is no inherited guilt at all because the Fall was not caused by the first humans, Adam and Eve, but occurred at the Aeonic level. Christianity carries a remnant of that understanding forward when it refers to “fallen angels,” but it does not connect the dots to realize their culpability in original sin.And then the theology of grace grows grimmer, for according to the great Augustinian tradition, since we are somehow born meriting not only death but eternal torment, we are enjoined to see and praise a laudable generosity in God’s narrow choice to elect a small remnant for salvation, before and apart from any consideration of their concrete merits or demerits, and this further choice either to predestine or infallibly to surrender the vast remainder to everlasting misery. So it is that, for many Christians down the years, the rationale of evangelization has been a desperate race to save as many souls as possible from God. The time has really gotten away from us, and we’ve only touched the first meditation, so I hope you are enjoying this theology. It’s theology, and I know that’s difficult slog, but I’m sharing with you these thoughts because they comprise basically the sum total of Christian theology for the past 2,000 years, and it has gone through changes here and there. David Bentley Hart is a scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy and a scholar of religion and philosopher and so forth, and I think that he has very clear sight.So we’ll pick this up one more time next week, and I promise we’ll wrap it up. Onward and upward! God bless us all!This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, kindle and audio book through amazon and your local booksellers and libraries—ask for it. This is a public episode. 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Rerun from November 9, 2024 Gnostic Insights PodcastsUniversal Salvation pt. 2God is loving and merciful, not judgmental and cruelWelcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week I began sharing with you what is essentially a book report on the book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart, and he’s the translator of the New Testament that I’ve been using. So, last week we got up to page 21 out of this book, and now I’m all the way up to page 85, so we’ll see what happened in this latest round of reading.Now, David Bentley Hart’s style of writing may not be for everyone. It’s very academic, very high-minded and educated and erudite—difficult to follow if you’re not accustomed to reading scholastic writing. But I believe his heart’s in the right place, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. I will do my best to reinterpret what he is saying in simpler words, in case you’re interested in the content, but not in its delivery method.So, picking it up on page 21, Hart says,And what could be more absurd than the claim that God’s ways so exceed comprehension, that we dare not presume even to distinguish benevolence from malevolence in the divine, inasmuch as either can result in the same endless excruciating despair? Here the docile believer is simply commanded to nod in acquiescence, quietly and submissively, to feel moved at a strange and stirring obscurity, and to accept that, if only he or she could sound the depths of this mystery, its essence would somehow be revealed as infinite beauty and love. A rational person capable of that assent, however, of believing all of this to be a paradox concealing a deeper, wholly coherent truth, rather than a gross contradiction, has probably suffered such chronic intellectual and moral malformation that he or she is no longer able to recognize certain very plain truths, such as the truth that he or she has been taught to approve of divine deeds that, were they reduced to a human scale of action, would immediately be recognizable as expressions of unalloyed spite.And he’s talking about the idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell and will suffer eternal torment. That is an interpretation or misinterpretation of the word brought about by incorrect translation of the original Coptic. Most of our Bible translations come off of old Latin Vulgate translations, and then they’ve been modernized. But that’s how errors are brought forward. And what Hart has done in his New Testament translation is go back to the original, very oldest transcripts, still in Greek, before they were translated to Latin. And he did what he called a pitilessly accurate translation, where Hart was not trying to make the words that are being translated fit into a predetermined doctrine, like everyone going to hell, or like the Trinity, or eternal damnation.These things we’ve been taught to believe are in the Scripture, but when you actually go back to the original Scriptures prior to the Latin translations, they are not in the Scripture. And so this book that I’m doing the book report on here, That All Shall Be Saved, this is about universal salvation, and doing away with the idea. And he says in this section I just read you, that it is a malevolent idea, unalloyed spite, unalloyed meaning pure spite on the part of God, that’s going to send everyone to hell that doesn’t get it.And that we have been commanded by the Church over the last 2,000 years to just nod our heads and say, oh, well, it’s God’s will, or oh, well, how can I presume to distinguish benevolence from malevolence, good intention from bad intention on the part of God, because God is so great and good. We’re supposed to be docile believers, to acquiesce, that is, to go along with, to quietly and submissively accept that we don’t get it, that we don’t understand the depths of the mystery, and someday we will, and that God is good, and God is just, and therefore everyone’s going to hell, except for those few preordained elect from before time began. So this book is entirely against that proposition. So moving on, what I did was I read the book through, and I’ve highlighted the parts that seem worth sharing or very interesting. Now we’re jumping to page 35, where he says that certain people,of my acquaintance who are committed to what is often called an intellectualist model of human liberty, as I am myself, [he says], but who also insist that it is possible for a soul freely to reject God’s love with such perfect perpiscuity of understanding and intention as to merit eternal suffering.And we can tell from the context that perpiscuity means you get it. So he’s saying, how is it even possible for a soul to freely reject the love of God and consign oneself into eternal torment? It just doesn’t work. It’s not possible. He says,this is an altogether dizzying contradiction. In simplest terms, that is to say, they, [that is, the intellectualists], want to assert that all true freedom is an orientation of the rational will toward an end that the mind takes in some sense to be the good, and so takes also as the one end that can fulfill the mind’s nature and supply its desires. This means that the better the rational will knows the Good, and that’s a capital G, Good, for what it is, the more that is that the will is freed from those forces that distort reason and lead the soul toward improper ends. The more it will long for and seek after the true good in itself, and conversely, the more rationally it seeks the good, the freer it is.He says that in terms of the great Maximus the Confessor, who lived from 580 to 660,the natural will within us, which is the rational ground of our whole power of volition, must tend only toward God as its true end, for God is goodness as such, whereas our gnomic or deliberative will can stray from him, but only to the degree that it has been blinded to the truth of who he is and what we are, and as a result has come to seek a false end as the true end. In short, sin requires some degree of ignorance, and ignorance is by definition a diverting of the mind and will to an end they would not naturally pursue.So, in other words, we all want what’s best for ourself, even in the most selfish sense, even in the most egoic sense. The ego wants what is best for this person that it is part of, that that is the rational end of the ego’s striving, what is best, and that there is a thing called good in the absolute sense, and if we realize that, then we would strive toward the good, by definition. Carrying on, page 37,I’m not saying that we do not in some very significant sense make our own exceedingly substantial voluntary contributions to our estrangement from the good in this life.And, see, he’s just saying we all screw up. Even if we are seeking the good, we often fall backwards into the bad, okay?Up to a certain point, [he says], it is undeniable, but past that point it is manifest falsehood. There is no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect understanding, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore, we are incapable of contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always extenuating circumstances.Well, in a sense, that’s true of all of us and all of our circumstances. We are a product of our environment, to some extent. But don’t forget that in the Gnostic view, we also contain the pure goodness of God, the capital S Self, that reflects the Fullness of God. So we do know what goodness is, even if we are surrounded by badness.Quoting Hart again, page 40,Here though, I have to note that it is a thoroughly modern and wholly illogical notion that the power of absolutely unpremised liberty, obeying no rationale except its own spontaneous volition toward whatever end it might pose for itself, is either a real logical possibility or, in any meaningful sense, a proper definition of freedom.See? He’s saying it’s thoroughly modern and wholly illogical to think that we have complete freedom of will, and that we can choose to follow any unethical or immoral end that we wish to, because what’s it matter? One choice being pretty much the same as another, you see. He goes on to say, in page 40,A choice made without rationale is a contradiction in terms. At the same time, any movement of the will prompted by an entirely perverse rationale would be, by definition, wholly irrational. Insane, that is to say. And therefore, no more truly free than a psychotic episode. The more one is in one’s right mind, the more that is that one is conscious of God as the goodness that fulfills all beings. And the more one recognizes that one’s own nature can have its true completion and joy nowhere but in Him, and the more one is unfettered by distorting misperceptions, deranged passions, and the encumbrances of past mistakes, the more inevitable is one’s surrender to God, liberated from all ignorance, emancipated from all the adverse conditions of this life, the rational soul could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its own supreme beatitude.We are, as it were, doomed to happiness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses unhindered. And we cannot not will the satisfaction of our beings in our true final end, a transcendent good lying behind and beyond all the proximate ends we might be moved to pursue. This is no constraint upon the freedom of the will, coherently conceived. It is simply the consequence of possessing a nature produced by and for the transcendent good, a nature whose proper end has been fashioned in harmony with a supernatural purpose. God has made us for Himself, as Augustine would say, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Him. A rational nature seeks a rational end, truth, which is God Himself.The irresistibility of God for any soul that has been truly set free is no more a constraint placed upon its liberty than is the irresistible attraction of a flowing spring to fresh water in a desert place to a man who is dying of thirst. To choose not to drink in that circumstance would not be an act of freedom on his part, but only a manifestation of the delusions that enslave him and force him to inflict violence upon himself, contrary to his nature.Do you follow the reasoning there? That boils down to simply saying it is logical. Even Mr. Spock would find it logical for a human to pursue the good in its own best interests, and that it is illogical, illogical all the way to insanity, to refuse the good, to refuse what is best for you. It’s a manifestation of insanity, to refuse the love of God. How’s that for laying it out? I really appreciate logic, you know, because this is a logical universe.If the laws of physics and chemistry didn’t hold true to logic, and that includes math, you see, 2 plus 2 equals 4, etc., all the way through all the difficult math, the quantum physics, and the string theory, and so forth, this is a logical universe based upon the Aeon known as Logos, logic. And so, therefore, to reject logic, it’s not smart, it’s not clever, it’s not freedom. And, by the way, this is about the level of pushback I see in, for example, YouTube comments that reject the gospel. They’re pretty much on the order of, oh, yeah, I can die of thirst if I want to, so F off. Okay, well, good luck with that, right? Carrying on, page 43.None of this should need saying, to be honest. We should all already know that whenever the term justice and eternal punishment are set side by side as if they were logically compatible, the boundaries of the rational have been violated. If we were not so stupefied by the hoary and venerable myth that eternal damnation is an essential element of the original Christian message, and then he says in parentheses, which, not to spoil later plot developments here, it is not, we would not even waste our time on so preposterous a conjunction. From the perspective of Christian belief, the very notion of a punishment that is not intended ultimately to be remedial is morally dubious, and he says in parentheses, and I submit anyone who doubts this has never understood Christian teaching at all.But even if one believes that Christianity makes room for the condign imposition, [and condign means proper or fitting], imposition of purely retributive punishments, it remains the case that a retribution consisting in unending suffering, imposed as recompense for the actions of a finite intellect and will, must be by any sound definition disproportionate, unjust, and at the last, nothing more than an expression of sheer pointless cruelty.And of course, I do find that attitude on the part of Christians I talk to and try to explain the idea of universal salvation being Christ’s true mission, that all shall be redeemed, every knee shall bow. They’d much rather send people to hell, and when you see their faces as they’re saying it, it’s not, oh, you know, I’m so sorry that it’s this way and my heart breaks, but I’m afraid they’re all going to hell. It’s not like that at all. It’s like, damn straight, they deserve to go to hell. Now, you take that kind of anger and cruelty when you consider that they are advocating unending, excruciating pain and punishment, and then you try to say that that is God’s will, that goodness incorporates unending punishment.And Hart’s saying, indeed, especially unending punishment that isn’t for remediation, isn’t to make them a better person, but simply to make them hurt. And who are you punishing? Finite beings with limited time and intelligence and ability to reason with things that happened in their past. Maybe they were brought up by someone very cruel who taught them cruelty, and so they carry on cruelty. And then that the God of all love and the God of all justice would send them to hell for eternal torment. And up until quite recently, even babies who were unbaptized would be sent to hell for eternal torment. And then someone came up with the idea of a baby purgatory where unbaptized babies never get to go to heaven, but they’re not going to be eternally punished either. They’re just going to go to a baby land where they’re held apart from the rest of the redeemed. Well, really? That’s hardly any better. I mean, it’s somewhat better, but why shouldn’t these pure babies who pretty much incorporate the Fullness of the Self and love of God, why wouldn’t God want them back? You see, it doesn’t make any sense.And if you’re a Christian listening to me today who has had niggling doubts about certain things, and one of them being this idea of grandma being in hell and in the midst of eternal torture now because she wouldn’t listen to your preaching, you can relax about it. Because we are the sower of seeds, but we are not the harvester. It is Christ who harvests the souls, who brings them all home.Back to Hart here again. On page 47, he says,Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us.And he uses the word infernalist for like the infernal torments of hell. So an infernalist is someone who believes folks are going to hell for eternity. So he says,Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us. And it is this that should be the chief concern of any believer.All of these arguments still oblige one to believe that a benevolent and omnipotent God would willfully create rational beings destined for an endless torment that they could never, in any rational calculus of personal responsibility, earn for themselves. And to believe also that this somehow is essential to the good news Christianity brought into the world.Isn’t it true? When you’re in church and you hear the preacher preaching a very nice, very good message about relationships or about moral virtue, and then there is a plea and a threat at the end that if you are sitting in the congregation and you have not accepted Christ as your personal Savior, you may go out and die this afternoon and go to hell. It’s not right. It’s contradictory. It is not the pure will of God. Page 47 goes on to say,In the end, there is only one logical terminus toward which all these lines of reasoning can lead: When all the possible paths of evasion have tapered away among the weeds, one has to stop, turn around, retrace one’s steps back to the beginning of the journey, and finally admit that, if there really is an eternal hell for finite spirits, then it has to be the case that God condemns the damned to endless misery not on account of any sane proportion between what they are capable of meriting and how he chooses to requite them for their sins, but solely as a demonstration of his power to do as he wishes.Now, by the way, when I read the Old Testament, I see that that is often the attitude that Jehovah has towards his subjects. He commands things because he can, and he wants obedience because he wants obedience. Remember, the Demiurge controls through strong strings. He does not approve of willpower. Willpower is messy. Willpower means not obeying the will of God, and he wants to be the sayer of our souls. But the God Above All Gods, the Gnostic God, outranks the Old Testament God. The God Above All Gods is the Father who begat the Son.The Demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjectsAnd so when Jesus says, I and my Father are one, he’s not talking about the Old Testament God. He’s talking about the God Above All Gods, the originator of consciousness, of love, of life, of free will. And we are all fractals of that Father. Through the Son, through the Fullness of God, we are fractals of all of those powers of the Father–stepped down, because we’re smaller fractals. So we all have to return to the Father in the end.When we loose these mortal coils and we’re no longer bound to the material that deludes us, then we can finally return to the Father again. So onward and upward is not a trap. Onward and upward is freedom. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So back to this idea of the Old Testament God enjoying his omnipotent sovereignty. On page 48, Hart is talking about Calvin and predestination. And he says, in book three of Calvin’s Institutes,he even asserts that God predestined the human fall from grace, precisely because the whole of everything, creation, fall, redemption, judgment, the eternal bliss of heaven, the endless torments of hell, and whatever else, exists solely for the sake of a perfect display of the full range of God’s omnipotent sovereignty, which for some reason absolutely must be displayed.He goes on to say he doesn’t know how to respond to that, because,I know it to be based on a notoriously confused reading of Scripture, one whose history goes all the way back to the late Augustine, a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin translations turned out to be the single most tragically consequential case of linguistic incompetence in Christian history. In equal part, however, it is because I regard the picture of God thus produced to be a metaphysical absurdity, a God who is at once supposedly the source of all things, and yet also the one whose nature is necessarily thoroughly polluted by arbitrariness.And no matter how orthodox Calvinists might protest, there is no other way to understand the story of election and dereliction that Calvin tells, which would mean that in some sense he is a finite being, that is God, in whom possibility exceeds actuality, and the irrational exceeds the rational. A far greater concern than either of these theological defects, either the deeply misguided scriptural exegesis or the inept metaphysics of the divine, it is the moral horror in such language.So that’s as far as we’re going to go today. In next week’s continuance of this train of thought, Hart will talk about the difference between the God Above All Gods, essentially, even though Hart’s not calling himself a Gnostic. When he speaks of God, or Goodness with capital G, he is speaking of the God Above All Gods. And when he contrasts it with the God of Calvin and Augustine in the Old Testament, that is the Demiurgic God.I’ve noticed that many modern people seem to think of God as a yin-yang type of completion, that is, where evil balances good, where darkness is necessary to balance light, where the purpose of humanity, or what happens here in humanity, is that we are instantiating strife and struggle and evil for the teaching of God, for the completion of God. That is not right. That’s wrong theology, folks. Our God is all goodness, and there is no evil that emanates from God. Well, where did evil come from then? It’s merely the absence of good. So evil is the absence of goodness.The archons are the shadows of the Aeons. And when the light fully comes and fills all of space, the shadows will disappear, and the light comes along with the love. And so that’s our job, to realize that universal and ethereal love, and to so let our light shine and our lives shine with love, that the Demiurge will be eventually won over. And as for the shadows, every time we bring light into the world, we’re diminishing the power of the Demiurge. We’re shining light onto a shadow and evaporating it.Next week, we’ll pick this up for part three of That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart.Let me know what you think of this. Send me some comments.Onward and upward. God bless us all.»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>Please buy my book–A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. In this book you will find the original Christian theology as taught by Jesus before the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome got their hands on it. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is for seekers and scholars alike. The language is as simple and accessible as I could make it, even though the subject matter is profoundly deep.The book is available in all formats, including paperback, hardcover, and kindle. The audio book narrated by Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio is also available on amazon. And please request that your local library carry the book—it’s available to all libraries and independent book sellers. 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

My major reason why everyone and everything that’s living now will return to heaven is that everything comes from heaven. So if everything doesn’t return to heaven in the end, if most of it, as a matter of fact, was thrown into eternal fires of torment, well, God itself would be lessened. The Father would be less than he was at the beginning, and that’s an impossibility, because the Father was, is, and ever shall be the same. He is not diminished by the love and consciousness and life that flows out of him. But if that life, love, and consciousness winds up in a black hole at the bottom of an eternal pit of torment, well, there’s so many things wrong with that statement, just absolutely wrong.The reason I say it can’t be so is that all consciousness, life, and love come from the Father. So in the big roll-up, if we accept the proposition that there will be an end to this material existence, which is what all Christians and Jews profess, and if everything that emanated from the Father in the beginning, beginning with the Son, which is the first and only direct emanation, and then everything else emanates through the Son, well, if it doesn’t return at the end of material time, then the Father and the ethereal plane would be diminished, because it poured out all of this love and consciousness into this material realm, and it all has to return.The Tripartite Tractate says that everything that existed from the beginning will return at the end of time. In verses 78 and 79 of the Tripartite Tractate, it’s speaking about the shadows that emerged from Logos after the Fall, and it says,Therefore their end will be like their beginning, from that which did not exist they are to return once again to the shadows.“Their end will be like their beginning,” in that they didn’t come from above—they were shadows of the fallen Logos. And so when the light comes and shines the light, the shadows disappear. Furthermore, in verses 80 and 81, the Tripartite Tractate says,The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, that is, after the Fall, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not exist from the first.So these shadows didn’t exist in the Pleroma; they were shadows, they were imitations of the unity which existed from the first, and that unity is the Fullness of God—the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And it is only these shadows that will be evaporated at the end of time, that will not go to the ethereal plane. All living things will, because we’re not shadows of the Fall. We are actually sent down from the unity, from the Fullness of God, with life, consciousness, and love. And so all of that has to return to the Father.So that is where I’m coming from, that God can’t be lessened, made less than it was at the beginning. So everything will be redeemed and returned. And of course, practically all of Christianity nowadays believes that most everything that was emanated from the beginning will be destroyed, or put into a fire of torment for all eternity. Anyone who wasn’t baptized, or anyone who didn’t come forward to profess a belief in Christ.So that’s most of the other cultures, most of the world, and the conventional Christian church doesn’t even realize that animals are going to heaven. I often comfort people whose pet has just passed away, and they’re missing them so badly, and they love them so much, and it hurts so much, and I say to them in comfort, “Well, your pet is waiting for you in heaven, and you’ll be reunited when you cross over, and then you’ll have them again, and you’ll all be very happy forever together.” That’s my basic approach.As a matter of fact, I’m waiting for my pack—that’s who I expect to greet me. I’m not waiting for my dead relatives, or my late husband. I’m not expecting them on the other shore waiting for me, although perhaps they will be. But who I really am looking forward to seeing are my dogs and cats, every dog and cat I’ve ever had. And I figure they’re all up there together as a big pack, playing on the beach. So that’s what keeps me comforted, and keeps me looking forward. I’m very happy to imagine that that will be what greets me when I cross over.So this morning, what I’d like to share with you are some of Hart’s writing that he shares in his introduction that’s called, The Question of an Eternal Hell, Framing the Question. So this is before he even gets into his various apologetics of how it is that everyone will be saved. But I really wanted to share this with you. Hart writes in a very high-minded manner, so I’ll attempt to translate it for us all.So on page 16, Hart says,And as I continued to explore the Eastern Communions as an undergraduate, I learned at some point to take comfort from an idea that one finds liberally scattered throughout Eastern Christian contemplative tradition, from late antiquity to the present, and expressed with particular force by such saints of the East as Isaac of Nineveh, who lived between 613 and 700, and Silouan of Athos, who lived between 1866 and 1938. And the idea is this, that the fires of hell are nothing but the glory of God, which must at the last, when God brings about the final restoration of all things, pervade the whole of creation. For although that glory will transfigure the whole cosmos, it will inevitably be experienced as torment by any soul that willfully seals itself against love of God and neighbor. To such a perverse and obstinate nature, the divine light that should enter the soul and transform it from within must seem instead like the flames of an exterior chastisement.That’s pretty interesting. He’s saying that after the final roll-up, the glory of God, or the light of God, will fill all of space and eternity, and that we will be able to see it and experience it. We will stand before the glory of God. But anyone who is hiding from God, or that is a hateful person, will experience that same glory as flames of fire that torment. And so that will be their punishment. But it’s not coming from God. God’s bringing glory and love and light. But they, because they are resistant, they will experience it as those flames of hell.So Hart goes on to say,This I found not only comforting, but also extremely plausible at an emotional level. It is easy to believe in that version of hell, after all, if one considers it deeply enough, for the very simple reason that we all already know it to be real in this life, and dwell a good portion of our days confined within its walls. A hardened heart is already its own punishment. The refusal to love, or to be loved, makes the love of others, or even just their presence, a source of suffering and a goad to wrath.And isn’t that true? That a hateful person views everything that’s going on around them, and anything that someone else says, to be irritating, and worthy of punishment, or worthy of disdain, because it doesn’t agree with their own opinion. He goes on to say on page 17,and so perhaps it makes perfect sense to imagine that a will sufficiently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and violence might be so damaged that, even when fully exposed to the divine glory for which all things were made, it will absolutely hate the invasion of that transfiguring love, and will be able to discover nothing in it but terror and pain. It is the soul, then, and not God, that lights hell’s fires, by interpreting the advent of divine love as a violent assault upon the jealous privacy of the self.Now, we’ve talked about that a lot here on Gnostic Insights, and I cover that in my discussions of Overcoming Death. My argument about Overcoming Death primarily comes from the Tibetan Buddhist book known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and in that book it describes this passage after life. And, by the way, it’s not only when the whole entire cosmos melts away, it’s every time we die. When your body passes away, suddenly you’re in that non-material state. Your ego goes forward without the attachment of the body, and in that state of not being attached to the material world, it is like, at the end of time, when the entire cosmos goes through the same process and is no longer attached to the material world. At that point, delusion drops away, the confusion of this cosmos and the confusion of our culture and the demiurgic culture that we are surrounded with, as well as the pulls of the material upon our bodies. It’s gone, it’s lifted, it’s no longer there, and your spirit is able to see with clear eyes. As Paul said in the first letter to Corinthians, chapter 13,For we know partially, and we prophesy partially. But when that which is complete comes, what is partial will be rendered futile. When I was an infant, I spoke like an infant, I thought like an infant, I reckoned like an infant. Having become a man, I did away with infantile things. For as yet we see by way of a mirror, in an enigma, but then we will see face to face. As yet I know partially, but then I shall know fully, just as I am fully known. But now abide faith, hope, and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love.And in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it talks about these things called bardos, which are levels of hell, basically, or levels of purgatory that people go through as they are learning to get rid of the mistaken notions that they picked up here during the lifetime. The samskara is stripped away. I would call the samskara the confounding memes that we cling to. We pick up these meme bundles from the people and from the things we read and learn and are indoctrinated into in school and then through the media.Those are memes, meme bundles, and they have to be let go of. You have to drop them in order to get past the ego that’s holding on to those memes and rediscover the purity of the Father and the Son in the ethereal plane—rediscover the purity of your true Self. And the longer someone holds on to those memes after death, the more difficult is their passage into purity. And that’s explained in depth in the Overcoming Death episode. Well, that Tibetan description of the fires of hell very much resemble the fires of hell that were talked about from these ancient saints of the Christian tradition.By the way, this idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell rather than going to heaven, that is a relatively recent addition to Christianity, but it has been grasped so firmly with the great assistance of the Catholic Church and their doctrines that by now most Christians think that most people won’t go to heaven. So even the Protestants who protest Catholicism—that’s what the word Protestant means, one who protests—they’ve lost the original thread of universal salvation that Jesus was teaching. The Anointed came to save everyone, it says, over and over in the New Testament.And in Hart’s translation, which comes directly from the original writing rather than down through the Latin that had already been filtered by the Catholics, you don’t find the eternal torment of hell. Remember, the word Aeon, which we in Gnostic belief generally translate as ethereal beings or part of the Fullness of God above, Aeon is also translated as a period of time, and throughout most of the translations of the New Testament, which derive from the Latin Vulgate, Aeon is translated as a period of time.And so when it says eternal torment, it’s really saying aeonic torment. And in my opinion, it’s the torment people bring upon themselves when they return to the aeonic realm. The Aeons aren’t the punishers. God is not the punisher. It’s our own grasping onto our past lives and the demiurgic culture and the demiurgic memes that we hold onto after death that are experienced like burning flames. But no one’s imposing it upon us. It’s our own lack of willing to give it up and turn and face the light. The eternal fires of hell are actually the aeonic reckoning that comes at the end of each lifetime and will come at the end of time itself when the material cosmos passes away. At least that’s what I think.So when Hart says on page 17 there that “a will, a personal will, sufficiently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and violence,” intransigence means not giving up, stubbornness, “might be so damaged that even when it comes face to face with glory, it will experience it as torment.” Now, for those of us who have accepted the anointing of the Christ and have come to true gnosis, (that is a remembrance that we come from above and will happily return to the above, that’s all you need to know), we will not cling onto this material world.We will not be clinging onto those demiurgic memes that keep us from coming face to face with our aeonic parents in the Fullness of God. We will happily cross over. We will joyfully meet with those who are on the other side, be they family, spouses, or pets, because the grasses and the flowers, the butterflies, the birds, everything that is alive down here on earth will be alive in heaven because all life comes from above. We will not be experiencing that chastening fire—that coming to grips with the lies that we’ve been holding onto. That’s the painful part, coming to grips with our own lies and the harms we have done to other people. If we’re not repentant of those harms we have done to other people, we will have to come face to face with those harms after we cross over, and we will see from that other person’s point of view what we did to them and how much we hurt them, and that will come back to us. We will experience their pain, and that is the pain and suffering of death, but it’s not being imposed by the Father or the Son or our aeonic parents above.On page 18, Hart says,Because Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their thinking, to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear and unambiguous element of their faith, and that therefore the idea must make perfect moral sense. They are in error on both counts, as it happens, but a sufficiently thorough conditioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the most ostentatiously absurd proposition to be the very epitome of rational good sense.You know, there’s some big words in that sentence, but I think you can tell by the context what they mean, right? Ostentatiously means open, flaunting. Epitome means the highest. So he’s saying that because the Church has taught that everyone’s going to hell except those very few, which is an ostentatious point of view, you see, ostentatiously absurd proposition, yet they have been taught that it is the very highest of good sense, and you can’t go against it.And so people are conditioned not to question it. And what this book, That All Shall Be Saved, is, is a very thorough and deep description and rationale of how that cannot be true, of how everyone must be going to heaven. I covered my version of why everyone’s going to heaven in this episode. Further episodes, I think I’ll do a series here, further episodes will each cover chapters in Hart’s book, and we’ll hear what his rationale is for why everyone is going to heaven. But returning to this page 18 again, he says,In fact, where the absurdity proves only slight, the mind that has been trained most thoroughly will, as often as not, fabricate further and more extravagant absurdities in order to secure the initial offense against reason within a more encompassing and intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense.In other words, you’ll have to spin a bunch of nonsensical rationalizations and excuses about why everyone’s going to hell, just to make the story float. Quoting again,Sooner or later it will all seem to make sense, simply through ceaseless repetition and restatement and rhetorical reinforcement.As I’m reading this, of course he’s talking about religious ideologies here, but I’m seeing these mechanisms at play in media bias. Do you see that? Just through sheer repetition, over and over, it doesn’t matter if things are true or lies. If you say it often enough, people will begin to accept it unquestioningly. And you can see that going on in the politics, can’t you?Hart goes on to say,The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime. In the end, with sufficient practice, one really can, like the White Queen (of Alice in Wonderland), learn to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.In my limited attempts to discuss Gnosticism face-to-face with people, I discover this continually, that if I present them with the absurdity of everyone going to hell, for example, they will say, Well, it’s a mystery. We can’t know the mind of God. It’s a mystery. Who are you to presume? And this is the way they cover up that it doesn’t work, by just shunting it off to God’s incomprehensibility. But our God is rational. Our God is logical. Our God doesn’t say one thing and do another. Our God doesn’t lie. Our God doesn’t say it’s all about life and living and love and then enslave and slaughter. That is not the God of Gnosticism. The Father that Jesus spoke of is not that God.Going on with page 19, Hart says,Not that I am accusing anyone of consciously or cynically seeking to manipulate the minds of faithful Christians. The conspiracy, so to speak, is an entirely open one, an unpremeditated corporate labor of communal self-deception, requiring us all to do our parts to sustain one another in our collective derangement. I regard the entire process as the unintentional effect of a long tradition of error, one in which a series of bad interpretations of Scripture produced various corruptions of theological reasoning, which were themselves then preserved as immemorial revealed truths and, at last, rendered impregnable to all critique by the indurated mental habits of generations, all despite the logical and conceptual incongruities that this required believers to ignore within their beliefs.He writes with big words. The gist of this entire paragraph was that the church didn’t set out to be deceptive. Well, it may have with the Nicene Council when they stripped the Gnosis out, but from about 600 A.D. onward, it’s just become such an ingrained thought that by now it’s unassailable. By now you can’t even question it. But that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights.So stay with me for the next few episodes, and we’ll go into depth concerning hell, resurrection, salvation, and the ultimate redemption of all living things by the Christ, the Anointed, that will return us all to that paradise above.With love, onward and upward, and God bless us all.This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, and ebook/kindle, and an audio book narrated by Miguel Conner.Available at amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.Please remember to leave a review at amazon if you purchase the book there. We need reviews in order to raise the book in amazon’s algorithm! This is a public episode. 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My journey to Christian Gnosticism and the introduction to my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. A replay of an episode from 7.23.2022. 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

Now the Father, insofar as he is elevated above the members of the ALL, is unknowable and incomprehensible. His greatness is so immense that if he had revealed himself at once and suddenly, even the highest of the Aeons that have gone forth from him would have perished. For that reason, he withheld his power and his impassibility in that in which he is, remaining ineffable and unnameable, transcending all mind and all speech.And this is why when the Aeon Who Fell tried to launch itself back into the Father, it fell rather than approaching. It fell because the Father is unapproachable. It is too great. And so the Father repelled that Aeon, which here in the Tripartite Tractate we know as Logos. Other Gnostic traditions refer to that Aeon as Sophia. But it was a protective mechanism for that Aeon because the Father didn’t want it to get burned up and annihilated. Quoting again,He, [that is the Father], on the other hand, extended himself and spread himself out. He is the one who gave firmness, location, and a dwelling place to the ALL.And the ALL is another word for the Pleroma. The ALL is the Fullness of everything that is God. It’s all of the constituents of God. When I write about it in the Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I capitalize each letter, A-L-L. They’re all capitalized because it is God. Quoting again,According to one of his names, he is in fact Father of the ALL. Through his constant suffering on their behalf, having sown in their minds the idea that they should seek what exceeds their capabilities by making them perceive that he is and thus making them seek what he might be.So you see, he’s put into the Totalities a yearning, a desire to seek after the Father, to reunite with the Father, as Logos attempted to do, but he doesn’t let them know that that’s impossible because he doesn’t want to repel them in their minds. He wants them to seek after him and to believe that they can come close to him.And by the way, when I speak about the Aeons or the Totalities of the ALL, we are their direct descendants. Everything, because of the principle, as above, so below, everything we say about the Aeons or the ALL applies to us as well. That’s why it’s good to know about the Aeons because they are the pure source of our consciousness. So we get all muddled up down here with all of the distractions of this material cosmos, but the Aeons are right up there without any material distractions. They are the pureness of the emanation of the Father. So what we can find out about the Aeons and the Totalities of the ALL, we can apply to ourselves. This is why we seek after God. This is why we want to know the Father.But according to this, it’s an impossibility to actually know the Father because it exceeds our capabilities. So again, it said that the Father of the ALL sowed in their minds the idea that they should seek what exceeds their capabilities by making them perceive that he is and thus making them seek what he might be. Quoting,He was given them as a delight and nourishment, joy and abundant illumination. And this is his compassion, the knowledge he provides and his union with them.So you see, what the Father gives us is delight and nourishment. He feeds our spirits. He gives us joy and abundant illumination. So we get all of that.We just can’t think that we are as great as God because we aren’t even approaching the Father because the Father is too great for us to touch. Quoting again,And this is he who is called and who is the Son. He is the sum of the ALL and they understood who he is and he is clothed.So this is saying that the Son is the extension of the Father. He’s the part of the Father that extended himself out and spread himself. And it is the Son who has firmness, location and a dwelling place. And it is the Son who is the ALL, who is the Totalities of the ALL. He is the sum of the ALL.And it says they understood who he is because he is them and he is clothed. He wears the ALL like a garment, just the same way that we wear our bodies as a garment. Except it’s not exactly the same because most of our body is made up of this material universe that arose during the Fall. But the ALL and the Totalities of the ALL are pure consciousness, pure love and delight and joy. And that is in their totality what is called the Son.On the other hand, that is the one by reason of whom he is called the Son, the one about whom they perceive that he exists and that they have been seeking him. This is the one who exists as Father and of whom one can neither speak nor think. He is the one who exists first.That is, the Father existed first before the Son. But the Son is the one that we can perceive or that the Totalities can perceive. They can’t perceive directly the Father, but they can perceive his emanation, which is called the Son. Quoting again,For no one can conceive of him or think of him or draw near to that place toward the exalted, toward the truly preexistent. [That would be the original Father they’re talking about.] But every name that is thought or spoken about him is brought forth in glorification as a trace of him, according to the capacity of each one of those who give him glory.So this is saying that the full glory of the Father cannot be known. The Son can be known because he is coexistent with the Totalities of the ALL. So they are him and he is them. But the Father can be perceived as this trace. And in other places, it says like a sweet odor wafting to your nose.That is the trace of the Father coming through the Father, coming through the Son, coming through the Totalities, coming through the Aeons. And that trace comes on through down to a Second Order Powers as well. We smell the beautiful aroma of the glory of the Father, even though we can’t know the Father. Quoting again,He, however, whose light dawned from him, stretching himself out to give birth and knowledge to the members of the ALL, he is all these names without falsehood, and he is truly the Father’s only First Man. [So we’re talking about the Son again.] And the Son has no falsehood.This is not a yin yang balance evil with good type of God. It’s all good. It’s all beautiful. It’s all glorious. And the Son is the First Man of the Father. This is saying that the Son is our prototypical human, the First Man. Quoting again,This is the one I call the form of the formless, the body of the incorporeal, the face of the invisible, the word of the inexpressible, the mind of the inconceivable, the spring that flowed from him, the root of those who have been rooted, the God of those who are ready, the light of those he illuminates, the will of those he has willed, the providence of those for whom he provides, the wisdom of those he has made wise, the strength of those he has given strength, the assembly of those with whom he is present, the revelation of that which is sought after, the eye of those who see, the spirit of those who breathe, the life of those who live, the unity of those who are united.Now this is saying that the Son wears all of those names, and the Son is all of that to the Totalities of the ALL. But again, as above so below, he is all of that to us as well. Quoting again,While all the members of the ALL exist in the single One, that is the Son, the Son and the ALL are united, as he clothes himself completely, and in his single Name, he is never called by it. And in the same unitary way, they are simultaneously, this single One, as well as all of them. He is not divided as a body, nor is he split apart by the names in which he exists, in the sense that this is one thing and that is something else. Nor does he change by [and then there’s a missing word], nor does he alter through the names in which he is, being now like this and now something different, so that he would be one person now and something else at another time. Rather, he is entirely himself forever. He is each and every one of the members of the ALL eternally at the same time. He is what all of them are, as father of the ALL. And the members of the ALL are fathers as well. For he is himself knowledge for himself, and he is each one of his qualities and powers. And he is himself the eye for all that he knows, seeing all of it in himself, having a son and a form.So you see, because the Son and the ALL are completely united, it’s saying that the Son sees them all at once, and the ALL sees the Son all at once, not split up into all of the various qualities, although the Father does see them all, because the Father knows all. Quoting again,Thus his powers and qualities are innumerable and inaudible because of the way in which he gives birth to them. The births of his words, his commands, and his members of the ALL are innumerable and indivisible. He knows them, for they are himself. When they speak, they are all in one single name. And if he brings them forth, it is in order that they may be found to exist as individual qualities, forming a unity.So this is talking about the Totalities of the ALL. That’s why they’re referred to as Totalities, because they are not individuals. They are part of this indivisible unity of the Son, and yet they’re all there in their individuality. They just don’t realize it, because they don’t know themselves as singular identities, because they form a unity that is the Son.He did not, however, reveal his multiplicity at once to the members of the ALL, nor did he reveal his sameness to those who had issued forth from him. Now, all of those who have gone forth from him, that is, the Aeons of the Aeons, being emissions born of a procreative nature, also procreate through their own procreative nature to the glory of the Father, just as he had been the cause of their existence. This is what we said earlier. He makes the Aeons into roots and springs and fathers. For that which they glorified, they bore, for it possesses knowledge and wisdom, and they understood that they have gone forth from the knowledge and the understanding of the ALL.So we’re talking about the Totalities. They are the Aeons of the Aeons. They are the direct parental units of what we then know as the Aeons of the Pleroma of God. But the Totalities were their forerunners, and they are the ones that are unified with the Son. And the Son, of course, is unified with the Father. However, these Totalities are like roots and springs and fathers, and they glorify the Father, they glorify the Son, and the things that they glorify, they give birth to. Quoting again,If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each Aeon, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who himself is the ALL. For that reason, they were drawn through the singing of praise and through the power of the oneness of him from whom they had come forth, that being the Son, into mutual intermingling, union, and oneness. From their assembled Fullness, they offered a glorification worthy of the Father, an image that was One, and at the same time many, because it was brought forth for the glory of the One, and because they had come forward toward him who himself is the entirety of the ALL.Okay, the Totalities, you see, have been giving glory to the Father in the direction of the Son, toward the Son. And that’s S-O-N, easy to confuse with S-U-N, but that would be a whole different set of mythologies.And they had to all give glory together. That’s why they’re called Totalities. They didn’t give glory individually. They were one voice. They didn’t know themselves as individuals. They were all at once that one thing, the ALL. And it was the ALL giving glory all together in the direction of the Son and Father that caused them then to procreate.Now we’re moving into a section called the Three Fruits of Glorification, and that’s chapter 68, verse 36 through 70, verse 19.This then was a tribute from the Aeons to the one who had brought forth the ALL, a first fruit offering of those who are immortal and eternal. [That’s the Father and the Son.] For when it issued from the living Aeons, it left them perfect and full, caused by something perfect and full, since they were full and perfect, having given glory in a perfect manner in communion.So what this is saying is that nothing was diminished. Everything was full and perfect because they all together sang their glory without personal identification. It was all for one and one for all.For inasmuch as the Father lacks nothing, he returns the glory they give to those who glorify to make them manifest by what he himself is. The cause that brought about for them the second glorification is, in fact, that which was returned unto them from the Father . When they understood the grace from the Father through which they had borne fruit with one another, so that just as they had been bringing forth by glorifying the Father, in the same way they might also themselves be made manifest in their act of giving glory, so as to be revealed as being perfect.So that is the second glorification that is being described. The glory that they were giving, that the Totalities gave to the Father and the Son, reflected back onto them without any loss or diminishment. It’s full and complete.You know we’re talking about fractal formulas, right? The Son is a fractal of the Father . The Totalities are the pure, complete, fractal formula of the Son, and they give glory to the Son and the Father without being diminished whatsoever, because they do it in unison, in full communion. So then,They became fathers of the third glorification, [or we could say the third iteration of the fractal.] They became fathers of the third glorification, which was produced in accordance with the free will and the power they had been born with, enabling them to give glory in unison while at the same time, independently of one another, according to the will of each.You see now, this is how the third glorification, or the third iteration, differs from the second iteration. The second glory had to all give glory, all together, all at once, all the time. They had no personal identity. But in that giving of glory, they gave birth to the third glorification, which showed each of those Aeons that they had free will.Thus, both the first and the second glorifications are perfect and full, for they are manifestations of the perfect and full Father and of the perfect things that issued from the glorification of him who is perfect. The fruit of the third glorification, however, is produced by the will of each individual Aeon and of each of the Father ‘s qualities and powers. This fruit is a perfect fullness to the extent that what the Aeons desire and are capable of in giving glory to the Father comes from their union as well as from each of them individually.You see, here we have the birth of ego. Because ego is identification of individuality, whereas the pure Self was further up line—that is the ALL, the Totalities, the Son. We have both of those characteristics within us.We have the Totalities of the ALL that we generally call our Self with a capital S. That is the pureness of God that reflects the totality of the Father and the Son, without shadow or blemish or fault. And then we have ego, which is recognition of our individuality and our individual free will. And it differs from the one Self because we are singing our own song of praise from our position.That’s our ego.For this reason, they exist as minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, a place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth.And each of us as well has our own place, position, place of rest, duties and whatnot. And that is our ego identification and the free will that we exercise through our ego.Our entire unit of consciousness, as I would put it in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, our entire unit of consciousness consists of the Self, which is the One, and the ego, which is our individuality and our personal will. That is our unit of consciousness. I am all that. Plus, I have this body that attached to me when I came down here into this material world.So the First Fruit is the totality of the ALL that is coexistent with the Son. The Second Fruit is when the Son and Totalities gave glory to one another and that produced the Aeons of the Fullness and they understood and were perfectly revealed. And then the Third Fruit is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, the third glorification by the will of the individual Aeons and their and the Father ‘s qualities and powers. That’s the Hierarchy of the Fullness—that’s the Third Fruit. And these are the ones that sit and dream of Paradise. And these are the ones who give glory together and in various combinations and produce us, the Second Order of powers.I really love the language of the Tripartite Tractate. It’s very beautiful scripture. I think that the understanding we gain here by reading the Tripartite Tractate deepens the knowledge of who the Father is and who the Son is and what the Aeons are. This is not an assembly of mythological characters. This is pure consciousness emanating from the Source and flowing out to us with consciousness, love, free will, joy, and the desire to seek after the Father. We inherit all of that from the Aeons and the Aeons of the Aeons and the Son.So until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. 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

Is transgenderism a mental disorder? Is transexualism a delusional pursuit? Is sexual identity a cultural value arbitrarily assigned at birth? This is the topic of today’s discussion. My first experience with a person seeking transexual modification was as a private practice marriage counselor in Idaho, back in the early 1980’s. This fellow was seeking an official diagnosis of transexualism as required by the state in order to proceed with surgical procedures. He had been denied certification by other psychologists and was hoping I would provide him with the needed diagnosis. One session was enough for me to deny his claim. Why? After hearing his story, it turned out that his wife had recently decided she was a lesbian and no longer wanted to have sex with him. In order to save his marriage he decided to have his genitals surgically removed so he could “become a woman” to save their marriage. Though motivated by love for his wife, this reason would not qualify him for surgery under any transgender or transexual definition. I can tell you he was plenty pissed off by my refusal to go along with his plan.By definition, a transgendered individual is one who identifies with a gender incongruent with their body. They prefer dressing in clothing usually associated with the “other” gender and purposely minimize their secondary sexual characteristics. They may prefer engaging in activities more popular with the “other” gender. Population estimates of transgender persons has jumped from an historically steady 0.6% of the total population as of 2016 to 1.0% of the population surveyed in 2025, with young people ages 13-17 now accounting for 3.3% of the general population. Transexual is defined as taking the extra step of body modification through surgery or hormones to bring the body into closer congruence with self-identity. It is estimated that 25% to 30% of transgendered individuals now undergo body modification, up from an estimated 10% to 15% in the early 2000’s.What accounts for this rise in trans identity? Is it merely a rise in societal acceptance that grants the freedom to declare one’s identity publicly as many claim, or is there another, more gnostic, interpretation of this phenomena? Let’s consider this carefully.Many gnostic texts suggest that the spiritual plane is gendered and populated by male and female entities, which gives rise to tidy mythological pantheons of male and female gods. However, I question the meaning of the term “gender” as it applies to the aeonic realm. At least one important book of the Nag Hammadi makes no mention of gender in the spiritual realm, and that’s the Tripartite Tractate upon which this gnosis is based. [I take that back. Actually, there’s one mention of the fallen Aeon being as one stripped of their masculinity, but that’s more a statement of overall loss of integration and power arising from the fall.] Everything I’m sharing with you today is based upon the Tripartite Tractate and the logical conclusions that arise from that book. Yes, the terms “Father” and “Son” are assigned to the originating consciousness out of which our consciousness flows, but the meaning of those terms has nothing to do with sexual attributes or form. Neutral names like “Source” and “Offspring” would do as nicely but lack the personal relatability of family and the familiarity of traditional names.Sexual orientation and activity only applies to us creatures here in the Deficiency for purposes of reproduction. The portal between the ethereal and the so-called material cosmos requires a mechanism for fruiting the 2nd Order Powers arriving from the Fullness. Sexual activity is primarily responsible for populating the 2nd economy for all creatures above the level of bacteria, amoeba, fungi, and some plants and invertebrates. It would seem that the rules for fruiting changed from asexual to sexual as the complexity of the 2nd Order creatures arriving on the planet changed from smallest to largest.The Aeons are not male and female. They are fully integrated units of consciousness. What we call male identity and female identity reflect our lack of integration of our complete identity, or what Jung referred to as the lack of self-actualization of our animus and anima. In other words, our essential identities are neither male nor female but both. So identifying with either is actually a deficiency that represents incomplete individuation hampered by overidentification with the physical form.Male identity is misclassified as belonging to a man’s soul identity, or what we here at Gnostic Insights call “ego” identity. The same goes for female identity. Remember, all 2nd Order Powers share the same One Self consciousness that flows unimpeded from Above. What distinguishes us is our ego identity—our self-identified name, position, place, and duty. The same goes for the Aeons. The Aeons share their One identity with the Son as fractals of the Son, and are distinguished from one another by their self-identified egoic position within the hierarchy of the Fullness of God according to name, position, place, and duty. Like the Aeons, we encompass and embrace the full anima/animus spectrum within our ego identity. But down here, physical and material forces act upon our bodies and influence self-identity as either male or female. In reality, we are equally both. Furthermore, the memes we pick up here from our childhood experiences, especially childhood sexual trauma, can affect our gender identity.The Son is the Father’s only direct emanation. The Son is a monad, not a dyad or syzygy. Even though we call this monad the Son, it is not a male figure. The Son is a fully realized individual representing all aspects of the originating Source. The Son is the singular embodiment of the ALL. The Totalities of the ALL are the full expression of the diversity of the Son.The Totalities of the ALL are not self-aware; they are fully identified with the ungendered Son. The ALL is called the “aeon of the Aeons.” During the act of singing glorious praise to the Father, this “aeon of the aeons” produces a limitless variety of Aeons that occupy the Fullness of God. The Aeons of the Fullness are fractal iterations of the ungendered Son. The Aeons self-sort themselves into a hierarchy of unique positions, ranks, and duties within the Fullness. Their job is to continue giving glory to the Father through song. The Aeons do not reproduce sexually. They combine with other Aeons and sings songs of glory to the Father all together within these various combinations, which produces fruit from their comingled glory. And during the giving of glory, the Aeons dream of Paradise. We 2nd Order Powers are the fruit of these Aeons dreaming of Paradise. We enjoy making love the same way the Aeons enjoy giving glory together. In our fallen world, we 2nd Order Powers manifest as only two sexes for the purpose of reproduction. Self-assigned gender identity is irrelevant to the end goal of biological reproduction; male plus female are required. Love is not confined to sexual activity or reproduction. Love is love and we are all full of love that flows like an unending stream from the Father through the Fullness. Love is not limited to sex, reproduction, or gender identification.Now we move on to a consideration of reincarnation and its implications for transgender confusion. We’ve talked about reincarnation in prior episodes. If you would like to review those, the links are in the transcript to this episode, so if you are listening to an audio podcast, please visit the Gnostic Insights website where all previous episodes are posted, or view this transcript at the Cyd Ropp Gnostic Reformation Substack. [Revisiting Reincarnation] [Reincarnation, Research, and Gnosis] Reincarnation provides an excellent counter-argument to transgenderism, so let’s consider the logic of this together. We do not necessarily reincarnate as the same gender from lifetime to lifetime. Therefore it follows that our ego’s memory houses all of our prior gender identities. What we take for our gender identity is usually associated with the body we are currently inhabiting. A person may identify with their previous life’s gender and carry those memes strongly forward into this incarnation. It is not an error to notice those gender-identified memes and behave accordingly. The error is thinking this current body needs to conform to that previous meme chord that we call gender. Confusion arises from thinking one is born into the wrong body or telling a child they are born into the wrong body. No. We are born into the most perfect body possible for our current incarnation. We are sent into this fallen world by our aeonic parents with our full cooperation. We forget our mission once we are here. We forget why we are here and who we really are, just as the Demiurge did. The error is thinking we know better than the Fullness from our fallen perspective down here who we are and what body we should be wearing.“Tomboy” girls and so-called “effeminate” boys are just that. There is no need to make the body conform to the previous life’s body. There is a reason to inhabit the body one is born into. Perhaps lessons to be learned by living a lifetime in a less familiar body configuration. Remember, our talents are gifted by our aeonic parents, just as our DNA comes through our earthly parents. A female who is gifted with so-called “masculine” traits is not masculine. The words masculine or feminine are misnomers of our gender-obsessed, fallen culture.Here’s a chart of so-called masculine and feminine traits drawn up by an AI at my request. The AI noted that, “Personality traits are often categorized as masculine or feminine, though it’s important to note that these traits exist on a spectrum and can be present in anyone, regardless of gender.” And, indeed, you can see by the chart that a well-balanced, integrated personality would display both types of traits as needed, regardless of sex.Trait Type Communication Masculine: Direct, assertive Feminine: Empathetic, nurturingEmotional Expression Masculine: Reserved, independent Feminine: Expressive, relationalLeadership Style Masculine: Authoritative, task-oriented Feminine: Collaborative, inclusiveConflict Resolution Masculine: Competitive, confrontational Feminine: Cooperative, harmonyDecision Making Masculine: Decisive, risk-taking Feminine: Reflective, consensus-buildingProblem Solving Masculine": Analytical, logical Feminine: Intuitive, holisticSelf-Perception Masculine: Self-reliant, confident Feminine: Community building, supportiveOffering my own experience as an example, this unit of consciousness that is known as Cyd is often miscategorized by others as exhibiting so-called masculine traits in academic and workplace settings. Yet, at home, I skew much more toward the “feminine.” That’s probably why I enjoyed running a large bed and breakfast for several years, because both types of traits make for an efficient yet caring innkeeper. Growing up, I was considered a “tomboy,” preferring wrestling and sports to playing with dolls and trying on make-up. My pixie haircut displays my lifelong disdain for futzing with hairdo’s, curlers, and hair products. My mother was a glamorous woman, a real girlie-girl that forever tried to force me into pink and ruffles while I preferred jeans and hoodies, much to her frustration. Again, I don’t think that any of these distinctions have one whit to do with gender. It never even crossed my mind that I should be a boy. Rude people from time to time have suggested I “come out” as gay and join the alphabet community. No thanks. No need. I am not confused. I am who I am. Knowing who you are, your aeonic inheritance and lifetimes of experience, transcends the tidy categories the culture would like to cram us into. The categories become irrelevant.We carry our fixed, God-given personalities along with our self-identity egos with us from lifetime to lifetime, adding and subtracting memes and meme chords like gender identity as we go. However, our initial personalities were formed by Aeons giving praise together in various combinations. Eventually we reach our final resting place. That resting place is not the silence of decomposing flesh in the grave. We have occupied countless bodies and forms throughout our lifetimes. We have left those bodies behind every time. We are not confined to those vessels of flesh and bone that sicken and die. Our One Self spirit and ever-evolving ego carry on. We either return to the next, most perfect body for our unit of consciousness to inhabit, or we stay in the higher ethereal plane occupied by Aeons and 2nd Order Powers who have left behind the material cosmos and the confusion that arises in the Deficiency.We will remain recognizable by ourselves and others. Our ego identification is not dependent on our gender or appearance; we have occupied so many different bodies in so many different incarnations that there is no way our identity is anchored by a single material form. Like Christ and the 3rd Order of Powers, we will all be recognizable to those who know us, irrespective of appearance or sexual traits. Like the Aeons, our ego is tied to our mind, our words, our rank in the overall system of the Fullness. “Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth.” [Tripartite Tractate verse 70]“For each of the aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father’s qualities and powers. Since he exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of him, by means of a richness of speech. Thus, the Father is a single Name because he is One, but nevertheless innumerable in his qualities and names.” [verse 73]Just be who you are without labels or gender identification. Embrace your self-identity irrespective of how you present to others as long as it is true to your aeonic, God-given Self and ego. Drop those confusing and unnecessary cultural memes that weigh down your soul. Our God Above All Gods is not the author of confusion. Gender confusion is just another demiurgic ploy to throw you off track and keep you down. The Father’s will is strong and clear and uplifting. The path of discovering gnosis and self-actualization is not through the labyrinths of despair and self-doubt. And it is certainly not through a surgeon’s scalpel. Turn your eyes up to the Fullness and within to find true self identity and acceptance.This article is not meant to criticize but to uplift divergent individuals like myself. God blesses all of us. Onward and upward. 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

Merry Christmas, Everyone! Here is a special Gnostic Christmas message for you! 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

Last week’s episode, The Key to Gnostic Cosmology, was well-timed to greet the slew of new subscribers who joined The Gnostic Reformation as a result of the wonderful review by The New Unhinged that appeared on Mariah’s Substack website on November 28, 2025. It’s titled: Roast for Relief #17: The Gnostic Who Broke My Brain in the Best Way If you haven’t seen the piece yet, please hightail it over there and take a look. It’s funny and reverentially irreverent at the same time. I feel honored by Mariah’s appreciation and the hours she spent on the review.Today, I’m going to run through the Gnostic Cosmology again, this time pairing the explanations with illustrations from my kid’s book, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. My brother Bill thinks the kid’s book will be the version that survives into the far future as a new Gnostic Gospel in some distant version of the Nag Hammadi codices. Personally, I’m not so sure there will be a far future here on this material plane, but we’ll see… In any event, I’m doing my best to get the hard cover edition into libraries and bookstores in the here and now. Meanwhile, we need more reader reviews to help the book rise up in amazon. So, please, buy the paperback or download the kindle version for free or almost free and then leave your review. You will be supporting gnosis and love.ALL of the following illustrations are from Children of the Fullness. For the purposes of this episode, I have removed the text from the pages and am only presenting the images as I narrate a grown-up version of the pictured events. Believe me, the kiddie book is written as a young child’s bedtime story. And because of that, the Gnostic characters are personified into recognizable forms. The Father looks like a father. The Son looks like a son. The Aeons are personified as Angels, although in truth, not all Aeons are angels. But kids can relate to angels, so I gave the Aeons wings and halos.I’m putting the illustrations into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you can go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustrations.The gnosis is simple. It has to be, because all living creatures know and embody it. So, if my dog can’t understand the gnosis, it ain’t gnosis, it’s just knowledge or good or bad information. And if you can grasp today’s illustrated gnosis, then you will have enough to go onward and upward. Sure, more explanations are nice, but they are not essential. All we really need to know is that we come from Above, and we will return to Above. That’s it in a nutshell. The rest is a lifetime of practicing love and embodying virtue.So let’s get started.The Father’s mind is the initial, illimitable consciousness. Consciousness is the ground state that predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows. There is no gender associated with this Father. Obviously the Father is not a man with a beard and long robes, rather “he possesses this constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through perception.” The Tripartite Tractate describes the Father this way:Whence also comes the title, the incomprehensible. If he is incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along with his form and his greatness and his magnitude.Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity—into a monad, as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father.This first illustration shows the Father holding his baby Son and showing Him the contents of His imagination. The facing page shows the mature Son releasing Aeons into the vision.The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the ALL were formed. The Totalities of the ALL are all of the variabilities that make up the Son, all broken out and enumerated. The Totalities of the ALL do not recognize themselves as individuals. It is only through their giving of glory to the Father and Son that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. In the children’s book, we skip the step where the Son divides itself into all of its discreet variables and jump right to the self-aware Aeons populating the hierarchy of the Fullness of God.Now, back to the children’s book. The next page shows the Aeons giving glory to the Father and Son by singing their songs of praise. The facing page shows the Aeons reproducing and making new Aeons through their combined singing.Each of the Aeons of the hierarchy of the Fullness has a position, a place, a duty, and a name—in the Gnostic Gospel as I describe it, I say that this is the emergence of ego, for every Aeon is a self-identified individual. And basically what they do is sing songs of glory upstream to the Father and the Son, just like the Totalities did. And all together, they dream of Paradise.We turn the page of the children’s book to see a young Aeon building a model of Paradise as the other Aeons look on with admiration.This final Aeon was produced through a combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God giving glory to the Father and the Son at the same time. “This aeon was last to have brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude,” referring, I think, to the fractal nature of his pleroma. This youngest Aeon carried within itself all of the traits of every other Aeon, perfect and complete. This was a very talented Aeon resembling the Son of God Himself, who also carried all of the traits of the Aeons within its singular Self.This final Aeon was named Logos, because he was also endowed with the ability to reason thoughtfully and to figure things out in a step-by-step manner. The word Logos in Greek means reason and logic. The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way:“This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit…”This is a curious statement, because it seems to indicate that Logos was equipped to bring others into existence without the cooperation of his fellow Aeons. If the Father had not wanted an individual Aeon to be able to procreate without the agreement of the Fullness, why would the Father have equipped Logos to do so? All of the Aeons have free will, because the Father has free will and everything that emanates from the Father carries the attributes of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says,“for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.”Logos was loaded with free will, as are all of the Aeons. The Father foresees our behavior before we do, which seems to contradict the idea of free will. We can resolve this classic theological conundrum by realizing that the Father anticipates every possible outcome of our free will. At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potentiality of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are within our reach as we pass through this universe; our own free will is driving our consciousness through those possibilities. The Father anticipates all possibilities in his infinite wisdom, and all possible courses of action are anticipated. This choice that Logos made was anticipated though not predetermined.We turn the page in the children’s book to see Logos happily carrying his model of Paradise upward to the Father’s mountain top. The Father is not there to receive the gift. The middle panel shows Logos falling down from the heights. The panel on the far right shows Logos crashed down into a dark space with his broken model of Paradise scattered about him. He wears an expression of pain and clutches his head. An eerie, shadowy copy of Logos emerges from him.Logos didn’t have the power or greatness of the original Son, but he had the blueprint—he had the model. He thought he was complete and could build a perfect Paradise on his own because he contained the Fullness of God in a smaller fractal iteration. He left his position and place in the hierarchy of the Fullness and headed upward to “the realm of perfect glory.” But he was mistaken and he crashed out of the ethereal plane, broke apart, and his pleroma lost its hierarchical arrangement. It became random and chaotic. Logos tried his best to bring it all back in order, tried to put his pleroma back together into a proper hierarchy, but it would not cooperate. Quote:“The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and which is.”“He became increasingly desperate. He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection he saw deficiency; instead of unity he saw division; instead of stability he saw disturbance; instead of rest, upheaval. He was unable to bring their love of disturbance to an end, nor could he destroy it; he had become utterly powerless when his wholeness and his perfection had abandoned him.”Turning to the next page we see sad Logos flying back up to the Fullness, looking over his shoulder at the mess below and his shadow rising from the gloom. And on the facing page we see the shadow of Logos, whom we call the Demiurge in Gnosticism, dark, no halo, a mean look on his face, staring at the pieces of the broken model of Paradise scattered about.When Logos falls and abandons his ego down below, his ego is separated from the direct flow of consciousness, life, and love of the Father, Son, and Fullness. So this is the beginning of ego running amok. Ego found itself in this weird, dark, chaotic space, and thought it was all that existed because it didn’t remember what came before. It had all of the blueprints for Paradise because they were in the mind of Logos when he fell. It also had the ambitious overreaching that Logos was engaged in when he fell.The next two pages show the Demiurge building our material creation, with Logos looking down from above. The Demiurge builds rocks and mud, but he can’t make his muddy models come to life because he doesn’t contain the consciousness and life of the Fullness and the Father.On the next double-page spread we see the Angels sending living creatures down from the Fullness to the Earth.The Tripartite Tractate says that the Earth was populated by the fruit of the Aeons, “from the smallest to the largest.” In Gnosticism the fruit of the Aeons are known as the Second Order of Powers, and they/we contain all of the attributes of the Fullness—the life, consciousness, free will, and love of the Father flowing down from the Fullness of God. Everything that’s alive, from the bacteria and the cells and the organs that make up our bodies and all of the critters and birds and fish, all of the insects and mammals, all living creatures, the grasses and the trees, the moss and the slime molds—everything that’s alive is a fruit of the Fullness of God, pre-designed in the Fullness. And we come down with a mission.We Second Order Powers were supposed to come down here to remind the Demiurge of the Father above; to remind the Demiurge of Logos, his better half; to remind the Demiurge of love and consciousness and that he is not God and he needs to return home. We are supposed to be calling to the Demiurge to return home to the Fullness of God.So the next page of the children’s book shows a loving Earth. Hearts and flowers; everybody happy and loving.We Second Order Powers operate according to the same Aeonic principle I call the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others with love to help build things that we can’t do on our own. We make families and work together. We make villages and work together. We make small communities and build things that we can all enjoy together.Sadly, this state didn’t last long, because the Second Order of Powers became caught up in a “never-ending war” with the material world. Gnostics speak of a division between the material world and our eternal spirits. Gnostics say that our eternal spirits are “trapped” in the material. We forgot about bringing love and remembrance to the Demiurge because of the never-ending war of spirit against material, the never-ending war of right and left, the never-ending war between us and the archons. It’s a constant battle here between life and death, with the Aeons promoting life and love and the archons promoting death and division.I portray this division on the next two pages as the once-happy people and animals fight tooth and claw against one another.Because of their isolation and strife, the Second Order Powers lost their purpose and joy. The people let their egos take control. Because the ego of Logos had been reaching for the heights, the egos of the Second Order Powers also reached for power and control, each thinking they were more worthy than the next. They forgot about the Simple Golden Rule and couldn’t work together in cooperation without favoring themselves. Narcissism ruled.The next two pages of the children’s book shows people filling their spiritual poverty with lots of materials riches and tasty treats as the Aeons watch and pray from Above. We Gnostics would say that you can’t patch over a spiritual void with material prosperity, no matter how much stuff you accumulate.And so the Fullnesses realized that that plan wasn’t working. The Aeons prayed to the Father, the Son, and the Totalities for true salvation to come and rescue the Second Order Powers, just like we were supposed to rescue the Demiurge. Now it takes a superpower, the most super Power, to come into our cosmos, rescue all of the Second Order Powers by reminding us of God’s love and what our true mission is of sharing love. Christ has the most power of any entity ever, more than enough power to bring remembrance, love, salvation, peace, comfort, joy to all of us down here who have forgotten. That’s the job of the Christ.On the next page, we see the Savior standing with his hands on the shoulders of a pretty girl. The facing page shows many of the kids we saw in the previous unhappy page now feeling love and salvation as the Savior radiates love to them all.Once the Christ succeeds in bringing remembrance to everyone, then the Demiurge will remember Logos above. Logos and his ego reunited. All is joy. All is gnosis. The material cosmos dissolves like snow and all souls are released to return to their home in the Fullness. This ushers in the age known as the Third Economy. Paradise at last.To quote from my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated,Redemption means returning to the Father’s abode—that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiency. That Paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In Paradise there is naught but life; so all the grass is green, and flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived, lives happily with their friends and families.That’s the end of this Gnostic Cosmology, as illustrated in my kid’s book, “Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.” It’s not all that complicated, is it?Last week I said we’d get into the applications of gnosis, and I released an extra episode this week for that purpose. It’s called “Remembering the Mission,” and it’s an update of an earlier episode from 2021 called “Why Not Be Sinful?”.Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t be shy. Make some comments. I look forward to reading them. God bless us all and onward and upward. 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

In 2019 I posted an article to my new Gnostic Gospel blog called, If All Are Redeemed, Why Not Be Sinful? And I’d like to share an update of that article with you today. This applies to the whys and hows of enacting gnosis in the world.One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ and all will someday return to the Paradise of the Fullness. Yay! Everyone’s going to Heaven! No one is going to hell, not even the Fallen angels. What joy! This seems to fly in the face of Christian orthodoxy that promotes the idea that only those humans who confess a belief in Jesus as the Christ will make it into Heaven, and those who don’t believe in Jesus will go to an eternal damnation of suffering in hell.Conventional Christianity states that Jesus came to save humanity, but only those who acknowledge Jesus as the only Son of God and invite Him into their hearts will be saved. This is the basis for all evangelism and all churches that follow the Nicene Creed, which is to say, all Christian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. This is why Christians are so keen on saving souls. They don’t want you to suffer for eternity in hell.The Gnostic Church begs to differ with that common interpretation of Christ’s mission. According to the books of the Nag Hammadi library, all of creation will be redeemed and returned to the Fullness and the Father’s home in Heaven. All of creation, everyone and everything, will be made clean and pure and holy by the end. As they say, it’ll all be good in the end, and if it’s not good yet, then it’s not yet the end.Gnosis refers to the ability to use reason and logic to arrive at spiritual truth. So, let’s think together about this idea of Christ and redemption and who does or does not go to Heaven. First, if Christ’s redemption were a matter of your belief, then Christ’s mission of salvation would be limited to what you believe. In other words, you would be the one holding the power of salvation, not Christ.Does that make any sense to you? Are you the one who redeems or is Christ? Can you see how making your belief central to redemption actually limits the power of Christ? Can you see how that makes sinful humans more powerful than the mission of Christ’s redemption? Limiting Christ to your belief, it seems to me, is the greater heresy than simply trusting Christ to accomplish the mission. It is Christ’s job to redeem humanity, not yours.Second, according to Gnostic texts, all creatures great and small will be redeemed. This means that all creatures are going to Heaven. My dog has never professed a belief in Jesus as the Christ, yet my dog is going to Heaven. The fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the insects, the forest animals, all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ. It is the job of the Christ to redeem creation, irrespective of creation’s ability to confess that fact. Do you think that only good dogs go to Heaven? Or nice fishes? Maybe only herbivores? Perhaps only parrots who can say, Jesus saves!Once we concede that it is only the Christ that can redeem, then what is the point of leading a virtuous life? Why not sin up until the end, have all kinds of fun, and then waltz into Heaven without repentance? Repentance, by the way, means to feel sorrow and regret. Are we allowed to sin willy-nilly with no negative consequences? An even more profound question is, why were we created in the first place? According to the Tripartite Tractate, the Second Order Powers were created in order to rescue the Fallen Aeon known as Logos.The most perfect and complete of the individual Aeons, Logos crowned the top of the aeonic hierarchy. This single Aeon consisted of all the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled up into one individual. And as you know by now from listening to the first eight episodes of Gnostic Insights, Logos had fallen from the Fullness and smashed to smithereens in a lower dimension.The broken bits of Logos scattered into space, forming our material universe along with a host of powers and personalities, including demons, evil djinn, and archons. Logos imagined he could build the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and possessed all of the necessary talents. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father. As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits. Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness, now there was a division and a turning away.The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos, “could not bear to look at the light but looked at the depths, and he faltered.” That’s verse 77 of the Tripartite Tractate. Going on to verse 78:“What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance—[by the way, that’s another word for ego]—what issued from his ego had existed from something that was itself deficient. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to its own in the Fullness, leaving the sicknesses behind in the darkness.”The material space of our universe is known as the deficiency and the imitation in Gnosticism, and it was initially populated by nothing but the lost and fallen shadows of the pleroma of Logos. The part of Logos that stayed behind in the deficiency was his ego, which came to be known as the Demiurge. The fallen ego of Logos was not hated by the Father or the Aeons of the Fullness. The fallen was mourned as lost, as a prodigal son or daughter is mourned by the parents who still love them. The Fullness loves the Fallen and only wants the ego of Logos to be restored to the Fullness.The Second Order Powers were sent into this dimension for the purpose of engaging the Fallen Demiurge and helping it to return home. However, as the Second Order Powers entered this earthly dimension, they were immediately plunged into a never-ending battle with the Fallen. Due to the law of mutual combat, we temporarily forgot our Father in Heaven and our mission of engagement and rescue.We were all infected with a host of fallen influences and fell into lifetimes of fear, regret, lust, and rage. As the Tripartite Tractate puts it in verse 84,“The two orders fought against each other, struggling for command with such a result that they were engulfed by forces and material substances in accordance with the law of mutual combat. And they too acquired lust for domination and all the other passions of this sort. And, consequently, empty vain glory pulls them all toward the desire of lust for domination, and not one of them remembers what is superior or confesses it.”We humans are Second Order Powers infected with many, many fallen influences that blind us to our true natures and our mission. These negative influences prefer the deficiency to the Fullness. These negative powers of the Fall represent the opposite of the All and of all that makes us truly happy and fulfilled.The survival reflex of the imitation requires the Second Order Powers to be miserable and lost, because misery loves company. They influence people to fight against each other rather than fight and resist the evil fallen. Our lives become an endless and fruitless quest to find happiness through selfish pursuits. All you have to do is pop into Facebook or Twitter to find evidence all over the place of these fruitless pursuits that appear to cause happiness, but actually cause misery.At this point in the Gnostic story, the Father and the Aeons of the produced a superior new entity, a Third Order Power called the Christ. It became the mission of the Christ to help the Second Order Powers remember and love the Fallen so that the Fallen could be redeemed. Love is the only power that can redeem the Fallen.Why, then, was a Third Order Power needed to accomplish the task that the Second Order Powers were sent to accomplish? Why populate creation with well-meaning but ignorant and confused Second Order Powers? Why not just send in the Christ to accomplish the redemption of fallen Logos in the first place? What is our function and purpose other than bumbling around in never-ending war with the Fallen? Because the Fallen Logos must be loved and redeemed one fallen piece at a time.Imagine if the original body of Logos resembled a human form, like we might picture an angel in Heaven looking something like us. Now, imagine that the heavenly body of Logos in the Fullness was comprised of the blueprint for every single potential body that would ever come to life in the imitation down here after the Fall. Imagine the body of Logos falling from an immaterial dimension, that being the Fullness or Heaven, and crashing and breaking apart into a lower, slower, thicker dimension, our material universe, and spilling out the blueprints for the material universe.Moreover, our personal stories, the drama that each human life enacts, are also stories of the Fall, stories that need redemption. Every life tells stories of falls and redemption, temptation and overcoming, despair and triumph, and every time an archonic influence is defeated and stripped from your personal life, part of Logos is redeemed.When we live a virtuous life, we are following the principles of the Father and the Fullness in Heaven, and we are participants with Christ in redeeming the Fall of Logos. When we live a sinful life, we are succumbing to the demons of the Fall and contributing to the chaos and despair of the deficiency. And I made up a chart with the values of the imitation or the deficiency on the left, and they are called on the left, and the values of the Father and of the Fullness on the right. And the left is the material, downward pull of the deficiency, and the right is the upward, psychical and spiritual pull of the values of the Father and the Fullness.This chart appears in this particular post, and I know I’ve said this chart to you before in prior episodes of the Gnostic Insights, so let me just briefly hit a few of them. If you’re living on the left, if you’re, quote, enjoying a sinful life, and it’s not actually enjoyment, because joy does not come from the left side. Joy only comes from the right. The most that you can hope for, if you’re living on the deficiency side, is a imitation of joy, which we generally call happiness. But as I believe you know by now, happiness is a never-ending pursuit, and we are often reaching for happiness—oh, let’s go here, let’s go there, let’s buy this, let’s buy that, let’s eat this, ooh, let’s have that, ooh, hey, let’s do this drug. You see, everything promises this joy.Sometimes it brings you temporary happiness, but it never fulfills, it never brings satisfaction, never brings satisfaction. Pursuit of material gain always brings more and more desire for more and more material gain. So the values on the left that the sinful are pursuing, these are called vices, and they are such things as impatience, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, ruthlessness, anger, resentfulness, rude, obstructionist.(And what I mean by obstructionist is this. Have you ever known someone who, no matter what someone else proposes to do, they go, nah, that’ll never work. So an obstructionist, they’re like a naysayer, that’s what that means. They’re wet blankets, they’re always pulling down good suggestions. That’s what obstructionist means.)Despair, depression, sloth or laziness, chaos, disorder, thoughtless action, greed, envy, arrogance, fear, confusion, gluttony. These are values or vices on the material side of the ledger, and these are the things that generally are promoted in social media, strangely enough.The values on the right actually are virtues that are part of our aeonic inheritance from the Fullness of God, and they are such virtues. Well, you know they say that God is love, right? So love is the number one virtue. Patience, generosity, graciousness, mercy, forgiveness, welcoming, obedience, respect, cooperation as opposed to obstructionism, free choice, hopefulness, joyfulness, truthfulness, industriousness, order, prudence. Prudence, by the way, means knowing what to do at the right time. Logic, charity, kindness, empathy, humility, loyalty, justice, courage, remembrance.These are values on the right side, and you can hear as I read down these values of the right side that these are the types of things that lead to true loving connections between human beings. They are not the kind of thing we generally see on social media, by the way, and we kind of rarely see them in actual walking-around life as well. But this is the goal, is to live on the right side of the ledger, to enact those principles rather than to chase after the emptiness of the vices on the left side.Now, back to my article. Because we are in actuality children of the Fullness, we can only be truly happy when we act out of love, that is, out of virtue. When we forget our place in the Fullness of God, we operate out of ignorance and are subject to the evil influences of the Fall. The Fall can only produce misery, fear, rage, and lust. Never love, never happiness. No good ever comes from rage. No good ever comes from fear. Here is the reason we strive to lead a virtuous life, because only virtue can make you happy. All else leads to despair and depression, because, as they say, the wages of sin is death. And that’s what that means. The imitation does not bring happiness. Despite a world full of false promises, vice can only bring ignorance and suffering, isolation and despair.When you dwell in vice rather than virtue, your life is part of the problem and not part of the solution. The Christ brings redemption and remembrance of the Father and the Fullness, one bit, one piece of the Fall at a time. Every time you resist evil and turn a bad habit into a good habit, you have redeemed a piece of the Fall. When you redeem all of your bits and pieces, you will be fully redeemed and regain your home in the Fullness. When all Second Order Powers have accepted the remembrance and the redemption of Christ, then Logos will be fully redeemed and this material universe can pass away. At that point, Paradise, with all of the love, peace and happiness that is implied, will be fully restored.The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment and no deficiencies, that Paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship and true love. In Paradise there is nothing but life, so all the grass is green and flowers blossom endlessly and every soul that has ever lived lives happily forever after with their friends and their families. The Christ will leave no one behind to condemnation and hell.What kind of unholy savior would that be? From a previous article, I wrote,“Thus the called will condemn evil and will turn away from the rage that has consumed them, and they will be healed as they acknowledge that they have an origin of their existence, and they desire to know what that is that exists before them.”The Tripartate says in verse 132, “And even those who were brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside them the seed that is lust for domination, will receive the recompense of good things if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things, and provide they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love of temporary glory so as to do the command of the Lord of glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the eternal kingdom.”So what this is saying is that you have to step away from ego, you have to take your pleasure-seeking ignorant side off the throne of your personality, and allow the indwelling of the Fullness to reside on the throne of your personality. You can turn your vices into virtues whenever you run across them. Awareness is always the first step, and then you put it into action.Okay, I’ll confess something to you. I have a short temper myself, and I often lose my temper even with strangers on the street. It’s a kind of a bizarre phenomenon. So I’ll be walking along, and I’ll see something that makes me angry. Like, for example, someone smoking a cigarette, and they don’t put it out, and they just flick it thoughtlessly out into the bushes. I walk up to that person, I go, Who do you think you are? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who’s going to pick that up? What if you burn down the place? Are we supposed to look at your cigarette butts? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.I get angry at total strangers. Okay, this doesn’t do any good. I realize this is not a good thing. This is actually a vice and not a virtue. This righteous indignation is the thing that captures the do-gooders of the Second Order Powers into that endless rage, and the war that never ends. We can’t win the battle through anger or through na-na-na-na-na. It doesn’t work. We have to love these people. I’m trying to figure out how I might approach a person who flings a cigarette butt down in the street with love and kindness and compassion, but I can’t figure out yet how to do that, and so I’m just going to stop getting in fights with strangers on the street. And that’s been my mission for about the last two years, is to stop having random encounters of righteous indignation, step back, breathe, give praise to God, and go on. I think at some point I will have the wisdom to know how to engage people that would otherwise enrage me, but at the moment I don’t quite have that. So that was my confession.Perhaps you are struggling with some other kind of thing. So remember, you have to just drop the thing when you notice it’s bad. Drop it. Stop it. These are called vicious cycles in psychology. Just stop doing it. Just stop it. Don’t worry about the consequences. The consequences are worse when you do engage in that vicious thing. So just stop it. Whatever it takes, just don’t do it. And the more you stop yourself from the bad behavior, the easier it is to embrace the other side of the ledger. You will shift over to the other side once you stop doing that thing on the left side. You cannot grab onto that virtue as long as you embrace the vice. On to verse 133 of Tripartite.“As for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision so that they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice that this is how things are. For the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration, even if some are exalted because of this economy, having been set up as a cause for things that happen, unfolding numerous physical forces, and taking pleasure in them, they, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. [Verse 136 promises,] these too will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the preexistent Aeon.”And that is the end of the article from 2019 and the original podcast from May of 2021. Over the past several years I have turned my mind from outrage and righteous indignation as best I can, even as our society has plunged into more and more division and outrage. It is easier to see now than ever before the uselessness of operating out of anger and rejection. Anger cannot produce good results because anger is a vice, not a virtue. Only love can turn hearts around.Onward and upward! And God bless us all.If you are finding these Gnostic Insights helpful to your understanding of Gnosticism, please contribute to the cause. This will be helpful to bringing the word to more people. Thank you!Please Donate 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I think we’ve got a lot of new listeners now and new subscribers. And since you haven’t been with us from the beginning, I’d like to review the Gnostic cosmology.A basic premise of Gnosticism is that we are all born with gnosis inherent within us. We already have the answers. We already are our perfect Selves. But because of the nature of the never-ending war that we find ourselves in here in this material cosmos, we forget our inherent nature. And we begin to engage in the war through what the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi calls the law of mutual combat. That being, since we are attacked, we attack back. And then we engage in that back and forth enough that we completely forget our mission and our goal and who we are.So today, I want to run through what I call the illustrated Gnostic cosmology. And I’m putting the illustration into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you really would do well to go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustration that we’re talking about.Now, when you first look at this Gnostic cosmology, it’s very strange looking, and it’s probably incomprehensible. But by the time I talk you through this, you’ll be able to follow the steps. There are 15 steps in this Gnostic cosmology. And once you recognize these stations, then you will literally understand Gnosis. You will remember your Gnosis, and you’ll understand what all of the various versions of Gnosticism have been trying to say.One reason is that this is a pictorial presentation. It’s not just words, because I’ve noticed when reading the various books of the Nag Hammadi, for example, some of which are Valentinian Gnosticism, some of which are Sethian Gnosticism, some are straight-out Greek philosophy by Plato. They use different words, but the concepts are the same. So what I always attempt to do is to level up to a meta-level, above the words, and envision and then picture it so that you can describe it with the words you prefer. So let’s get started.The background image of this entire Gnostic cosmology key I picture as pure inky blackness, like the sky with no stars or moons. That is the ground state of consciousness. And that is the Father’s mind. Now the Father is another one of these words where many people would like to disagree with saying Father. They want to say Source, or, for example, as it is called in the Secret Book of John, the One, the Parent, the Invisible Spirit. However, in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, which is the book that I mainly use as a reference, that initial, illimitable consciousness is called the Father.Now, that’s the ground state. That’s the first principle. Consciousness is not a byproduct of the little gray cells. Consciousness predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows.Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity, into a monad, as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father.The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the All were formed. That’s step number three. And the Totalities of the All are all of the variabilities that make up the Son. So, the Totalities and the Son are coexistent, but it is all of the characteristics broken out and enumerated that form what are called the Totalities of the All.The Totalities of the All do not recognize themselves as individuals. They are only spokes on the wheel. They have no personal identity. They know that they are part of the Son, and they glorify the Son, and they glorify the Father. So, they are glorifying upstream, as we like to say. And it is through this giving of glory that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. Now, instead of one singular unit that is coexistent entirely with the Son, they blossom into self-identities, and they arrange themselves in a hierarchy.So, step four is the Totalities of the All migrating from a burst of sunshine that’s sitting within the Son into a pyramidal shape, because the pyramid is the essential shape of a hierarchy. There’s more at the bottom than there is at the top. Everything keeps leveling up, following a basic Gnostic rule of the higher the fewer, until you eventually arrive at a capstone at the very top, just like our physical pyramids look.And this entity, at number five, is called the hierarchy of the Aeons of the Fullness. And in Gnosticism, we usually identify the word aeon with consciousness, with an individual. It’s an entity. It’s not a unit of time. It’s a unit of consciousness. And so the Aeons of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God are infinite in number. There aren’t only eight or 64 or 365. Those may be ones that are named in other books of Gnosticism, but conceptually, you see, they’d have to be innumerable, because they are part of the illimitable consciousness of the Father, via the Son.And the job of the hierarchies of the Fullness, well, they’ve each got a position, a place, a duty, and a name. And basically what they do is sing songs of glory upstream to the Father and the Son, just like the Totalities did. And in this combination of the Aeons in the Fullness of God, they dream. They dream of Paradise. They dream of the intelligent design of this cosmos that we live in.And so all of us down here, we’re prefigured in the minds of the Fullness of God. And that Fullness of God is generally what we humans imagine as Heaven or Paradise. Humans in cultures all over the world have a dream of Paradise. And the reason why we all have this exact same dream of Paradise is because that’s where we come from. We are the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness, and we instantiate their dream of Paradise.Now, according to the Tripartite Tractate, the object that in my drawings looks like a starburst re-sorted themselves into this hierarchy of the Fullness of God.The last Aeon that was produced through a combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God, giving glory to the Father and the Son. In the Tripartite Tractate, that Aeon, that final Aeon, the capstone to the pyramid, sitting right up there on top, is called Logos. And Logos means reasoning. It means logic.The next step in the story is when that final Aeon that’s sitting on top of the Fullness of God wants to re-insert itself into the Father—the original source of consciousness—wants to plug into the Father the way that the Son remains plugged into the Father. It tries to take that position, and it can’t do it. And it is repelled by the Father, and that is the Fall. The Father repelled that Aeon from being able to plug into itself.I wouldn’t say that Logos was trying to become God. That’s kind of an insulting way to put it. I would say that that final Aeon was simply trying to reunite with the Father. But it couldn’t. It was repelled because no one can come to the illimitable. It’s too powerful. The Tripartite Tractate says they would be annihilated because the Father’s power is too great. It would just burn it up.And so instead of plugging into the Father, Logos fell. And that, according to Gnosticism, is the Fall. And it was the Fall that created our material cosmos. Now, you could say that that was Sophia that fell and her child Yaldabaoth. I prefer to keep it simple and just to say that it’s Logos that fell.Logos was a very special Aeon that contained within its one unity, fractal representations of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness. So Logos was perfect and complete, representing the Son of God. However, he was a fractal level down.He didn’t have the power, didn’t have the greatness of the original Son in step two. But he had the pattern. He had the blueprint. He thought he was complete and could build Paradise, the Paradise that all of the Aeons dreamed up together in step five. He thought he could do that because he contained the Fullness of God in a smaller fractal form.But he was mistaken and he crashed out of the ethereal plane, boom, broke apart, and his pleroma lost its hierarchical arrangement. It became random and chaotic. That is step eight. I generally depict that random chaos as quantum foam. It’s just boiling in and out of existence. Nothing can stick. Nothing can stay. Nothing can level up. It’s chaotic. Logos tried his best to bring it all back in order, tried to put his pleroma back together into a proper hierarchy, but it would not cooperate. And he was aghast, it says. He was very upset, very disturbed by the disturbance that had come out of him. He meant to bring perfection and instead he brought chaos.And he was now separated from the Fullness of God. Well, the Fullnesses prayed to help Logos return, and the best part of Logos, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, step 10, the best part of Logos returned to the Fullness of God, but it abandoned the chaos below.So what is that chaos? I’ve identified that chaotic disturbance that came out of Logos as not only quantum foam, but the Fallen ego of Logos. You see, all of the Aeons have an ego. They’ve got their perfect One Self that is a fractal copy of the Son, but they’ve also got positions, places, names, duties, which is to say they have an ego. And an ego is just their designation. It’s just their address and their name, rank, and serial number. That’s their ego. It’s not self-centered. It’s just a name.But when Logos falls and abandons his ego down below, then it is an ego that came into being that is separated from the One Self of the Son. It’s outside of the direct flow of consciousness and life and love of the Father and the Son and the God. So it is the beginning of ego running amok. Ego came to its own realization, woke up, so to speak, found itself in this weird, dark, chaotic space, and he thought he was God because he didn’t remember where he came from. He didn’t realize he was the fallen ego of Logos. He had all of the blueprints for Paradise because they were in the mind of Logos when he fell. And he also had the ambitious overreaching that Logos was doing when he fell.Step 11 in the diagram shows the chaos and this disordered pleroma of the ego of Logos down here, no longer looking like a pyramid but just random bubbles. But there’s a border around it now because the Father put up a border around the fallen bits in order to contain them, in order to protect the Fullness of God from the disaster that was occurring, we would say, down below.Logos, now reunited with the Fullness, prays for his fallen ego, prays for this mess that he left behind. Demiurge came to awareness down there at step 11. So the ego of Logos, abandoned down below, becomes what Gnostics call the Demiurge. And the Demiurge, thinking it was God, having all the blueprints for Paradise, thought it could build Paradise now down here inside of this border. And this border, by the way, could be likened to the expanding bubble around our universe.The Big Bang would have been the splat in step 8 when Logos crashed apart and began emitting these particles. So Fullness and Logos prayed for help to come to what is called now the Deficiency. Our cosmos is known as the Deficiency or the imitation because it’s a knock-off of Paradise.And what they want is to rescue the Demiurge. They’re not trying to condemn the Demiurge to hell. They’re trying to rescue the Demiurge and bring him back up to the Fullness to reunite with Logos and plug back in with them because that’s where it belongs. So in step 12, we have the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness being sent down into this material cosmos.The Demiurge has been working on the material cosmos in step 11. He can’t get it to come to life because he doesn’t contain the consciousness and life of the Fullness and the Father. He’s a flat version, like a mirror image or like a projection on a movie screen. He doesn’t have the true depth of consciousness.Archons lack consciousness, they are not self-aware the way the Aeons are. They are tightly restrained and very strictly ordered by very strict laws of physics and chemistry and whatnot by the mind of the Demiurge only. They are projections of the Demiurge. They are shadows of the Aeons. They’re like the inversions of the beauty of that Aeonic Golden Pyramid, but they are lacking consciousness, life, and love.So the Aeons send down what are called the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The Second Order of Powers is all of the life and consciousness and love of the Father flowing down from the Fullness of God down into this fallen cosmos. That is all living creatures. Everything that’s alive from the bacteria and the cells and the organs that make up our bodies and all of the critters and birds and fish, all of the insects and mammals, all living creatures, the grasses and the trees, the moss and the slime molds, everything that’s alive is a fruit of the Fullness of God. Fruits of the Aeons pre-designed in the Fullness of God and sent down here to instantiate life, love, and consciousness into this otherwise dead disaster of a cosmos. And we come down with a mission.We Second Order Powers were supposed to come down here to remind the Demiurge of the Father above; to remind the Demiurge of Logos, his better half; to remind the Demiurge of love and consciousness and that he is not God and he needs to return home. Come home, Demiurge, come home. We are supposed to be calling to the Demiurge to return home to the Fullness of God.Well, we got caught in a never-ending war instead with the material world. See, at conception, we are all bonded to the molecular level. So when a creature has the spark of life come into it from the Fullness down here, when it bonds to that material level, that molecule that then begins reproducing, reproducing, reproducing according to the pattern from above that that creature brought into the cosmos with it. We all carry the Fullness of God within every part of our living bodies, every one of our cells, every one of our organs. We are full of the Fullness of God. We have consciousness. It’s self-evident. We love. That is also self-evident.We operate according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others to help build things that we can’t do on our own. We make families and work together. We make villages and work together. We make small communities and build things that we can all enjoy together.But we forget our job. We forget about bringing love and remembrance to the Demiurge because of the never-ending war of spirit against material, the never-ending war of right and left, the never-ending war between us and the archons, the never-ending war. It’s a constant battle here between life and death.And so the Fullnesses realized that that plan wasn’t working. We forgot to do our jobs. They prayed upstream to the Father, to the Son, to the Totalities, and they prayed for true salvation to come now and rescue the Second Order Powers, just like we were supposed to rescue the Demiurge. Now it takes a superpower, the most superpower, to come into our cosmos, rescue all of the Second Order Powers by reminding us of God’s love and what our true mission is of sharing love. We can’t do it on our own. We already proved that we lost the battle in step 13.So step 14 is sending down the Savior, sending down the most powerful entity of the ethereal plane, that being what is called the Christ. And Christ is the Son of God. Christ is the Fullnesses all praying together. Christ is the Totalities all singing the song together. Christ has the most power of any entity ever, more than enough power to bring remembrance, love, salvation, peace, comfort, joy to all of us down here who have forgotten. That’s the job of the Christ. That’s step 14.And step 15 is once the Christ succeeds in bringing remembrance to everyone, then we can move into what will be called the Third Economy. We’re in the Second Economy now. That’s the economy or the system of the material world. The First Economy was the Fullness of God, where the First Order of Powers live. The Second Economy is this cosmos that we live in, where the Second Order of Powers live. And the Third Economy is after this material cosmos passes away, dissolves like snow, gets all rolled up and wrapped up, and we all return to the Fullness of God.We all return to the new Third Economy ruled by the Third Order of Powers, and that’s the pleroma of Christ. Christ is the Third Order of Powers, and there is an individual Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers.We can’t do it on our own. We cannot love to the extent needed to demonstrate to the Demiurge love. We get caught in wars. We kill each other. We fight with each other. We quarrel. We quibble. We blow each other up and chop off heads. Bad, very bad. The Christ and the Third Order Powers comes to each of us as an individual, comes to you, comes to me, comes to our neighbors, comes to all of the critters and all of the plants, but I don’t think they’re quite as fallen as we are. I think they’re doing a pretty good job of living their lives according to what is required down here in the Second Economy. But true salvation, true redemption from this world comes by accepting the assistance of the Christ.Okay, I think we’ll stop there today. That’s the end of this Gnostic Cosmology. Next week, we’ll talk about the yeah, so what? to all of this. What good will that do me? What good will that do the world? Tune back in next week and we’ll talk about it.Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t be shy. Make some comments. I look forward to reading them. God bless and onward and upward. This is a public episode. 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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.Last week we started an episode called Gnostic Psychology Slideshow, Part One, and today we’re going to wrap that up. It’s a slideshow that I presented at my class at Southern Oregon University on the Simple Gnostic Gospel, and so I will be describing for you and posting the transcript on the GnosticInsights.com website and also at Substack. In the written transcripts, you’ll be able to see the PowerPoint slides, which really, I think, helps to clear things up, to clear up confusion, by the imagery. If you’re listening to the audio-only version, you might want to go to the websites, one or the other, and look at the slideshow too.Last week in Gnostic Psychology Part One, we talked about Who am I? Who is a human being? Who are you? And in my way of thinking, we are a combination of units of consciousness; memes and the memes we carry in our meme shroud; karma; and our One true Self, which is a replication of the One consciousness of the Father; the aeonic inheritance we have from our parents in the Fullness; and our body, our material body, which comprises our DNA and our human parents, our inheritance, as well as the units of consciousness of the 37 trillion cells in our body. There’s a therapeutic application for this Gnostic Psychology.And if you look at my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, or you go to my 20-year-old website and look up https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com you can find this particular explanation in depth.I think that would be a good bumper sticker or t-shirt. Gnosis you can trust.Again, if you’re following along with the slideshow, and this will be called Gnostic Psychology Part 2, the values on the left are egoic and they are demiurgic and they are from the deficiency, the imitation. The values on the right are from the true Self, from the Fullness of God, and they are traits of the Father. So, I don’t want to read through this whole list.It’s a very long list, but for example, a vice would be to be hateful, spiteful. The virtue that’s the flip side is to be loving, charitable. So, if you find yourself hating someone, it’s not virtuous, it’s not righteous, it’s demiurgic.We are called to love others, and indeed that is our Second Order task. We were sent here to remind the fallen demiurge that there is a Father above, that there is life and love, and that it comes from above. The Demiurge is a fractal of Aeonic ego, being the ego of fallen Logos. We are also fractals, so we want to dwell on the Aeonic Fullness side rather than the fallen demiurgic side.Another example would be hard-hearted, ruthless on the left, and the virtuous side is to be merciful. One of the vices is to be slothful, lazy. The virtue side is to be useful, to be part of the solution.The left is illogical, incoherent. It makes no sense because it’s built on lies. The right is logical. The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything theory of everything that I developed starts with a single premise that consciousness is the ground state of reality, and then everything derives from that first premise. The Gnostic gospel that I teach, or that I share with you, because I don’t have to teach you Gnosis, we’re all born with the Gnosis, so it’s inherent in us. We just need to be reminded because we’ve been caught in a never-ending war.So, for example, if a person has an eating disorder, and let’s say you eat uncontrollably, you eat far too much, and you eat the wrong things, and you know you should cut back, and you know you should eat better because it’s just not good, because you feel sluggish, and your health is suffering. That is because you’ve allowed your organ system of the digestive tract to rule. It’s an even further down fractal iteration than ego. Your ego wants to lose weight because you want to look good. You want to fit into that new outfit or whatever. You want to be attractive to the opposite sex, but you can’t control your eating. That’s because you have ceded your control to your digestive system. Willpower is difficult because that food is very attractive, and your digestive system is very powerful because you’ve given it so much authority, and it’s become accustomed to ruling you. You have to go a step to the right. You have to get on to the virtue side, and instead of being gluttonous, which is a vice, you want to be temperate.So, how do you get on the virtuous side? By turning your eyes upward to the Fullness of God, by asking for the Father’s assistance, or asking for the Son’s assistance to overcome this demiurgic slavery that you’ve found yourself in. This works for all vices, for all addictions. Now, if that’s too difficult, this is where the Christ comes in, because the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. So, it’s yet another pyramidal shape, like the Fullness, except it’s the most powerful force in the cosmos. And, if you jump from giving your control to your gluttonous digestive system, or to your Self-centered me-me-me ego, you can turn it directly over to the Third Order of Powers, and ask them to come over and take control. And, that is like a stencil. It’s going to overlay a Third Order Power on top of every one of your units of consciousness, and it’s got all the power to do anything. You borrow the willpower of the Fullness, the willpower of the Christ.And, that’s who Jesus was. He was our exemplar. He was the first human who ceded all authority to the Third Order Powers, to the Father. He was God incarnate that way. He did not have any vice, and he showed us, yeah, it can be done. Yeah, you might get crucified for it, and everybody’s going to hate you. You’re going to have very few friends. You’re going to look like a total goody two shoes. But, if it’s really the Third Order Powers working through you, it’s not a burden. It’s lifting the burden, because you always know what to do, because the Third Order of power is sitting on the throne of yourself.That’s just an example of something you could say, and that will bump the negative meme. Oh, there’s not enough. I’m going to lose you. I’m going to lose this. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.It just bumps it right out of the way, because you’ve displaced that demiurgic meme with a godly meme. They don’t work together, so one of them has got to go, and if you have set your willpower upon the Third Order of Powers, upon the Fullness of God, upon virtue, you don’t have to strain and sweat to get it done. You feel joy. You feel in alignment with the One. You are truly centered. This is what it means to be enlightened.Therapy may help you to identify which memes need dropping, and may assist in the process. You may not realize the reason you’re so insecure is because you think there’s not enough to go around, so a good therapist can help you identify that, and then you can drop that. There’s not enough to go around. I’m going to be left out. Nobody loves me. I’ll never amount to anything. You can drop those negative memes that you uncover during therapy, and then replace them with positive memes.And nowadays, since everything’s going so poorly out here in the world, if you spend a lot of time with the media, and with social media, you are absorbing all of that negativity, and all of that hatred, because social media is inherently demiurgic. It’s not alive. It comes from the bottom.You need to turn your eyes upward, turn off the phone, look upward, and plug into the Father, however you can do that. Some memes are easy to detach, because they don’t really fit in with your bundle of meme strings and cords, so if you stop reading those posts, if you get off of Facebook, well, maybe they will evaporate, because it turned out you were actually a very loving person, and you still love your old friends, even if you disagree with them now. But if you continually feed that negative meme, then you will continually feel horrid, because the demiurgic side of the ledger is designed to make you feel bad, to make you feel enslaved, to create division, despair, fear.That all comes from not living a godly life. But we don’t force ourselves to live a godly life. We run to it with joy. It’s coming home. It’s remembering. It’s remembering the joy. And suddenly all burdens are light enough to bear. Bad things can happen to you, but then you can trust in God that all things work together for good for those who love God.So I may have broken my leg and wound up in the hospital for a couple of days, but it turns out I needed to be in that hospital bed, because my roommate in the hospital was a lovely person that needed to hear what I had to say, and vice versa. And we made a new friend. This is how a bad thing can turn into a good thing, by having a godly attitude and trusting that God knows best. God does know better than you. You don’t have enough data to run your life and avoid all of the pitfalls.So you’re starting to get the idea this whole Gnostic psychology has to do with dropping unwanted memes and turning to the virtuous side. That’s what it boils down to.There’s only peace and joy and happiness on the side of virtue when you’re sincere. We’re not talking about hypocrisy. We’re not talking about forcing the issue. We’re not talking about whipping yourself with a flagellant whip to make yourself holy. That is not God’s will. God is entirely love, entirely acceptance, entirely forgiving, entirely compassionate, entirely charitable.And if you think you’re living a righteous life, yet you’re feeling anger, hatred, division, well then you’re not living a righteous life. Those are clues that you’re in the wrong set of memes, you see? So you want to get rid of those and turn your eyes upward. And you can either turn your eyes directly to Jesus as Christian true believers do, and I mean true believers, not hypocrites or pew warmers, or you can go this Gnostic route and turn your mind up to the Fullness of God, the Son, the Father, and the disincarnate Christ who pre-existed Jesus. You can take your choice, but it all is going to level you up to the Father. If you’re on the path, the glory beam, then you wind up with the Father.On a practical level, therapies such as the Emotional Freedom Technique can help with that. You can go to an EFT trainer, or you can look up EFT on YouTube and learn how to do the EFT technique. Then you just do this tapping. It takes about a minute, and it literally taps those unwanted memes right off of your meme shroud. I use it now and then, and it works. If you’ve got a thought you can’t dislodge, you do the EFT while thinking of the thought. You do the EFT a couple, maybe three times, and boom, it’s gone.Serenity is achieved as the memes are discarded. Of course, the whole point of traditional meditation is to clear your mind. What are you doing when you do that? You are quieting the memes. You’re turning them off so they can’t affect you and get in the way of you coming into contact with your true Self or with the Father.It’s important to realize that at any moment in time, you can choose to lay down an unwanted meme. You have that power. It is in your control. If you notice yourself carrying a meme around again that you thought you’d gotten rid of, but here you are again, well then stop. Lay it down again. You can lay it down as many times as it takes, but if you continue to do that meme, if you continue to activate that meme, think about it, or carry out this unwanted behavior, you’re not going to be able to get rid of it because activation causes it to stick to your meme bundle. That’s why you have to continue to lay it down, and you have to stop thinking about it. It doesn’t help to think about it.Regret, regret that never goes away, is also demiurgic because it makes you feel guilty. It wants you to feel like you have no willpower, like you can’t help yourself, and that’s a lie. It’s all lies. You can help yourself. You can be free in a moment, and from personal experience, I can tell you that that’s what the born again experience is. It’s inviting the Third Order of Powers to come into you and to take over, and the Christian prayer to Jesus, Jesus I’m a sinner, I repent, I ask you to come into my life, is a version of what I’m saying, and you can do that.I’m not against you asking Jesus to be your personal emissary. Jesus is my man. I’ve always been with Jesus, and I still am. Nothing wrong with Jesus.And if you don’t want to believe in the Christ, if you think that’s just hooey, you don’t need the Christ, well you’re going to have a hard reckoning when you pass away because we have to be pure to get to heaven. We have to be a hundred percent pure because heaven’s all good, all good. Sooner or later, everyone repents, but sooner or later everyone does repent, whether it’s in this lifetime or in the in-between place. Or you will keep coming back and getting reincarnated over and over again because you don’t want to let go of those memes that you’re holding on to. In order to stick the landing, as I say, which is a gymnastic term—you know how when a gymnast jumps off of that vault and then they land, that’s called sticking the landing. If they fumble the landing or they fall over, they didn’t stick the landing. So I think of getting to heaven and being able to stick the landing. That only happens if you repent and accept that you come from above and you want to return to above, and you don’t want to keep doing these activities that you love so much down here on the earth, or else you’re just going to keep getting pulled back onto the earth.In the case of PTSD, some sort of therapy is usually required to detach that meme from the person, unless of course you want to go full throttle and have a born-again experience, then it can all be gone in an instant. But if you don’t actively strive to detach that meme, it’s possible to be victimized by PTSD for the entirety of your life, and this causes much suffering, as Buddha would say, much needless suffering.And if you want to hear more about that, if you want to know more, please leave a comment below, and I’ll review that whole idea of Bill’s hypnotic method and give you some case histories.God bless us all, and onward and upward.If you find these Gnostic Insights beneficial and you would like to do your part to usher in a new Gnostic Reformation, please contribute to the cause. The Aeons will notice and be glad. 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

When we talk about Gnostic Psychology, I’m going to answer the question of who we are, and we’re going to cover six topics. We’re going to talk about units of consciousness, memes, karma, Self, Aeonic inheritance, and then how your body even gets into the picture when we’re talking about the psychology.Please do what you can to support this independent Gnostic ministry. You can show your support by leaving comments and questions that prompt me toward sharing gnosis with you.You can also show your support by subscribing to Gnostic Insights and/or The Gnostic Reformation on Substack.And, of course, financial support is always welcomed! Thank you for whatever you can do to contribute. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, and I’d like to welcome all of our new listeners and welcome you back, all of our regular listeners and readers. It’s my joy to bring this gnosis to you to help you draw out the gnosis that you were born with and to remember, because that’s our job here. It’s to remember and to love.Last week, we talked about Christ and the third order of powers, and at the end of that episode, I promised to draw together what that has to do with Jesus Christ. The Christ existed before Jesus, and Jesus is his manifestation here on earth. Jesus of Nazareth was the first manifestation of the Christ, or at least he’s the first manifestation that we know about. But the third order of powers came for all of us, came to replace the demiurgic elements in all of us with the elements of Christ.That’s what the third order powers are. They are our personal Christ sent from above to help us, to redeem each one of us. The Christ comes for each of us the way it was first manifested in Jesus. Jesus manifested the Christ from the get-go, but we need that second step, because we were not born as third order powers. We were born as second order powers, and so we need that step of repentance, removing the ego off of the throne of our soul, and inviting the third order powers to take up residence within us.What I’m going to do is put together two older episodes to talk more about Jesus. In first part of the episode, I’m just drawing out a recap of the Christ and the role of Jesus in particular, and then the second part of the episode will be a replay of the Gnostic Lord’s Prayer.I know a lot of people reject Jesus as the Christ. They don’t even like the idea of there being a Christ. But I have to remind you that the Christ is, what we could call in our modern terminology, a correcting algorithm for our human selves, for our human DNA even. And it is thought, primarily by me, and I’m sure other people probably share this point of view, that by saying that Jesus is both fully human and fully God, what was meant by that is that Jesus shares our human DNA. Yet the DNA of Jesus is perfect. It is as designed.Jesus was a perfectly constructed human. There were no epigenetic changes, no degradation of his DNA and its various functions. He didn’t inherit any congenital problems from his parental lineage. And being fully God means that the perfection of the pleroma, the perfection of the Fullness of God, filled this body, this DNA, and the Self of Jesus. We all have the same one Self. We all share the same Self that comes from the Fullness of God. But for most of us, well for all of us really, our Self is hidden. It’s covered over by this shroud of memes that we have acquired in this lifetime and in prior lifetimes that come down to us from our human societies, from various personal problems, and misunderstandings and hang-ups.Particularly, we have been under attack by the Demiurge and the archons of the Demiurge. The Demiurge does not care for humans. Humans challenge the authority of the Demiurge because we claim to be from the Fullness of God. And the Demiurge, of course, believes that he is the Fullness of God. He does not acknowledge the God Above All Gods or the pleroma above because he has a case of amnesia at the moment.But eventually, everything will be redeemed by the Christ. That was the purpose of the Christ. And the Christ pre-exists Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ is not exactly the same as Jesus. The Christ is a supernatural power that lives up there in the pleroma. The Christ is the Fullness of God plus the willpower of the Son with the blessing of the Father. So, the Christ embodies the entire lineage of the Holy Spirit without interruption.And the Christ was sent down to this Earth, presumably in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, in order to implant this correction, this correcting algorithm, onto us humans who have fallen away from the perfection of our original design, either spiritually, because of the archonic attacks and the memes that we hold, or physically, because of our human DNA that is shared with the body of the Jesus. And that’s why Jesus had to have a virgin birth, because Mary was the vessel. However, the Fullness of God was the parental unit that gave this perfect human to the earth for correction and assistance.[That was part of an earlier episode about the virgin birth of Jesus. Now I’d like to change gears and discuss with you the Lord’s Prayer.]The Lord’s Prayer I say daily or nightly as I’m going to bed or if I wake up in the middle of the night. And technically that’s from chapter 6 of the book of Matthew. I prefer reciting the Lord’s Prayer in King James language, because I think it’s beautiful. So, I’ll first let you hear what it sounds like in King James, and then we’ll look at a more modern translation and talk about the energy and the flow and whatnot of the prayer.This prayer was suggested by Jesus, and he was talking to his disciples, and they asked him, how should we pray? And he said this:9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.11 Give us this day our daily bread.12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.That’s the way I learned it as a kid, and I really like the poetic nature of the ye’s and the thou’s and whatnot, so that’s why I speak that way in prayer. But it isn’t necessary, and it’s not even necessary to use these exact words.There are many New Testament translations now, and they all have slightly different takes on exactly which words to use, but the meaning is always the same. And remember, it’s not the particular words that we use with each other. It’s the meaning behind them that’s important. The meta level means to step up and see what is being communicated. It’s not the particularities of the memes themselves.Here’s the most modern translation that I know of, and that is David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament. And his is a fresh translation of the New Testament, not reworking old translations like most Bibles are, but he actually went to the original Greek and re-translated it in the most precise manner he could. And this is what David Bentley Hart’s version sounds like.Our Father, who art in the heavens, let your name be held holy.Let your kingdom come. Let your will come to pass, as in heaven, so also upon earth. Give us today bread for the day ahead, and excuse us our debts, just as we have excused our debtors.And do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from him who is wicked. For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory unto the ages.Now, again, I’ve noticed that the word ages in these translations can also be translated as Aeons. And I think of Aeons as units of consciousness, not as units of time. So when it says, ‘for yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory unto the ages,” in my own mind, I think. “for yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory unto the Aeons.” And finally, we’re pulling the Aeons and the Fullness of God into the prayers, because they’re usually left out.In this Gnostic Christianity, the Fullness is an actual entity. It’s a location where the Aeons live. And the Aeons are infinite in number, because they are expressions of the Son of God, and the Son is infinite in scope, power, and size. So it stands to reason that the particularities of the Son of God would also be infinite. So the Fullness of God is where they live. That’s what it means to be the Fullness of God–the place where the Aeons dwell.And the Fullness, and the Son, and what’s called the Totalities of the ALL, which are like the parents of the Aeons, they are coexistent. They are equal in scope and power with the Son. Normally, in Christianity, the Fullness of God is just used as an adverbial expression of how great and big and grand God is. But it’s actually quite a bit more than that. It’s a description of all the individual traits of the Son of God.Okay, let’s go back for a minute and talk about prayer. Jesus said,“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. [And that’s what makes them hypocrites, because they’re actually looking for recognition and brownie points from other people. He goes on to say,] truly, I tell you, they have received their reward in full. [That is, from the other people, the brownie points.] But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”And I think of the Father not as this big eye in the sky who watches everything that everybody does. The Father is within us, because we all carry the Fullness of God inside of us. So the Father is as close to us as we are standing here. We wear this body on us, and we also wear the Fullness of God within all the parts of our body. That is how the Father sees us. He’s inside of us. He sees everything, because he’s going along with us. We take him along with us everywhere we go.Continuing, Jesus says, “then your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans do, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.” [So the idea of having to repeat, to sit and repeat and repeat, as monks do in various religions, to sit all day and repeat the same prayers out loud hundreds and thousands of times, that isn’t necessary.] Jesus says, “do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”And personally, I am not what’s called a prayer warrior. Some Christians call themselves prayer warriors, and they are moved to pray for people constantly. That, I suppose, is a good thing, because it’s a method of expressing love. But Jesus said, “your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” So asking him over and over and over for these things doesn’t help. I think what the prayer for other people does is it helps you focus that the answer will come to them from the Father above. And it opens you up to see if there’s some way that you can help the Father bring it into practice here on earth.The simplest prayer would simply be, “thank you for the Christ, may Christ’s will be done.” That’s how you need to say, because the Christ knows what everybody needs.Okay, so let’s look at what I’m thinking when I’m going through the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Hallowed means separate because of glory. It’s a hallowed place that only the Father occupies. Because the Father’s so infinitely glorious, we can’t even begin to imagine it.And it says in the Tripartite Tractate, as it says throughout the Bible, that we cannot look upon the face of God the Father, the God Above All Gods, because he’s too great. In the Tripartite Tractate, it says anyone looking upon him would be annihilated. And that goes for the Aeons and the angels as well as us down here below. The only one that can look upon the face of the God Above All Gods, the origin of consciousness, is the Son. And that’s because the Son is an encapsulation in a monad form of the Father’s traits. But it’s a particularity, an infinitely large particularity.And also, when we say “our Father in heaven,” in the Tripartite Tractate, it says that we have the God Above All Gods as the ultimate Father of consciousness. That’s where the consciousness begins, and that’s where it resides. And the Son is his offspring. That’s why it’s called a Son.And let me remind you that the only reason we use a male designation of Father and Son is because it has to do with the direction of the energetic flow. The male is the outward projection of the flow. The female is the receptive projection of the flow. So the Father, the Son are male figures. The cosmos is a female figure because it receives the emanations of the Son. But as soon as the Son was formed, being in the exact image of the Father, he also became a Father, and he gave birth to the Totalities.And so it says in the Tripartite Tractate that as soon as the Son was formed, he also became a Father. So our consciousness and life emanates from the Son of God, and then we are emanations of the Fullness of God, because this consciousness is coming downstream to us. When we pray to the Father, it’s not only to the God Above All Gods. The Father also includes the Son who has become a Father. We don’t pray to individual Aeons. We pray to the God Above All Gods and his designate, which is the Son, who also is called Father. And then we can pray to the Christ because it’s his job to help us.The Aeons, the rest of the Aeons, have other jobs. They’ve got tons of other jobs, including the way physics and chemistry runs, and the way cells work in our bodies, and how bodies go together, and all of the things that make up the living creatures of the earth. Those are particularities of those particular Aeons, Aeons in charge of blood, Aeons in charge of personalities, Aeons in charge of everything. The Christ puts it all together and transcends them all. So we pray directly to the Christ. In Christianity, the Christ is represented by Jesus. You can pray directly to the Christ, or you can pray to Jesus if you’d like to personify Jesus, and many of us do.And I’m thinking that in that Hart’s version of the Lord’s Prayer that I read you, it started by saying, “Our Father who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy.”That’s plural, isn’t it? “Who are.” And so I’m thinking that Jesus recognized that the Father had many parts, and of course in traditional Christian religion, he’s called a triune God, and they recognize him as the Father and the Son. Okay, we agree with that. And the Holy Spirit, and that those are the three parts who would be the are in heaven. But in Gnostic Christianity, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit flowing down from the Fullness of God, which is infinitely complex. It’s not a singular thing.So the prayer goes on to say, “your kingdom come,” and when I say kingdom, I’m picturing the kingdom of God. And a kingdom is a place, isn’t it? And it’s a place where someone is in charge. There’s a king. And so we are saying that we want the kingdom of God to come. And you can picture the kingdom as, you know, really neat. It can be that Castle on a Hill kind of thing, with pennants, waving flags and all that. So, “your kingdom come, your will be done.”Now, part of the characteristics and traits of God, of the originating consciousness, is willpower. We also have willpower. There’s a long-running argument in theology about whether God’s will blanks out our will. But that isn’t true. Every expression of the Fullness of God carries all of the expressions of the Fullness of God.And the Fullness of God carries that willpower that begins with the originating consciousness, flows down through the Son, flows down through the Fullness, and on into us. So we have that same exact characteristic of willpower as the Father, the Son, and the Fullness. That is why it is that at any given moment in time, you can make a decision for this or that. You are not powerless. You are not helpless. You are not a pawn in a bigger game.And is the bigger game going to be God, or is the bigger game going to be the Demiurge? No. You have the willpower of the Fullness of God within you. And so you choose to be in the kingdom of the Father, or you choose to be in the kingdom of the Demiurge.So in this prayer, Jesus suggests that we pray for the Father’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” So here we are trying to bring the perfection, and the love, and all of the virtues, and the knowledge, the true knowledge, onto the Earth. That’s the job of the second order powers. We embody the Fullness of God on this fallen plane. That’s what it means, “your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.” And that will is expressed through us.Then it says, “give us today our daily bread,” or “give us the bread we need for the day ahead.” So we don’t need to worry long scale about things. We’re praying for today’s manna, today’s provisions to be given to us, or to find them.Now the next part, which is chapter 6 verse 12 of Matthew, says “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” And that is a tit-for-tat kind of quid pro quo expression. Excuse us our debts just as we have excused our debtors. Now this means that unless we have a forgiving heart, we cannot accept the forgiveness of God in the same way. There’s no way that you can expect to be forgiven for your shortcomings by the Christ, by the Father, by other people, if you are not willing to forgive others in exactly the same way. So we are forgiven to the extent that we forgive others.And it’s not just because of the balance of the scales of justice. It’s because unless we can embrace the concept of forgiveness, we won’t believe that we are forgiven. If our hearts are hard and we carry grudges, well how can we expect to be forgiven? We will project that same kind of grudge carrying and condemnation and punishment onto God. But God is all forgiving. And if God is willing to forgive us, we need to be willing to forgive each other.The next line is, “and lead us not into temptation,” which I’ve always thought was a strange translation because the Father wouldn’t lead us into temptation.It’s not the Father or the Fullness or the Son that is dangling temptation in front of our eyes. Although it’s all around us at all times, the one who leads us into temptation is the Demiurge and the archons of the Demiurge. So if we keep our eyes on heaven rather than on the world, we will not be led into temptation.In Hart’s translation he says, “do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from him who was wicked.” So him who was wicked, that’s the Demiurge and those who work for the Demiurge. And we’re just praying that we don’t come to trial. But trials come to us, don’t they? All the time. So we’re asking for mercy. We’re asking that things would be easy and good. And you won’t be truly tempted if you’re staying on the right side of the ledger, the side of virtues rather than vices. If you live on the side of vice, well you’re always tempted because that’s all about temptation.And then it wraps up by saying, “for yours is the kingdom.” And so when I say “yours is the kingdom,” in my mind, my spirit, my energy looks upward towards the heavenly realms, towards the kingdom. So I picture again the kingdom. And it’s not just picturing it, I’m moving my energy in an upward direction, onward and upward, to be with the Father in the kingdom.“Yours is the kingdom and the power.” So then we picture power in its most abstract form. Power. When I say power, I’ve got my fist closed and I’m moving it forward. It’s a motion. And so it’s the power that helps me pull onward and upward into the kingdom. It’s the power that moves up from me, but it’s also the power that flows down from the Father. So true power comes up towards the Father and comes down to us from the Father.“And the glory.” We praise the Father. We praise the Son. They are glorious. Glorious means wonderful, indescribably wonderful, beautiful, the best thing ever. That’s the glory.And then in Hart’s translation, he says, “the glory into the ages,” which allows me to fold the Fullness into there and the Aeons. So they’re glorious as well because they are part of the Son. They’re not as glorious as the Son. And by the way, to remind you of how this Gnostic cosmogony works, the way the Totalities of the ALL were birthed was by the Son and the Father giving glory to each other. They had this reflected glory and love for each other.And it’s the process of giving glory that gives birth to new creation. So when the Son and the Father gave glory to one another, the Totalities were birthed, which is all of the breakout variables of the Son. And the Totalities, their entire job is to give glory to the Son and the Father. They don’t do anything else. Their full-time job is to give glory to the Son and glory to the Father. That’s all they do. They sing and they give glory in harmony, perfect harmony, all together.The way the Aeons were birthed was as the Totalities give glory to the Father, they become aware of themselves. They broke out from their melded together unity and became individuated pieces of consciousness. And that next step is the Aeons of the Fullness of God. They were birthed by the Totalities giving glory upstream. And it’s the process of giving glory to God that creates our true Self-nature.Also, as soon as the Aeons were birthed, as soon as the Fullnesses were realized by the Totalities giving glory to the Father, as soon as the Fullnesses realized themselves, they immediately sorted themselves into the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Everyone has a name, everyone has an address, a place, a position, a rank, and a purpose, a job. And that’s what I identify as the ego, the birth of the ego of the Aeons. But it’s not a negative thing. It’s simply awareness of oneself as an individual consciousness.And that’s the Lord’s Prayer. Usually you end it by saying “amen.” And amen means let it be so. So be it. Hear, hear. But if you forget to say amen or you don’t say amen, it’s not a magic word. This isn’t magic, people. So you don’t have to say incantations in any particular way and make sure you don’t skip any words. It’s all a matter of reflecting where your heart is. And if your heart gives glory to the Father, that’s all that matters.You can even do it without words at all, as I’m sure the other second order powers do. What do you think the rabbits are doing and the cats and the dogs and the cows all day long when they just seem to be dozing off, standing there in the sunshine or lying there? They’re giving glory. They know that they are loved. Even those that aren’t pets that have humans to love them, they know that they are loved by the Father, by the Fullness, because it’s inside of all of them as well. And they probably aren’t reciting the Lord’s Prayer. They’re just communing with the Spirit of God.And you can do that as well. Okay. Onward and upward.God bless. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to share with you the PowerPoint lecture that I gave yesterday at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University, and the topic is Christ and the Third Order of Powers. We began with a review using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart, and this is just a very… this is too difficult of a chart to describe to you.You’ll have to see it, so I recommend that you go to GnosticInsights.com and find this episode, or the Gnostic Reformation. This is the current episode here on Substack, but I begin every class with a full review of what we have done before using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart that I have designed, and I was very heartened to see that yesterday the class was able to name all of the parts. I think that is extraordinary, and so good for you, class! Now after the chart, here we begin the lecture.Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate,The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance, and it is also called Synagogue of Salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought.Now what does that mean? “The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability.” That is Logos after the Fall, and now he has returned back up to the Fullness of God, pulled up there by the prayers of the Fullnesses, his brothers.He has returned to his stability. He’s sitting at the top of the pile again like he used to be before he fell. Now his shadow remains below, his shadow being the Demiurge and all of those broken imitations of his original Pleroma.You know the Logos is a fractal of the entire Fullness of God formed by when the Fullnesses gave glory to God all together in unison, and what they produced out of that unity was the Logos, and he contains a fractal representation of every one of the Aeons within him. However, it is a fractal level down, and it was that Logos that fell, and so the shadows of the fractals of Logos are what remain behind and become our material universe.Now back to this quote, “the thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him.”Those who had come into being because of him is all of us second-order powers, not the shadows, because they are not really beings. They do not really exist, but we second-order powers are the fruit of Logos and the Fullness together praying for help to come into the deficiency to rescue his abandoned ego that we called the Demiurge. So this sentence is saying that the thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him, that’s us, “was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance.”You see, we second-order powers, which is every living thing in the cosmos, we were brought forward in accord with the ordinance, which I believe to be something along the lines of the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to the other Fullnesses, and they held hands and prayed together, and we were brought forth as fruit. So that was the ordinance. And it says that Logos is called the Synagogue of Salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, and that dispersal was after the Fall when his Pleroma rolled out and became the material universe, which he abandoned down here.And it says that “the dispersal was the multifarious thought, and he returned to the single thought.” So that multifarious thought, which means a whole lot of different thoughts, multifarious, that’s all of those independent little tiny egos that are the shadows of the ego of Logos that fell, the shadows of the Demiurge, the parts of the deficiency, those are the multifarious thoughts. They don’t come from the single good thought of the Father, but they come from an infinite number of egoic, selfish thoughts. It says that he healed himself from that dispersal, and that’s when he abandoned it down below and went back up to the Fullness, and he returned to the single thought.The single thought is the good thought of the Father, the good thought of the Son. God is one giant good thought, the God Above All Gods. The true Self, with a capital S, that we all carry inside of all of our living parts, is the single thought of the Father. And we’re born with that. That’s all that we need to remember. That’s all that we forget. But when we’re in ego, we’re part of the multifarious thought. We’re thinking anything but the Father.There is one of the second order powers for every one of the likenesses of the Fall. Whereas the likenesses are shadows of the Aeons, we second order powers are the true fractal fruit of Logos, and we bring life, consciousness, and the Holy Spirit of love into this fallen cosmos.Because we second order representations are fitted into the boundary that forms our cosmic ecology. We find ourselves bound in a relationship to the material of the deficiency. Since we are true fractal representations of the pleroma of Logos, we are a perfect match for every likeness of the shadow pleroma of Logos. We have a one-to-one relationship with the matter that forms our earthly bodies. And the illustrations on the slide depict the second order powers as green cells in a petri dish. So it’s a round space full of green cells, and I use that to represent all of us living second order powers.And then also on this slide is my picture of the shadows of the deficiency, and they’re little blue balls, very dark. It’s an almost black picture, very dark because they’re shadows. And it’s a circular space, the same size as the circular space of second order powers there on the left, the greens. They all have a boundary around them. That is the boundary that the Father threw up around the deficiency to keep it contained and to keep it in relationship to each other. Because when they fell, the shadows, the deficiency is not hierarchical. It’s everything for itself. It’s all egoic. And so in order for them to even have a semblance of working together, they have to be bound together in a boundary. So that’s what the boundary is.And then the third picture on this slide is the second order powers and the shadows of the deficiency together, smushed into one ecology, which happens to us when we are born into this material world. We are bonded temporarily to the shadows of the deficiency. And so it’s kind of a yin-yang symbol. I’ve got the greens rising and the shadows falling in a yin-yang circle. And that represents the never-ending war between material and ethereal, between virtue and vice, between life and death, between knowledge and ignorance.The stumbling, which happened to the Aeons of the Father of the Totalities who did not suffer, was brought to them as if it were their own in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Totalities so they may be instructed about the defect by the single one, from whom alone they all receive strength to eliminate the defects.So the stumbling is the Fall of the Aeon logos. The Aeons of the Fullness were made aware of the situation in a careful, non-malicious, and immensely sweet way. Don’t you love those words? Which implies that there was no condemnation or wrath involved. You see, the God Above All Gods is not a wrathful God, the way Jehovah, for example, is in the Old Testament. The God Above All Gods does not torture people and send them to hell for eternity. The God Above All Gods is nothing but love. It’s all good. It’s all love.And so the knowledge of the Fall was brought to the Fullnesses. The Fullnesses, the Totalities, were informed of the Fall in this non-malicious and immensely non-judgmental sweet way. The passage says “the Aeons were made aware of the deficiency by the single one,” which is the Son, “who also gave them the strength needed to eliminate the defects.”All power comes from above. None of us can approach the Father. The Father is too great. The power is too great. We’d be fried in a second. So the Son is our intermediary. The Son is the only direct emanation from the Father, and he remains plugged into the Father. He’s swimming in that great sea. He is the bucket dipped into the sea of the Father. The Father is illimitable, but the Son is a monad, a singularity that encompasses all of the characteristics of the Father in one infinitely large space, but it’s still a contained space.And then from out of the Son came the Totalities of the All. And so I’ve got that picture directly underneath the Son. And I always picture the Son as a circular cloud of fog emerging out of the great unknown of the Father. And then as soon as it emerged, the Son immediately differentiated into all of its variabilities, into all of its component pieces. They all acted and thought as one. They were like spokes on a singular wheel. They had no self-identity, but they were the variabilities of the Son. The Son wears the All like a cloak, and the Totalities of the All wear the Son as a cloak. So they’re co-existent, you see?And then it was the Totalities of the All that became self-aware by giving glory to the Father and the Son. And once they became self-aware, they migrated into this hierarchical shape, this pyramid that we call the Fullness of God. And now at that point, they’re known as Aeons, because they each have a self-identity. They’ve got a position, a place, a duty, a name, and they’re stacked in this gigantic pyramidal shape. And then the Logos is the topper. He’s the crown on top.The one who ran on high, [Logos], became for the one who was defective, an intercessor with the emanation of the Aeons which had come into being, [that’s us, the second order], in accord with the things which exist.And the things which exist are the Totalities and the Aeons. The ethereal plane is considered all that exists. The Totalities of the All, the Aeons of the Fullness, the Father and the Son are the true things which exist.The shadows of the deficiency do not really exist. And at the end of time, they’re just simply going to evaporate. When the Demiurge returns home to the Fullness, there will be no more shadows.So “the one who ran on high became for the one who was defective, an intercessor.” You may wonder who exactly is “the one who was defective.” Well, this phrase can refer to both the Demiurge who fell and to us second order powers. We second order powers who have forgotten our true origin by engaging in the never-ending war with the deficiency have also become defective, like the Demiurge.Likewise, the defective one also refers to the Fallen ego of Logos, abandoned down below, whom we call the Demiurge, the agent of the Fall. By this time, in the Gnostic cosmogony, Logos would be praying for the redemption of both his fallen ego and the second order powers, fruited from his pleroma, both struggling in this material world. Indeed, the redemption of each of the second order powers will prove to be a fractal version of the redemption of the Demiurge. As above, so below. As below, so above.And now we’ve reached the point in the Gnostic cosmogony and ethereal history where the third order of powers is created. The third order of powers are the pleroma of the Christ that comes from the ethereal plane to redeem us, and along with us, the fallen thought of the Demiurge. There is a third order power for every one of us second order powers.And on this slide, I have illustrated the concept.The way I illustrate the Christ is a circular shape, again, like the Son, because the Son and the Christ, their names kind of get swapped there in Christianity so that the Son and the Christ are considered to be the same. Well, they’re very similar, but we see here that the Christ is a third order of power. The Christ is the same shape and size as the Son in my circular drawing, and it’s got that starburst of the Totalities of the All filling it and filling it with light. So it’s a lighted sphere as opposed to the Son that I illustrate as a gray fogginess. This is a lighted starburst that’s really quite beautiful.And then right next to that, I’ve got the image of the second order powers, us and all living creatures as that green petri dish of cells. And then next to that, I’ve got the shadows of the deficiency. But now I have created a brand new illustration just for this PowerPoint slide. And it is taking the Christ starburst type of image, and I have overlaid it on top of the second order powers in a transparency kind of way. So you can see the Christ sitting on top of and infusing the second order powers with the third order of powers.There’s a third order power for every one of the second order powers. It’s a one-to-one relationship. And it has to be, because the Christ redeems every second order power, redeems every part of us second order powers.In the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I used to refer to the Christ as the correcting algorithm. That’s the secular way of speaking of the Christ. The Christ brings perfection and correction to our broken code and our broken DNA strands. It’s all perfect again, as it was originally designed.When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement and with harmonious consent to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one.The All and the Hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. And in the Tripartite Tractate, you know, you have the originating Father, which is the God Above All Gods, but when the Son emerges as the Son, but then he differentiates into the Totalities and the Aeons of the Fullness, he is called the Father of the Aeons and the Father of the Totalities. So the Son is sometimes referred to as the Father and sometimes referred to as the Son and that can be confusing. So the All and the hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. The Aeons stepped up “joyously and willingly” with the thought of being helpful to the deficient ones by bringing awareness of the Father’s glory and love.We know that the originating source of consciousness is the illimitable Father, the God Above All Gods. The originating Father is beyond comprehension, even for the Aeons. The only entity capable of grasping the illimitable God Above All Gods is the Son of the Father, who contains within himself all of the traits of the Father. This is the Son who has a countenance, a face, because the Father wants to be known to his emanations through the Son. This is how we know that when these passages speak of the Father, they are actually referring to the Son who has become a Father to his emanations, because the Aeons are able to behold the countenance of their Father.By now we realize that when Aeons give glory together, they produce new emanations. This is how Aeons make new fruit. The last time this happened, all of the Aeons had emanated Logos as an image of their totality. Now they gathered together and all of them, including Logos, gave glory to the Pleroma of their Father with harmonious consent while concurrently asking the Father to help them bring aid to the defective one. The difference between this act of fruiting and the one that originally brought forth the Aeon named Logos was that Logos was fruited by the individual Fullnesses giving glory to the Father together. This time, the fruiting was the Fullnesses and the All giving glory alongside Logos while praying with specific intent for salvation to come to the deficiency.Then from the harmony in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit.The Gnostic gospel calls this new fruit the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the third order of powers endowed with more capabilities than the first and second orders because the Christ embodies the entirety of the All and the particularity of the consciousness of each of the individual Aeons of the Fullness, along with the full power of the Holy Spirit and the Son’s entire knowledge and remembrance of the ethereal plane. The first order of powers is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, that hierarchy. We are the second order of powers. This third order of powers is fully equipped to bring remembrance and redemption to the second order powers living in this fallen world and to the Demiurge.Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which was written previously, but also they generated their own. For the Aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.So you see, the third order powers bear the countenance of each and every one of us because we are the ones who are praying for help. And they also bear the countenance or the face of all of the Aeons that comprise the third order of powers. So we recognize that help is coming to us because it’s got our face on it. It’s a personal answer to prayer.The emanation of the Christ brings all of the knowledge, power, and glory of the God Above All Gods through its Son and the Totalities into creation. The Christ is now in the process of bringing this gnosis to all second order powers. There is a third order power for each and every second order power, and a second order power for each and every shadow of the Fall.All we need to do is allow the third order powers to take up residence within our individuated pleromas. In this manner, the gnosis and love of the Christ will displace the shadows and bring redemption to us and through us. This is the true mission of Christianity.And on this slide I’ve got an illustration of the Son, the Totalities of the All, the hierarchy of the Fullness of the Aeons, the Christ, and then lastly that new image of the Christ overlaying upon the second order powers. And then the lecture moved into what does this have to do with Jesus the anointed, and we’ll cover that next week because we’re at the end of our time for today.So what is all this talk of Christ, the Christ, which Christians don’t like Christ being called the Christ, you know. They believe that that differentiates us who believe in the Christ from those who believe in Christ, that we are worshipping a different God because we call it the Christ. I disagree with that. I think this is the nature of Christ. We’re simply describing it. And next week we’ll talk about Jesus the anointed and what Jesus has to do with the Christ.God bless us all, and onward and upward. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, and I’d like to welcome our new readers and listeners.What is the Antichrist? By definition, of course, the Antichrist would be the opposite of the Christ. So, before we understand the Antichrist, it would be helpful to understand what we can about the Christ.Christ, according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, is composed of the Aeons of the Fullness, both in their aggregated entirety known as the Pleroma of the Fullness of God, or the hierarchy of the Fullness of God, along with their personal individual forms, which are the Aeons, the infinite infinity of variations of the Son that are called the Fullnesses or the Aeons or the Totalities. So the Christ is powered by the full force of the Holy Spirit, the Son, and the Fullness of God. The Christ has all the mojo of the ethereal plane.In order to restore memory, reason, and redemption to the second-order powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of their focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father, and that is what we call Christ or the Christ. So here’s how the Tripartite Tractate describes the Christ.“They gathered together asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above from the Father for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one.”And the defective one, in this quote, has to do with the Demiurge that arose from the Aeon known as Logos.“Then from the harmony and a joyous willingness which came into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit. And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which was his beloved Son.“But the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased put himself on them as a garment through which he gave perfection to the defective one and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, the one who is properly called Savior and the Redeemer and the Well-pleasing One and the Beloved and the One to Whom Prayers have been Offered and the Christ and the Light of those Appointed in Accordance with the Ones from Whom He was brought Forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given him. Yet what other name may be applied to him except the Son, as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know.”This paragraph describes the fruit of the Aeons called the Christ, that he possesses all of the traits, that is the names of the positions and all of their characteristics, all of the virtues of all of the Aeons of the God Above All Gods, and all of that essentially adds up to the original Son of the Father that came directly from the Father. So the Son and Christ aren’t exactly the same because the Christ was created later than the Son. However, the Son and the Christ share the same characteristics, so by this time it is the Son.That’s kind of confusing, but they are different entities because they were created in different ways. The Son is directly emanated from the Father itself, from the original consciousness. The Son is the monad version of the otherwise illimitable Father.But the Christ is the Fullness of God, both as the Fullness itself and the individual Aeons that had differentiated out of the Son, all rolled up together, with the blessing of the Father. So it’s a slightly different character, yet they do have all the characteristics. So I can see why the Tripartite Tractate finally rolls it up into saying, you might as well say, it’s the Son.And this is interesting about the Christ.“Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but they also generated their own. For the Aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony.”And by the way, we’re talking about the Fullness of God. We’re talking about the hierarchy of the Fullness of God and all the Aeons, the infinite number of Aeons that dwell in the Fullness of God. And so when the Christ was formed, he came forth not simply as Jesus Christ with the face of Jesus. He came with the face of every single Aeon of the Fullness of God. So he’s a composite individual, whereas the Son is actually a singularity, at least in the beginning, before he differentiates into the Fullness. But the Christ stays a multiplicity rolled up into one. All is one. That’s the difference between the Son and the Christ. The Son is One and stays One and then differentiates later. But the Christ comes in as all of the differentiations, plus the Son, plus the blessing of the Father.The Aeons of the Fullness are known as the First Order of Powers. We living creatures are the Second Order of Powers. The Army of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. Because of the fractal nature of all things, “as above, so below,” there is not only a Third Order Power for every First Order Power—the Aeons that comprise the Fullness of God—there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. These Third Order Powers overlay us Second Order of Powers when we repent and are redeemed. Redemption is the maneuver that installs the Third Order of Powers within our souls, bringing the remembrance of the Father, love, and error correction to us living creatures.So what is the Antichrist then? The Antichrist is the shadow of Christ. The pleroma of the Antichrist mirrors the Third Order pleroma of Christ.The Antichrist is not alive. We know that because it arises from the Fall and therefore it is not infused with the light and life of the Pleroma, the Father, and the Son. Nor is it Aeonic, as it is not considered a fruit of the Pleroma. So it cannot express Aeonic traits, such as the various facets of love known as virtues, nor operate through the cooperative nature we call the Simple Golden Rule.There are many episodes devoted to the virtues and to the Simple Golden Rule. So if you go to GnosticInsights.com and do a search in there, well, just read through all the titles of the assembled podcasts that are all living there. See, in your podcast host, you’ve only got the latest. But if you go to the homepage, Gnostic Insights, they’re all there. So you can go back to the beginning of the podcast and catch up with us that way.The Antichrist arises after the Fall, and so it does not recognize the hierarchical structure built upon the harmony of the Fullness. In place of that harmony, the Antichrist operates through the application of power, and its only goal is power. The Antichrist does not know the hierarchy of the Fullness, nor does it come from their assigned roles and places. Lacking the Pleroma’s cooperative design, the Antichrist exists in a state of perpetual disturbance driven by self-centered ambition.Now, this is all the same as the description of the Demiurge at this point, because the Antichrist is like his head henchman. See, he’s the Antichrist. He’s the inverse of the Christ. So if the Christ is the savior of all of us second-order powers because we’ve forgotten the goal and we’ve been estranged from the love of God, the Christ brings back the correction, the correcting algorithm, I like to say, to our original programming.But the Antichrist then would be bringing the Demiurge’s anti-life, anti-consciousness, anti-free will, anti-virtue programming of the Demiurge. The Antichrist and the imitations of the Fullness that exist as a result of the Fall, that would be the imitations and the deficiencies, the archons, are only interested in,“exalting themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he is a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 79).So these phantoms all represent values contrary to the originals of the Fullness. They’re the inverse of the virtues. Those of the imitation give rise to,“fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, and other such disobedient types driven by the will to dominate.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 80)The Antichrist is therefore some sort of ungodly expression of the material universe. Again, by definition, its goal would be to block the mission of the Christ, placing itself as the rightful alternative to the redemption and salvation of the Christ.Now we know the mission of the Christ is to restore the fallen Logos, who is now the Demiurge, by reminding the fallen Aeon and those under its control, (which would be the archons), of the gnosis of the originating Father and the Pleroma of the hierarchy. So the Antichrist, as the inverse of Christ’s mission, would encourage us to forget about the Father above and the Holy Spirit that infuses life. We would also be encouraged to forget that we are second-order powers sent from the Pleroma above to do battle against the Fall.And the way the second-order powers were designed to do battle against the Fall isn’t by anger or violence. It’s by love. The only way you can disarm hatred, rage, violence, fear, is with love. You can’t reason it there. You can’t bully it there. You can’t make laws to force it to be there. The only way you can do it is to love them. And when they see your love, they will be reminded of the Father. We are the emissaries of love, and that is the armament by which we are supposed to do battle.It’s our Aeonic duty to stand against vice in favor of virtue. So whenever you allow temptation to take you down a road of vice rather than a virtuous path, you are enabling the Antichrist. You are enabling the archons in the Demiurge. You’re making them stronger. You become part of the problem. That’s why it’s important to be virtuous and to be loving, charitable, forgiving. That’s the only way we can win the hearts of those who have fallen.The Antichrist would encourage us to operate according to our ego’s desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe rather than following the will of the Father. And whereas the Christ contains and mirrors every aspect of the Father and the Son, the Antichrist mirrors every aspect of the Demiurge created from the Fall away from the Pleroma. Therefore, the Antichrist is an imitation and an inversion of the original Fullness of the Aeons broken out of the hierarchy of cooperation and infused with isolated striving for power and domination rather than the glory of unity and a joyful willingness to help others. The Antichrist serves the needs of the Demiurge rather than the will of the Father. In the name of peace, it brings war. Instead of prosperity, it brings dependency. Instead of free will, it mandates conformity.Now, historically, many have nominated the Catholic Pope as the Antichrist as he appears to displace Christ as God’s messenger and Redeemer. The big one that’s making the rounds now, of course, is many people think that President Trump is the Antichrist. Elon Musk could be the Antichrist because all of the artificial intelligence that he’s leaning towards and the brain implants and the global communication served by one singular source. George Soros, that’s another good nominee, in my opinion. So could Bill Gates also be considered a nominee for the Antichrist, because the Antichrist always comes as a do-gooder, and he wins the hearts of people by doing tremendously good deeds and big works, big gigantic works that are almost unhuman, and they would be if he’s actually the Antichrist.But the gnostic interpretation would be that none of these humans can actually be the Antichrist because humans are Second Order Powers and the Antichrist is a shadow figure—the shadow of Christ. The Antichrist is a demiurgic power, not a human. Sure, someone could favor the Antichrist and invite its powers to rule them, but the human is not the Antichrist.In 1951, a very popular figure in religion, Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen, said,“The Antichrist will not be so called, otherwise he would have no followers. He will come disguised as the great humanitarian. He will talk peace, prosperity, and plenty, not as a means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves. He will tempt Christians with the same three temptations with which he tempted Christ. He will have one great secret which he will tell to no one. He will not believe in God, because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God. He will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counter church. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the church, but in reverse, and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will, in all externals, resemble the mystical body of the Christ.”And that was from Sheen’s book, Communism and the Conscience of the West. The three temptations of Christ referred to by Sheen are, one, seeking our own satisfaction rather than God’s will. Two, manipulating God’s will in order to achieve personal gain, power, and glory. And three, to ultimately believe we deserve to be Gods.Now, while I agree that powerful humans reflect the spirit of the Antichrist, I don’t think that the Antichrist will be found in a singular human being, but rather as a dark spirit arising from the Fall. I’m inclined to nominate the Demiurge itself as the father of the Antichrist. It seems to me, likely, then, that the Antichrist is a fractal vibration that reinforces the Antichrist mission across all times, places, and people. As the Demiurge is the maker of heaven and earth, it is certainly within its power to flood our cosmos with ever-increasing delusions designed to lull us into the three temptations of Christ in the most pleasant possible way.This age that we live in is rife with narcissism. Narcissism is the self-centered, ego-driven belief that puts our desires ahead of others’ needs and desires. The narcissist does not reach out to others with aid and information for the betterment of all. The narcissist only pursues their own agenda. That this is a narcissistic age should take no convincing to any of you out there, right? We can all see it. Selfies, exercise machines that mirror ourselves as we work out, the often-repeated phrase, you deserve this, used to sell us everything from juicy hamburgers to universal government programs, all speak to our ego’s need for comfort and power at all cost.Indeed, it would seem that our narcissistic egos, when given their full, unbridled reign, blossom into the spirit of the Antichrist. So there is no singular Antichrist human, but as many Antichrist as there are fully blossomed egos. The Antichrist is to be found within the often-repeated mantra that we can take care of each other and build a better tomorrow without God. That more and more powerful governmental and corporate entities will satisfy our needs and give us that paradise on earth that will dispel hunger, climate change, poverty, and inequality, for the betterment of all. That we can live forever through technological manipulation. That we deserve everything we desire—kinkier sex, fancier food, stronger drugs, more stuff dropped on our porches by Amazon. That these are the things that will make us happy, that this will bring us fulfillment. No, that is exactly the spirit of the Antichrist.I went to the website called Christianity.com, and I’m looking at their article on the Antichrist, and they have several points that describe the Antichrist. I’ll hit them real fast here.In 2 Thessalonians, Paul describes the Antichrist this way,“He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”Now putting himself in the temple doesn’t have to be literal. The temple represents the Ten Commandments. It represents the Ark of the Covenant. It represents orthodoxy and prayer. And so putting himself in the temple is like saying that the Antichrist is establishing himself in the place of God’s law.In the book of Revelation, the Antichrist is referred to as the beast. That’s Revelation chapter 13. The beast emerges from the sea, symbolizing chaos and evil, and is given power by the dragon representing Satan. The beast’s reign is marked by blasphemy against God, persecution of the saints, and a relentless quest for global domination.The prophet Daniel provided a glimpse into the nature of Antichrist in Daniel, chapter 7, describing him as a boastful king. This king speaks against the Most High, oppresses the holy people, and seeks to change set times and laws. Daniel’s vision emphasizes the arrogance and audacity of the Antichrist, highlighting his efforts to undermine God’s order and authority.Okay, this must be where they’re getting the Trump accusation from. But the odd thing is that the people in general that are accusing Trump of being the Antichrist, well, they’re not all that worried about undermining God’s order and God’s authority. They want to set up a unitary control system, so they’re already in the pocket of the Demiurge, for the most part. Daniel 7 verse 8 says the Antichrist is portrayed as a little horn with a mouth that speaks boastfully. This imagery signifies his initial insignificance, but eventual rise to power.Daniel 7 verse 25 says he will speak against the Most High and oppress his holy people, and try to change the set times and the laws. The holy people will be delivered into his hands for a time. I just have to laugh at people who are saying that Trump is the Antichrist, because that would put them to be the holy people. And obviously, they think of themselves as the holy people. It’s a holy crusade. The left versus right, it’s a holy crusade. But if you’ve been with us for a while, you realize that these holy crusades are a yin-yang situation. They’re perfectly balanced. It’s the never-ending war. Neither side can claim righteousness, because they have both entered into the war, and that never-ending war is a game that the Demiurge plays.The Antichrist will be powerful and perform miracles. These miraculous acts are meant to authenticate his false claims and persuade many to follow him. Okay, well, here’s where the Elon Musk type of accusation could be made, because Musk does incredible things, and he’s changing technology from retro-engineering captured spaceships, or wherever the heck he’s getting his ideas from. In 1 Kings 18:38, it says that by replicating the miracles performed by the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament, the Antichrist seeks to present himself as a powerful prophet or a divine figure. In Revelation 13:3, the beast receives a fatal wound, but is miraculously healed, astounding the world and leading people to worship him.And the Antichrist performs other miraculous signs. 2 Thessalonians 2:9 says that all sorts of “displays of power through signs and wonders” suggest a variety of miracles, not specified in detail, but intended to awe and deceive the masses. Okay, and speaking of awing and deceiving the masses, have you seen those new 3D holographic projections that don’t require any screen to be projected on now? I saw gigantic whales swimming through the sky. That’s a weird thing to see. So we have that technology right now in the form of AI and holographic projections combined, virtual reality, enough to fool even the elect, if that were possible, as it says in the New Testament.Ultimately, the Antichrist will persecute Christians in particular, attempting to extinguish their faith and loyalty to God. And this phase of persecution will be marked by intense suffering, oppression, and a systematic effort to undermine and destroy the Christian faith. Now that is currently going on in other nations. It’s not going on in the United States, but it does go on in Africa, where thousands, I heard the other day that 65,000 Christians had been slaughtered in one of these African nations, and I forget which one. So these are systematic efforts to undermine and destroy the Christian faith by killing the Christians. So that is not a holy act, that is a demiurgic act, or a satanic act, or an Antichrist act.And then during that period that’s called the Tribulation, in Revelations 13:7, the Apostle John’s vision says, “it was given power,” that is, the Antichrist “was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language, and nation.”And so it’s a global authority and power, which we’re coming into that stage right now. Particularly if we succumb to this idea of universal digital IDs, and then you top it off with changing from actual money that you can hand to people to digital Bitcoin type of money, well then that will be the, in my opinion, the entry into the age of the Tribulation, because there will be no resistance possible. Everything will be controlled. It’s all about power and dominion. It’s not about making things better. It’s not about making people richer, or healthier, or happier. It’s about power and dominion. So it’ll be a very dark age, the Tribulation. We will be persecuted and put to death and hated by all nations, and turned over for torture and death.But the good news is that the Christ will then come. See, that’s what the whole Armageddon thing is about, that the actual Christ comes with the army of Christ and overpowers the Antichrist, because Christ has all the mojo to do so. The Antichrist only arises from the Demiurge, and it never had the power of the ethereal plane. But apparently it’s going to be this period of Tribulation, this final Armageddon, not to kill off the followers of the Antichrist, or to kill and torture them, instead of them killing and torturing us. It’s to show them love.So I think that when Christ comes with the army of Christ, they’re just going to love everybody. They’re going to love everybody. And the battles that are being fought will lay down their arms. They will give up, because they’d rather be in love, and they will see the truth of God. Because He’s going to come so that none can deny Him. The Christ will make Himself manifest, and everyone will be able to see Him. And everyone then will feel the love of Christ, and it won’t just be a mythological claim.Okay, tell me what you think of these ideas. I’d love to hear what you think of the Antichrist, or who you would nominate. Or if you think I’m off track on something, tell me what you think is the right answer to these questions. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward. 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

This is the lecture I delivered to my adult education class this week. It caused quite a stir. One dedicated atheist dropped the class at this point in a huff. It seems that the class is quite alright discussing gnostic concepts in the abstract, but when it comes down to Earth, then it gets real. Suddenly it’s a war between science and religion. The part that ticked off some of the students was demonstrating conscious life within the cells. In other words, consciousness comes down to the cellular level and then levels up through intelligent design to become us through cell division and differentiation.Substack is not behaving. It is supposed to be able to embed the slideshow into this column. Hopefully you can see the slideshow by clicking on the large link immediately below or if that doesn’t work you can also go to the Gnostic Insights.com post where the imbed worked. Second Order powers– the new pleroma DownloadHere are the links to the three videos mentioned in the episode. 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

For regular Gnostics Insights, subscribe here. Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSWelcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review the relationship between fractal consciousness and the outflow of consciousness through Logos and the Aeons, and how the consciousness of Logos led to the Fall. I’ll be reading several verses from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi books.If you are new to Gnostic Insights, don’t worry about grasping everything I say. Just listen and go with the flow. The gnosis will reveal itself, so relax.AEONS“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…”The Aeons of the Fullness of God became self-aware by the giving of praise and glory to the Father. This giving of glory is not for God’s benefit, but for the Aeon’s benefit. It gave them a righteous task to perform alongside their neighbors, which brought them to self-awareness and gave each of them a unique identity. The Aeons are innumerable because they reflect the totality of an infinite consciousness.“… 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.”LOGOSThe final Aeon that was produced as an emanation of the Pleroma of the Fullness arose by all of the Aeons giving glory together. The Fullness thus produced a final Aeon whom the Tripartite Tractate calls by the name Logos. Because Logos was produced through the entirety of the Pleroma giving glory as one, this Aeon possessed within itself all of the characteristics of the entire Pleroma.This youngest Aeon carried within itself all of the traits of every other Aeon, perfect and complete. This was a very talented Aeon resembling the Son of God himself, who also carried all of the traits of the Aeons within its singular self. This final Aeon was named Logos, because he was also endowed with the ability to reason thoughtfully and to figure things out in a step-by-step manner. The word Logos in Greek means reason.“This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit…”All of the Aeons have free will, because the Father has free will and everything that emanates from the Father carries the attributes of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says,“for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one,” (this one being Logos), “such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.”“This aeon was last to have brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude,” [referring, I think, to this concept of fractal iterations…]“In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. This exhibition of similar patterns at increasingly smaller scales is called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry; if this replication is exactly the same at every scale, as in the Menger sponge, the shape is called affine self-similar.” [wikipedia]The construction of a Menger sponge can be described as follows:* Begin with a cube.* Divide every face of the cube into nine squares in a similar manner to a Rubik’s Cube. This sub-divides the cube into 27 smaller cubes.* Remove the smaller cube in the middle of each face and remove the smaller cube in the center of the larger cube, leaving 20 smaller cubes. This is a level 1 Menger sponge (resembling a void cube).* Repeat steps two and three for each of the remaining smaller cubes and continue to iterate ad infinitum.The second iteration gives a level 2 sponge, the third iteration gives a level 3 sponge, and so on. The Menger sponge itself is the limit of this process after an infinite number of iterations.The reason we’re talking about fractals is because consciousness is a fractal. Consciousness rolls out from the Father very much in the manner of any other fractal, where you have the Father’s consciousness to begin with, and then it keeps dividing, dividing, dividing, dividing. It eventually winds up in us, in a fractal matter. And so we carry all of the attributes of the original pattern of the Father. We are fractals of the Father. The Aeons are fractals of the Father. Logos carried within himself fractals of the Father.THE FALL“The intent, then, of the Logos, who is this one, was good. When he had come forth, he gave glory to the Father, even if it led to something beyond possibility, since he had wanted to bring forth one who is perfect, from an agreement in which he had not been, and without having the command.”“And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…”Thomassen translates the word “magnanimously” in the scripture above as “presumptuously.”“And before he had yet produced anything to the glory of the Will and in the union of the members of the ALL, he acted presumptuously, out of an overflowing love, and rushed forward toward that which surrounds the realm of perfect glory.”Given that translation, the movement that resulted in the Fall was presumptuous thought, which is a pretty good synonym for Ego. Yet the intention of Logos was good.The Tripartite Tractate is unique in its gentle assessment of not blaming Logos for the Fall. The book says that this act of disobedience by Logos was within the will of the Father after all, and it was necessary to usher in an organization that needed to come forth “for the revelation of the Fullness.”The Tripartite Tractate says,“for it was not without the will of the Father that the Logos was produced, which is to say, not without it will he go forth. But he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being”So what that passage just said is that Logos, with that capability of acting on his own through will and reaching for the Father and instigating the Fall, was actually within the will of the Father after all. But it was like a secret. Because the Father brought Logos forth. The Father made Logos with all of the capabilities in order to bring us into being. So this was a necessary step. The Fall was a necessary step to usher in materiality out of the ethereal beings.The Father knew what would happen and the Father found it fitting that Logos should be conceived as he was and take the action that he did. The Father knew that this was the path that would lead to material creation—the economy that was to come—“so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being.”What these verses are saying is the Fall of Logos was needed in order to create the next generation of fractals of the Aeons. This next generation of fractal iterations of the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Fullness would come into being in order that the Fullness would be revealed through them. We could say that it is through the Fruit that came from the Fullness into Fall that a new material Hierarchy of God on Earth was created. Logos doubtless thought he was going to instantiate Paradise with his Egoic act. What came instead was a Fall from the Fullness and the first experience of estrangement from the Father.This, then, is the gnostic version of the original Fall, a movement of Ego away from reason, logic, interdependence, duty, and place, which led to the creation of this material universe.You may wonder why we spend time figuring out things that happened so long ago that our universe wasn’t even created yet. The reason is because of that oft-repeated maxim: as above, so below. Logos may have been the first to let his Ego lead him astray but he was certainly not the last.ARCHONS“The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and which is.”“Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be…”“They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being. They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be.”With the introduction of the Archons of the Imitation we begin to see human nature emerging. When humans act outside of the will of the Father and the Fullness and center themselves on egoic dominance, they replicate the Archons’ striving for power and control.And yet, the remnant of glory they retain through the ego of Logos still possesses the fractal formula of the Fullness, making it possible for the Demiurge to create the cosmos.“They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.”“The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his, and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his.”THE BOUNDARYAs Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness, the Father placed a Boundary around the area containing that which had been produced as a consequence of the Fall. The purpose of this Boundary was to separate finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness.Another essential purpose of the Boundary was to establish an “economy” for a system about to unfold. And economy is another word for an ecology. Things have to be in relationship to one another in order to be able to work with one another. So the boundary was required to be put around the fallen bits, the shadows, the imitations of the Pleroma of Logos. They were put inside of a bounded space in order to push them together so that the ecology might be established.“The Father and the Totalities drew away from him, so that the limit which the Father had set might be established – for it is not from grasping the incomprehensibility but by the will of the Father, – and furthermore, (they withdrew) so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being. If it were to come, it would not come into being by the manifestation of the Pleroma. Therefore, it is not fitting to criticize the movement which is the Logos, but it is fitting that we should say about the movement of the Logos that it is a cause of an organization which has been destined to come about.”The Boundary Contains ChaosWe can think of this Boundary as a bubble containing our universe. You can picture these chaotic imitations as quantum foam. Quantum foam is the lowest level of instantiation in this universe of ours, and quantum foam is characterized by randomness and chaos. It does not work together. It is popping in and out of the universe, constantly producing matter and anti-matter that cancel out and destroy each other. Consequently nothing is building; nothing is able to reach out to level up. They lack the Golden Rule of cooperation because they came from the Fall rather than from the Fullness.The Simple Golden Rule requires units of consciousness to work together with their neighbors to share information, assistance, and loving coherence on a single project that benefits ALL. This results in the hierarchical configuration because cooperation always results in the higher the fewer.Archons cannot level up. It requires conscious control to replicate the Golden Rule. Archons do not have consciousness. They are programs.THE RISE OF THE DEMIURGEThe Demiurge went about organizing this universe out of the quantum foam:“over those who belong to the likeness, he set the word of beauty, so that he might bring them into a form.”The Demiurge, by the way, is the ego of Logos that was left behind in the Fall. Logos himself, his unitary self, beat it back up to the fullness as quickly as he could. And he abandoned the results of the Fall, because he couldn’t bring order to the Fall. What he abandoned down below was that overreaching ego that caused the Fall in the first place. That ego takes on the name of the Demiurge. It’s the ego of Logos that controls the matter that has been formed by the Fall.At first the Demiurge established energetic waves, then subatomic particles followed by atomic particles. Everything according to “the higher, the fewer” pattern. The particles combine to make atoms; the atoms combine to make molecules; the molecules combine make elements; the elements combine to make minerals and the aggregations of minerals, and that is the limit of the God of this universe. The Demiurge can only level up to the mineral level. All of the hard, rocky places in our material universe are the handiwork of the Demiurge.We don’t come from the Demiurge; the Demiurge is only in charge of the material universe. The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down. Death is bottom-up.I hope you got something out of this episode.God bless us all, and onward and upward!watch the neat video below of zooming in on the Mandlebrot set!The Most Satisfiying Intense Mandelbrot Deep Zoom Ever 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

We recently had an episode called Synchronicities, broadcast on September 13th of 2025. In that episode I reviewed a Why Files episode about synchronicities and shared some amazing synchronicities that look like coincidences, but they’re just too precise to be coincidental. They give an indication of this very strange nature of the universe that we live in, and in that episode we discussed how the quantum mechanics of this universe at the quantum level seem to explain how these amazing synchronicities occur.In the synchronicities episode, I talked about one of the funny things about quantum mechanics—that whenever someone looks at an object in a scientific experiment at the subatomic level, peering into the subatomic level through their experiment, it is said that “observation collapses potential” and makes the reality. This is because before we observe something, it exists in a state of what is called superposition. Remember, at the subatomic level there’s no such thing as particles. It’s all waves and probabilities. It’s more like a blur, and it doesn’t stop spinning through all of its possibilities until it is observed and then, at that point in time, when it is observed, it stops being a blur of all possible positions and it collapses into one position, solely through the process of being observed by a watchful consciousness.Another strange aspect of quantum mechanics is known as quantum entanglement. This is when two—and it’s not even right to call them objects or particles because they’re not, there is no material reality, it’s all waves and probabilities and forces—when two such subatomic objects have a relationship with each other, no matter how far the space is between them, then when one of them is observed in an experiment, and it stops its superpositional blur at that moment in time, landing on a particular way of being or way of appearing, then the object it is entangled with also collapses at the same exact moment, even though it’s not the one that’s being observed. Furthermore, this entangled “collapse” is instantaneous—faster than light.Not only that, but balance is always occurring throughout the universe, because when one entangled thing collapses in a spin right direction, for example, its entangled partner collapses as spin left. Or when one photon, for example, moves vertically, its polarized partner moves horizontally. In this manner, the universe remains balanced and symmetrical. You can think of it this way: imagine two entangled quanta were a pair of gloves spinning so fast you couldn’t tell which was right and which was left. Once you observe object A to be a the right glove then object B instantly becomes a left glove. If the same object A had been observed to be the left glove, object B would have instantly become the right glove. And before observation, both gloves were simultaneously right and left, left and right, both states at once.Now let us think about this with some gnostic logic. We say that the mind of God is the ground state of all of the consciousness. Another way of saying this is that consciousness permeates every corner of everywhere—both on the ethereal plane and down here on the material plane. So, if observation affects quanta, then quanta are being observed all of the time by the mind of God. It is this Godly observation that holds the cosmos in its balanced physical state. This is how entangled quanta can affect their partners instantaneously. There is no distance or time in the ethereal realm and all of creation is held in steady state within the mind of God, so this is how and why a quark that is observed by a human is instantly balanced with its entangled partner, even if it is on the other side of the universe.In that Synchronicities episode, we talked about quantum field meditation—visualizing potential and then collapsing it into reality. Let’s say that you are moved to want something good for you that’s within God’s will. According to the quantum field meditation as discussed in the Why Files episode, your intentional desire and focus is said to collapse that intention into reality. Quantum field meditation visualizes the potential and, “collapses it” into reality. That’s what happens in healing meditations. You intentionally visualize getting well and it eventually heals the part of you that’s broken. Setting clear intentions is the first step.Quoting from the Why Files’ episode: “every nanosecond, infinite decisions are being made that cause the infinite possibilities to collapse into this one reality. But you can learn to influence the outcome of all those decisions. You can alter your small corner of reality.”My brother Bill and I had a follow-up conversation last week about that concept. He had come to the realization that there is no “collapse” in the sense that the superpositional blur changes into a static object. What is actually happening is that in our cherry jello universe, one reality is arrived at, and the others are not chosen. It all has to do with free will and choice. In the cherry jello universe, what we have been calling observation to collapse potentiality is actually us arriving at a particular cherry and choosing it through free will.A gnostic insight concerning this is that all possible outcomes already exist in the infinite mind of the Father, and it is our free will that chooses one course or one outcome over another. We’re not collapsing anything. The quanta is not stopping its superposition. What is happening is that we are choosing one cherry over another. For example, the scientist’s observation chooses the cherry that spins right instead of left, so to speak. And something that A.J. had talked about in that Why Files episode on synchronicities–and again, go back to my episode on synchronicities if you haven’t read or heard it yet –the universe is filled with choices. It’s not filled with particles. It’s not filled with stuff. It’s filled with choice points, conscious choices, and they’re already there because our God is an infinite God, and it takes infinity to be able to hold all possible choices that could ever possibly happen.As I say, it’s the many worlds theory, but there aren’t many worlds. You don’t need parallel universes or parallel dimensions for these things to happen, like we often see in science fiction or people’s theories. It’s all contained in this one infinity that is the mind of God, and it is our intention to head for a choice, a particular potential, and to find that potential. Quantum theory calls that collapsing the potential, but it isn’t really collapsing, it’s that a choice cherry has been arrived at. You’re choosing a particular outcome. You’re choosing this rather than that, and it’s the choice that makes what quantum physicists call collapse.In the cherry jello universe, our consciousness is swimming through an infinite sea of choices, and every moment of the day we make one choice rather than a different choice, and that is the path of our choices as we swim through the cherry jello of life. The other choice is still sitting there in that infinity of unused or uncollapsed potentials, but once you make a choice by setting an intention and you arrive at that intentional outcome, the cherry that’s already waiting there in your mind is the so-called collapse, but the other uncollapsed choices are still there.Does that make sense to you? It’s a completely different way of looking at quantum superposition and collapse. Nothing’s collapsing. The blur of potential is still there. What the scientist arrives at is one cherry and the infinity of other cherries are still sitting there, because the mind of God holds all possibilities. It is free will that decides the outcome.Now, speaking of swimming toward cherries, one of the aspects of that Why Files episode that I didn’t have time to get to in our previous discussion of it was the vision board. A.J., the host of Why Files, strongly recommended setting up a vision board and then putting pictures or words, clipping things out of magazines or printing things off your computer, of the cherries you wish to swim to, is how I’d put it. So, I have started a vision board. There are only two things on it now because I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to get along with setting up my vision board fully. But what I have on there so far is a picture of my gnostic cyber fiction screenplay becoming a motion picture, and to that end, one of the reasons I’ve been so crazy busy the past few weeks is because I’ve been working on that screenplay. The other thing I have on my vision board is a description of an old Econoline van with what one of our listeners says is the best engine ever built. He recommended it as a possibility for my cherry of a book tour. Well, I wrote down all those notes and I’m walking around with this note in my hand and thinking, how do I file this? Where do I put this note about what RV to buy? I’m afraid if I file it away, it’s going to be filed away, and then when I wonder, what was that van I was supposed to buy? I wouldn’t be able to find it again. So I finally realized as I’m holding this piece of paper in my hand with the notes about the RV—aha! The vision board. So I taped the note onto the vision board and now I have two strong intentions sitting on that vision board and every time I walk past it, I see those intentions which, in this quantum meditation way of thinking of things, causes me to be swimming in the direction of those particular cherries.I must admit, it all sounds kind of silly to me. I’ve heard of vision boards for years and I’ve never tried to put one into practice because I just didn’t understand how it would work, how such a thing is possible, until that episode about synchronicities and then my brother’s discussion with me this week about the philosophy of choice and free will. Because it’s all driven by free will and it’s our choice. It’s not going to magically appear because it’s taped to a vision board. It’s my intention that it should come about that causes me to be moving in that direction.The day after I recorded that Synchronicities episode, I was reading a daily devotional called The Word for You Today that is mailed out by the Christian radio station I listen to. And the first four articles of encouragement in this quarter’s Word for You Today, September 1st through 4th, is about faith. And as I read the discussion of faith and how your faith can produce results, I recognized that it’s what we’ve been talking about. This is the Christian version or the Biblical perspective on quantum intention meditation. It’s a different way of looking at the word faith that I never thought of before and I wouldn’t have even noticed it except for our discussion on quantum intention.When people talk about faith it’s usually a gigantic concept, right? Usually it stands for the ideology you believe in. I have faith in God. I have faith in Jesus Christ. It’s my ideology to hold certain beliefs. My faith is part of my Gnostic Christian meme bundle. But faith, as explained in The Word For You Today is “the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. The certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we cannot see it up ahead.” When you put it that way, I can tell that I have experienced that kind of faith throughout my life without labelling it as faith. For example, I always knew I’d earn a Ph.D. someday, so I wasn’t concerned about how or when. I had faith. I always knew I would share spiritual knowledge with others, but I didn’t know how or when. And here we have the last twenty years of blogging, writing books, and podcasting. I didn’t so much work toward these as goals as simply knowing they would occur.Here’s a quote from Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament, Hart’s translation:Now faithfulness is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of unseen realities. For the ancients were commended for this. In faith we rationally perceive that the ages [and here I would use the word “aeons” rather than ages] were composed by an utterance of God, so that the things that are seen have not been made from the things that are manifest. (Hebrews 11:1-3)In our Gnostic system, the Aeons have thought everything through in advance. The ethereal plane is the unseen reality. The Aeons were emanated by God so that the ethereal plane would become manifest reality. This is why the Tripartite Tractate does not condemn Logos for the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate says that the Fall was necessary for the Economy that was destined to come about—that being this material cosmos.The Bible also says in James 2:17 that faith not accompanied by action is dead. And this teaching says that effective faith calls for an act of your will. This again points to making choices propelled by faith in a particular outcome. It is a choice you make to fully embrace what God says in his word. So they’re talking about choice. They’re talking about acts of will.For just as the body without spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead. (James 2:26, Hart)Usually that verse refers to doing good deeds to prove one’s faith in God. But if you look at it in this Gnostic way, the “works” is the cherry you are moving toward with your free will, and your faith is the intention to reach it. The Bible says that God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.So do not cast away your confidence, which has for its recompense a great reward. For you need to persevere so that, having done God’s will, you may receive what is promised. (Hebrews 10:38, Hart)The apostles felt they didn’t have enough faith and so they said to Jesus, increase our faith. And Jesus replied,If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea and it will obey you. (Luke 17:6).So we don’t need a lot of faith. We just need the strongly believed intention. Yet it always has to be in God’s will for it to occur, which is good. It’s a backstop for us. If you have faith and intention to create chaos and death, it would only happen through archonic influence because it’s not in God’s will.But it is God’s will for us to fully experience this universe that we have been incarnated into. That’s why there’s so many choice points. All the choices are there to be made. And the faith that is spoken about in the Bible is meant to produce results. It’s not meant to just fill you up with assurance of salvation. And faith is not accomplished by action. Faith precedes action. As these quotes by James affirms:Every good act of giving and every perfect gift is from above, descending from the Father of the Luminaries [the Aeons], with whom there is no alternation or shadow of change. (James 1:17, Hart)So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Yet someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” You show me your faith without the works, and I will show you faith by my works. You have faith that God is one? You are doing well. Even the daemonic beings [archons] have that faith, and they tremble. But are you willing to recognize, O you inane man, that faith without works yields nothing? (James 2:17-20, Hart]In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. In other words, faith produces outcomes. The choices you make produce the outcomes that are the fruit of those choices. Just as the quantum meditation folks claim.The Word for Today devotional says, concerning faith,The biblical prescription for faith is simple but potent. One, you decide to believe in God’s promise and his power to make it happen, leaving the how and when up to him. Two, you choose to act in keeping with what you believe before you see any evidence of the results. Three, God responds to your faith by keeping his unbreakable promise. Quote, “Hath he said and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken and shall he not make it good?” (from the Old Testament, Numbers 23:19) God goes to work exercising his unlimited capacity to perform his word. Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:24)So it’s not that God has to perform or accomplish this for you. It’s all there. It’s all ready in the mind of God. The cherries are in the jello. We have to, through our belief and actions, make choices. It all has to do with our free will and our choices. God has already done what God does. God has laid all the cherries in the universe that will ever exist out in front of us for our choosing. This concept gives a whole new meaning to the phrase cherry-picking.Now, going on to the fourth devotional of the faith series, The Word for Today talks about How Your Faith Can Produce Results.Saying that you believe is just the beginning. Activating your faith means preparing for the answer to arrive. So, if I really expected an answer to my prayers, how would I prepare for arrival? Jesus gave his disciples a parable, Matthew 13:31-32, when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man planted in his field. When it grows, it becomes a tree.” See, the farmer believes that if he plants the seed and cares for it and tends it, waters it, fertilizes it, keeps an eye on it, protects it from the pests, that it will grow into the thing that he has planted.So, we begin by praying for wisdom to make the right decisions (James 1:5-7). We aim for the thing to come about, which means that while waiting to get to that cherry that we’re swimming towards, we actively involve ourselves with things that will cause us to move toward that cherry. We break our big plan and our intention into small steps that can be accomplished. Don’t wait for the faith to grow. Don’t wait for fear to turn you aside. Take small steps. Make choices. Make all of the choices in a row that lead you to that intention. This devotional suggests that we start thanking God even before we can see the answer. We aim toward the thing and if we’re missing it, we adjust our aim. And then this Christian devotional reiterates that faith and actions working together produce results.And I’ve been sharing all this just by way of saying that this quantum meditation, this focusing and intention moving toward that result, is not unscriptural. It’s not ungodly or New Age. It’s all laid out before us by the Father. And if we need assistance to move in that direction, we meditate upon the Father, the Son, the Fullness. We ask the Aeons for assistance. We ask Christ for assistance in faith, knowing that the answer is already there and that all things work together for good for those who love God. Amen!Onward and upward and God bless us all. 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

This week I appeared as a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. I’m going to make that YouTube video this week’s episode. The interview went well and the viewers like it very much, judging by their Comments of the episode. I’m including the YouTube link here on the transcript. The episode is called “What Is The Gnostic Pleroma? ”The episode lasts an hour and a half. People in Comments said it was their favorite episode from Aeon Byte. Seemed to cause quite a positive stir among the viewers.It’s funny, when the interview was over and we were saying our goodbyes, I failed to say “onward and upward” to Miguel and he noticed and called me out on it. He wanted to hear the blessing! Isn’t that sweet?On this Aeon Byte appearance I also give a reading of my new kiddie book “Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.”I encourage you to go watch it and let me know what you think.All of my gnostic books are available for purchase on amazon.com. I always price my book as low as amazon will allow in order to make them more accessible to the greatest number of people.PLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW ON AMAZON!Thank you,ONWARD AND UPWARD! AND GOD BLESS.cydHere’s the YouTube transcript of the interview below.My name is Miguel Connor and I am still your pompatus of Gnosis– that man across the waters of creation. And good to see everybody on this moon day. And very excited today because we will be discussing a topic that is very important and often uh misunderstood about Gnosticism and that is the pleroma. And I can’t think of anybody better to engage in this conversation than our guest Dr. Cyd Ropp. She will be discussing her new work, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Gospel. And of course, we will touch upon the great ideas from her other recent book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And yeah, check it out. Definitely check it out if you’re looking for a good audio book. I do the narration and you will be taken on an amazing Gnostic journey of awakening that is useful for you.Cyd, thank you very much as always for coming to the virtual Alexandria.My pleasure. I always like to be here. Thanks, Miguel.We always like to have you here. Life the the world is better. Well, the world is the world, but at least uh the psyche is better. And with us, too, we got Mr. Graham Pong. Graham, how are you doing on a Monday? Are you Garfield or something other? Oh, no. I’m something other. I’m definitely uh this week I’m much more a fan of one of my favorite uh existential philosophers, Alfred E. Newman. You know “what me worry?” seems to be the answer to this mad world we’re in.Exactly. Exactly. There are answers and you got to find them where you find them. Again, I keep quoting Julian of Norwich. “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner things shall be well.” It’s going to be okay. And certainly Cyd’s work and mining the Valentinian Tripartite Tractate tells us that.So uh well where do we start? First we want to look at your new book. We’ll talk about the pleroma but first Children of the Fullness. This is something you’ve been working for on for a long time, right Cyd?Well, one of my listeners, I also have a podcast– Gnostic Insights– and one of my listeners suggested a children’s book. She’s a young mom, little kids. She goes, “I can’t find any Gnostic children’s books.” And I believe that I have written the first ever Gnostic kiddie book. And it’s ironic because people have this idea–and of course the way a lot of gnosticism is presented, it is very labyrinthian– but they have this idea that gnosis is impossible to achieve or it’s so difficult how can we grasp it? And I have actually simplified it down to uh well the book is 34 pages long but it’s double page spreads like kiddie books are. It’s a big size book and so it’s actually simplified down to only 17 story boards that aged 2 to eight can understand. And really, their parents. I’m thinking they’re the ones that are going to be sapping it up the most—the people that are reading this book to the kids. So, it’s very exciting to be able to produce a book in a cartoon type of way for little ones that’s true.Brilliant idea. Love it. Love it so much. And what’s was the process? I mean, your process was to even simplify it more while it’s still understandable. The script. Yeah. How did you find an artist? What was the process?Okay, I’ll tell you the whole thing. First of all, the whole simple thing because I want to mention that to people. I believe in simplicity. Truth is simple. The more excess verbiage you slap on it, generally the further it wanders from the simplicity of truth. And the most profound truths are the simplest. So whenever I write anything, I’m not only thinking of writing to us humans, I think of my dog as if I were trying to teach my dog gnosis. What could that dog understand? Or a flower. What does a flower know of God and the Fullness? And so I simplify all gnosis down to what all of us creation creatures– the second order powers—that we’ll talk about when we talk pleromas– that any second order power can understand. So, to simplify the Gnostic gospel down to a 2 to 8 year-old level is no big deal because it just simplifies it even more clearly.So what I did was I took the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi– and that is a Valentinian book. Uh it doesn’t have a lot of the extraneous mythologies that most of the other books of the Nag Hammadi have. It’s more of a point A to point Z type of book and a roll out of cosmology. So I just took the Tripartite story of the fall of the Aeon known as Logos. His splitting into two. He flees back up to the Fullness and his egoic self that caused the fall in the first place stays down below and that becomes the god of this universe. The Demiurge. Anyway, I didn’t want to use big words and nonfamiliar gnostic words in the telling of the text. So I don’t use words like Aeons, Fullness, hierarchy, demiurge. I make them words that people are more familiar with because I’m assuming this is going to be a non-gnostic audience that just kind of bumbles across this kids book. I’m hoping. And so I call the Aeons angels to simplify things. And I just call the demiurge the dark twin. And it just goes like that.I found an artist on Fiverr. You know, the Fiverr app. We know Fiverr because we’re tech people, but most people that I talk to don’t know what Fiverr is. And if you don’t out there who are listening, Fiverr is like Uber, only instead of calling for a car, you’re calling for an artist or a composer or an illustrator of some sort. So, I put a notice on Fiverr that I wanted a children’s book illustrator. And then I looked at all of their samples and I picked a guy, a wonderful guy in Indonesia. And he was very helpful, barely spoke English. But we got the points across and I think he has drawn a beautiful book that completely illustrates the gnosis I was trying to get across.Awesome. That’s the story. Great job.And now it’s on Amazon now as an ebook Kindle and as a paperback, but I wanted it in hardback too so that libraries would stock it. So I had to go to a different printer than Amazon because they won’t do an 8” by 8” children’s hardback book. So I had to go to a different printer and now I’m pushing it through– talk about labyrinthian– I’m pushing it through these various types of outlets that librarians use and trying to get it on shelves. That’s the plan.Awesome. Yeah. Very excited. Yeah, very excited indeed. So I guess the question as uh we move on — would be what is the pleroma? I mean traditionally obviously to geek out uh the Valentinians of course saw Paul’s writings and they thought oh my god it’s full of cryptic symbolism and you know, you know like we do watch a band we see and we read a book and it may be cryptical and we go gaga over it. We all do it. But to the Valentinians, Paul had this amazing secret symbolism. And when they would say, you know, Christ is the Fullness of God incarnate. You know, the pleroma Fullness. And it appears in Ephesians, Colossians, they’re like, what is this? What is this Fullness? It must be the divine realm. And they saw it as, you know, the capacities of God, the mind of God, the potentials. And other Gnostics, the Sethians would call it the eternal realm. and the Manichaeans the treasury of light and so it became, again to simplify, like the hermetics it’s the capacities of the mind of God– the potentials and personhood– god knowing his own aspects and flowing out in this perfect realm until Logos or Sophia had other plans.They were going to disrupt the first kingdom or they were going to rebel. But is that it? Or tell us how you see the pleroma.Sure, except I don’t think of that. Well, you know, I’m not a historian. I really don’t even like history much. I am a philosopher and I look at the works themselves. So, when I read the Tripartite Tractate, what I see are the truths behind what Paul wrote, not derivative from Paul. I think that they go side by side. I actually think it should be one of the books of the Bible of the New Testament. And it fits right there between the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament. It squeezes into that space as far as time and thoughts go. So what the pleroma means is the Fullness of God. And yes, the Fullness of God is referred to throughout the New Testament especially. But I think when they, when the Nicene Council stripped the Valentinianism out of the New Testament, it took away what it meant.So actually, and that’s not the only term in the in the New Testament where we’ve lost the actual intent of meaning of Fullness. And it doesn’t just mean, oh, God is great. God is full. God is so big and ungraspable. That’s not what Fullness means. The pleroma is the– Okay, so God wanted to be known. It says that throughout the Bible. God, and we’re talking about the God above all gods, by the way. We’re not talking about the God of this world or the God of the Old Testament. We’re talking about the Father. And I believe that when Jesus referred to the Father or when he wanted us to pray “My Father who art in heaven,” or the ethereal plane, he’s talking about the ultimate consciousness, the ground state of everything. But God is illimitable and omnipotent and everywhere and knows everything. There’s no way we can know God. But God wants to be known. God doesn’t want to be up there all alone. So God emanated a monad, a person of himself. And in Christianity, that’s called the Son. It’s simply the emanation or the encapsulation of the otherwise illimitable God. And so the Son is also though the first pleroma. He’s the Fullness. And this moment– there’s no time in the ethereal plane — but the instant that the Son was emanated from the Father, he split into all of his variables is what we would call it in math or science nowadays. So he wasn’t just a single monad. He was an infinite array. And this is where I differ from a lot of the other gnostics. They think there are is x number of Aeons, but there’s not. It doesn’t make any sense. The Father is infinite. The Son is infinite in his capacity and in his scope. So if you differentiate infinity, well there’s an infinite number of differentiations. And so I think that there are, in the Fullness of God, an infinite number of differentiations.And at first they were one. They were coexistent with the Son and they had no self-identity at all. So that really didn’t do the Father much good. Yeah, he’s sitting there. The Son and the Father are glorifying each other, but that doesn’t go anywhere. And so they wanted to emanate and that’s how we come into being. But we’re down downstream a bit. So the Fullness that first differentiated didn’t have self-awareness but in their giving glory to the Son and the Father– or the first emanation and the ground state of consciousness if you don’t like the word Son and Father, that is really immaterial what the words are– it’s the concepts that count. Alright, anyway, as soon as the Fullness became self-aware then all those infinities of fullnesses or totalities, made themselves into a hierarchy. And a hierarchy looks like a pyramid just because that’s what a hierarchy looks like. The higher the fewer.[note to readers—I’m going to stop editing and correcting the AI at this point because I don’t have time today to edit another 29 pages of YouTube AI mistakes. Read on if you care to, or switch to watching the episode on You Tube. BTW, note how many errors remain and, mind you, I’ve already spent an hour making global changes using the Replace function in Word for Windows for all of the words that appeared in the first five pages of transcript. This is why Aeon is spelled right and gnostic and pleroma, etc etc etc.]Can we put up the little slide? Oh, I’m I’m looking at a picture of a pyramid down here on your on your desk.Yeah. Let me put it up for the audience. Where is Here you go. There you go. Okay. So this is how I conceive of theoriginal hierarchy of the Fullness of God. And this is supposed to represent an infinity of a Aeons. Aeo ns. Andthat’s one of the mistakes that that’s one of the words that’s been lost out of Christianity. When they use the word Aeonin the New Testament, they translate it as a unit of time, but it isn’t necessarily a unit of time.It’s just as likely to be a unit of consciousness. And that’s a very exciting concept. So these Aeons are allconscious self-aware beings who have a place, an identity, a job to do. They’vegot neighbors on either side. They know where they are, who they belong to, andwhat their job is. And they sorted themselves. Hierarchy is not a nastyword. They they sorted themselves. My feet do not feel less important than myhead. I need my feet just as much as my head. So anyway, so that’s the originalFullness. Your head’s not exploiting your feet with taxes and saying that’s right. That’s right.That that comes out of the demiurgic imitation of these things. So here we have a picture of theoriginal hierarchy of the Aeons of God or the Fullness of God. And this isencapsulating the entire entirety of the Son of God. And then right up there onthe very top is a fractal of the Fullness of God in the Tripartitetrackct date. The Aeon who is the top Aeon, the last Aeon to be produced, themost perfect and complete. He had miniatures of all the other Aeons of theFullness of God within his own pleroma. So you’re seeing a pleroma of and in inour Tripartite tractate reading of the gnostic gospel that is called Logos.That top the capstone of the pyramid is Logos and that’s his fractal pleromasitting on top of the great pleroma of the Fullness of God. So those are calledthe first order of powersand everything. Everything is well until it wasn’t. Right.That’s right. That’s right. All is good. And they’re in complete harmony even though they have identities which meansthey have egos. And ego isn’t necessarily a bad name. It’s just your identity. It’s like an address in aname. It doesn’t have to mean I’m an Aeon with a name and I’m full of myself. No, it’sjust I’m this Aeon and I sit right about in the middle and I’ve got these neighbors and this is my job. That’s allit meant. So, uh so that’s that’s thefirst order of powers. All right. And then well then as theysay what went wrong? I mean we’re talking about the definition of nostism which is outdated because Hans Jonasassumed there had to be a Sophia. This is pre- Nagamadari library but as we can seeSophia isn’t the cause of the fall in this one in this no Logos is the cause of the fall butLogos means all knowledge all knowledge and logic thinking the ability to have wisdomand Sophia means wisdom they’re both Greek words so I believe that they are interchangeable concepts they are theAeon with the wisdom who is elevated to the top position and ofThis came down in a fractured form into Christianity as Lucifer, the angel oflight who’s sitting at the top who falls. So, Logos because in my way ofinterpreting events and I’m the one that’s calling Logos his pleroma as fractals because it saysin the uh Tripartite trackct date that Logos did containall of the others within him only smaller lesserbut he was given wisdom and of course has free will because all Aeons have free will because everything that proceedsfrom the originating consciousness has free will and we are all from theoriginating consciousness. So we have all of the attributes of the Father. We have love, we haveconsciousness, we have free will, we have entityand uh Logos made a mistake. He was trying to do a good thing in theuh in the in the Tripartite track day. It’s it’s it’s the only book I believeof the Nag Hammadi that says ah you know don’t condemn the Aeon who fell becausehe his fall was necessary to bring about the next order to come. So apparentlyit was in the Aeons’s minds. They’re sitting there dreaming of this place,this creation. They they conceived of everything that would ever come to be because they are after all the mind ofGod. Mhm. And so he’s a fractal of that and he thought of it too, but he didn’t realizehe was supposed to stick on top of the pleroma and just be like the the head ofit. He thought he could do it all by himself. So he overreached. He tried to bring the Fullness to the Father andplug directly back into the Father the way the Son does because the Son still plugs into the Father but everybody elseis further away because if we were to pl if you and I were trying to plug backinto the Father we would be annihilated is the word used in the Tripartitetractate so it’s not a good idea he tried to plug in the Father said no you will be annihilated push him back outAnd instead of going back to his place in the Fullness, he fell. And it is thatis the fall. Not Adam and Eve. The fall is when the Aeon fell from the etherealplane out into what? Nothingness. And now that becomes our materialuniverse, the cosmos. Exactly. And then so of course now we wehave the rescue operation. Yes. The rest of your operation of little Logos. Poor little Logos.That’s right. Logos is out. He’s He fell. He cracked open like uhHumpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty. That’s right. And um his pleroma was no longer in that neat andtidy hierarchical arrangement and it just spilled out all over the place andit wouldn’t obey him. Logos is trying down there saying, “Come on back. What are you doing? Where you going?” Andthey just go, “Ah, screw you.” And they just went rolling on their merry way. And he couldn’t get them back. And hewas horrified. Logos was horrified. And so children, children, this isso he actually abandoned them. He he couldn’t get anything done. So because the rescue operation was initiatedthough by the Fullness of God, they pulled him back up. He didn’t get back up on his own. The Fullness prayed forhim and Logos went back up. And thenaltogether Logos and the Plleoma prayed for salvation for the mess that had beencome into existence down below and for the ego of Logos which stayed down belowuh which has been given the name the Demiurge. And they want to save theDemiurge because he’s part of Logos. He needs to be reunited. And so that’s therescue operation. Clean up this material mess and bring the Demiurge back uphigh. And then everything that came of that except the shadows and theimitations that didn’t exist from the beginning, but everything from the beh everything from the beginning will goback up into the ethereal plane. Mhm. No, makes sense. And then but uh wehumans are this as you say or as the tripart tract is said we’re the secondorder powers. We’re different. Okay. Right. Yes. The the next pleromathe second economy it’s called. The first economy is that first plurleof the Aeons and Logos. The second economy is down here now in the materialcosmos. And we living creatures with consciousness,with love, and with the power of the Fullness. We were fruited like a like aslime mold. We were fruited down here into this otherwise completely deadcreation down below because the split off ego of Logos that stayed down belowthe demiurge has no power from God. It doesn’t have the consciousness or thedirect flow. It’s a flow of consciousness directly from the Father through the Son through the hierarchy ofthe Fullness that being the uh first order of powers and then we were fruited down here andwe’re the second order of powers. Every living thing, everything that is germinated and grows.The demiurge can’t grow anything. All he can do is put broken things together and we call that matter. We call thatmaterial. Sounds like my ego in relationships. Well, we are Good point though. We’refractals of the whole fall. We’re fract Everything’s fractally nested. It’s allfractals. So everything we say about Logos and the demiurge, Logos and hisfallen twin happens to us too because we as children of God, we have the Fullnessinside of us. there. Our little oam and our little sperm have the Fullness ofGod and they get together and we are now channeling the Fullness of God and thelove and consciousness. So we have the Fullness of God. We’re born with remembrance. We’re called those of thegood thought, those of the remembrance. Whereas matter has no remembrance. It isnot of the good thought. It was of an egoic overreach.So yeah, we can identify the Logos and the demiurge because they are parts ofus. Matter of fact, we second order powers. Although we came with the purity of thefirst order powers within us, that’s our big S self. I call it not our big assself, but our big S self. Uh uh that’s our, you know, our ourgolden self inside. That is the god inside of us. But we are melded to thismaterial world when we come in. Obviously that little spark of life. Youdo you know that when a have you heard this Miguel that when a sperm fertilizes an OAM a spark of a photon of light isemitted? I have. Yes. That’s that’s really a fascinating thought, isn’t it? Yeah. So, so we’ve got this uh uh lifeand light inside of us, but then we’re slapped onto these molecules as we growupward with our molecular bodies. And so, we are part Demiurge and we arepart uh Fullness of God. And that’s that good angel bad angel business and why wereach down instead of looking up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, interestingcomment. I just my questions are are we saved by his blood sacrifice on the cross or is that a demonic lie? So,tripart track. Who is Jesus? Who’s big J? All right, I’ve got this phone. Jesus.This darn phone. Okay. Jesus is the second order embodimentof Christ. Christ and Jesus are notex they Jesus embodies Christ. Jesus is the only second order power to everfully embody Christ. So he was born that’s why the whole bit about uh partGod part man Jesus.The blood I always wondered about the blood. I mean that that’s been one of the things I have contemplated all of mylife as I’ve walked with Jesus and I have walked with Jesus since I was about 5 years old. So I’m walking with theman. I am a Christian. I am baptized. I am dipped in the Missouri River,talking tongues, all of that kind of stuff. So umOh, now the other phone’s talking. I can’t hear it. It must be on your It must be on your side cuz I getMan, I thought I muted it. I only muted the ringer as it turns out, but the voice is still yapping back there. I’m alittle ADHD, so I get distracted easily. Sorry about that. So, no. Uh, here’swhat the blood of Christ is. The blood of Christ is the complete embodiment ofthe purity and Fullness of Christ. It is the bringing of Christ into this fallenworld. The blood dripping on the earth of this fallen world is part of theredemption of the Demiurge. I think of Christapart from Jesus. I mean I love Jesus. I walk with Jesus. Jesus is my man.However, Christ is still up in the ethereal plane. He’s called the third order of powers. He has a pleroma of hisown and it’s called the third order of powers and it outranks a second order of powers. And the third order of powers isall of the mojo of the ethereal plane. It’s not just Logos and the Fullness praying for the redemption of the leftbehind half of Logos, but it’s the complete Fullness of God and the Son ofGod and the Father giving blessing toredemption. And so the Christ embodies all of the power of the originatingconsciousness. And he is what you could say the correcting algorithmfor the fall. And the correcting algorithm is needed because if you lookat it in a musical sense the pure tone of consciousness is one thing but whenit fell it got out of tune and we’re down here rolling around inthis disharmonic state. So the Christ is the hum of the Father and when Jesuscame he brought that hum with him and the blood of Jesus on the ground is nota heresy I don’t think. Did that answer that question do you think? I think it does. No it makes perfectsense. And for everybody else if you do have questions might not be able to get to it. Please super chat them so Grahamor I can get to them. And uh yeah uh really not much housekeeping. You wantto take a look at the children’s uh at the Children of the Fullness or show some of the other slides before cuzChildren of the Fullness of course we’ll simplify it in a podcast. Yes. But hey um housekeeping for amoment. Since my stupid telephone over there answered and the person left a message, it’s going to go beep beepevery so often and everybody’s going to hear it. Don’t worry about it. If you Okay, if if you hear it, I’ll go and uhyou know throw the phone. Can you hear it? I don’t hear I didn’t even hear the phone ring.Okay, good. Every I was going to say I heard it vaguely one time, but I haven’t heard it in a while.You must have some noiseancelling stuff on your computer or something. Beep.Okay. All right. What’s the question? You might be like the telltale heart or something. ItIt is. It is. And it’s so annoying because I tell you what, 99% of thephone calls I get are junk. They’re trying to sell me something. Of course,they’re all trying to or they’re politicians trying to get me to contribute. God,I can’t get them to stop. Stop. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome to this world of uhYeah. Too much technology, too much information. And I was going to ask do you want to uh jump on the children ofthe Fullness or sure let’s do that because this will uh it’s quite a journey and for the audience uh pleasecheck out our interview last year late 2024 if you want a more expanded uh viewof a simple uh explanation of the Gnostic gospel. But let’s pull up the uhthere you go. That’s not the one. Remove. There you go. There it is.Okay. And just let me know when you want to switch the slide. Children of the Fullness, an ostic myth by Cyd Rob.There we go. And you see, I depicted the Aeons as angels. And by the way, someAeons are angels, but not all Aeons are angels. But all angels are Aeons. How’s that fora logical? But anyway, so yeah. Uh so but but forthe sake of it being a children’s book, these are these are the aonic familieshaving babies. And you know, I think I will not only look at the children’s book, but when we’re on each page, I’mgoing to maybe explain briefly the depth behind that part of it too, right?Sure. Of course. Okay. So let’s turn the page because we’ll turn the pages. Bob Seager saying,“All right, so this is the first double page spread in the book. Long ago, inthe dark, empty sky, Father God dreamed of everything that would come to be. TheFather gave birth to a Son who shared with him all of his love and power.And the Son brought forth angels to help him build the paradise his Father had imagined.” Now, I know a lot of peopledon’t like the words Father and Son. Once again, don’t get hung up on labels.It’s the concept that matters. So, you can call it the source. You can call it the base state or the base matrix ofconsciousness. You can call the Son the emanation of the Father. I like to callthe Son the bucket dipped into the sea, but you won’t find that in anybody else’s uh uh gospel. So, uh the theFather god dreamed of everything that would come to be. That’s because he’s omnipotent and and and knows everything,right? So, the Son brought forth angels to help him build the paradise his Father hadimagined. And that is my way of simplifying this for a children’s book.That’s what we talked about. This is going to be the first pleroma, the all the totalities of the all. Andthey’re still all up in the ethereal plane. Okay. Turn. Okay. turn.The angels gave glory to the Father and sang songs about his great power, love, and sweetness. Now, the the a the Aeonsthat is their primary job is to commune with the Father and they like to give glory. And I I’ve often thought, youknow, sometimes it seems when you’re in church that the Father is like needy andweedling for praise and glory. Oh, please. I want your praise. Worship me,please. That isn’t what glory is. Glory is getting in tune with the originatingconsciousness. It’s being in tune. And the way you get in tune is to giveglory. It’s not for the Father’s sake. It’s for our sake. It’s the way we uhget in tune, I guess, is the thing you can say. And plus giving glory. It’s like when you’re at a let’s say you’reat a concert. Let’s say you’re at a rock concert and somebody’s just done a great song and everybody screaming and goingyeah at the end. They love that’s giving glory. And it’s that feeling of wantingto give glory that the that the Aeons do or that the angels do. It’s inherentthat if you were in the presence of God, there is nothing more that you would want to do than to applaud and go righton. That’s it. So that’s what giving glory does.And so the angels gave glory to the Father and sang songs about his sweetness, love, and power. And it isthrough the process of giving glory to the Father in company with all the other Aeons.So there’s an innumerable number of Aeons in that hierarchy of the Fullness of God. And they give glory together. Theygive glory with their neighbors. They might give glory by themselves. They might all give glory together, but it’sthis sort of logarithmic expansion of ways you can give glory that create newand more and more and more Aeons. So, it already started out as a huge thing. It was already the Fullness of God. But nowthe angels are loving each other, the Father and the Son. They make angel families because they have so much loveto share because they’re combining. You see what I mean? Does that make sense?Okay. And of course, every Aeon and in the book it’s called every angel had special talents and abilities andtogether they dreamed of the Father’s paradise. So every Aeon is a variable of the Son.Every Aeon has a unique talent and every combination of Aeons has a combination ofunique talents. So there might be an Aeon that like specializes in singing. Theremight be a neon that specializes in art and guitar. Everything that we know, all of the talents that come down to us,math, creativity, art, music. I play this instrument, you play that. They allhave Aeons. They all have Aeons in the Fullness of God. And we are their children. So eachof us people and and of course it’s true of every every living thing from the flowers and the bugs up through theanimals and us we are each a unique combinationof this combinatory quality that Aeons do. You know I don’tknow how many Aeons I’m a combination of. I know we’ve got like 50 trillion cells in our body. So we’re at least 50trillion Aeons in us. But there’s also unique combinations. So that’s why myprimary talent is probably from Aeons who like to write and talk and sing. Butsomebody else’s primary talent, they didn’t have so much of those guys, but they’ve got more of the visual artsor more of the mathematical or the scientific logistical prowess. So youwere all unique combinations of this infinite pleroma of the first order ofpowers. We are the second order of powers that are combinations of them. And so I’m saying uh angel families.We’re part of the angel babies. And then we are sent down. You can turn.And then you’re we’re sent down into uh this Fullness. Now, my version in thechildren’s book of Logos sitting on the top with his fractals is this guy downhere. There’s little Logos with his halo, and he’s making a fractal copy.He’s making a model of the ethereal plane. It’s just a uh, you know, arepresentation of him being able to recreate the Fullness of God becauseobviously that’s just a little baby model right there. But I I’m very proud of my um my illustrator who was able totake that idea and do that. I think he did a great job of showing that that’s Logos and his fractal model of paradise.And so reading it, it says the final angel born was very special because he knew the whole plan of paradise. Hisname was Logos. Logos decided to build paradise all on his own without the other angels. Hewanted to surprise the Father with his gift of paradise. And of course, that’s what he was trying to do when he when hefell. He was trying to bring paradise. Look, look what I built to the Father.But that wasn’t the plan. And he shouldn’t have tried to plug back into the Father with it. And that’s why hewas repelled and fell back.Next. So here’s Logos on the left page.bringing his model of paradise up to the Father who was standing up on that cliff. Uh but when he tried to bring theFather his gift, he fell all the way out of heaven.There he goes. And Logos crashed into the darkness and broke apart and now hewas split in two. And you see on the far right there’s Logos going, “Oh my head.”And that’s the uh that’s uh the demiurge crawling out from behind him. And yousee he’s not seeing that the demiurge is crawling out. He because he’s lookingthe other way and he’s oh my head. But and the deurge isn’t really looking at him either. So neither of them realizeswhat’s gone on there. All right, we can turn.Okay. Logo was horrified and that’s a direct quote from the from the Tripartitetrackct date horrified by his shadow twin and broken paradise and he flewback up to heaven. Now, I’m not making the story up, mind you. This is directly out of the Tripartite Tractate. And inmy big book, my big book,there it is. This explains all of this in exquisite detail, I would say. Wouldn’t you,Miguel? Yes. Yes. And as narrated by Miguel Connor. Yes.You leave no Monad unturned. I do. I do not. We We tell the whole thing. They explain the whole thing. Youonly have to want to understand. Now, by the way, I’ve given that book and I’veeven given the children’s book now to many people and they’re like, I don’tget it. I just don’t get it. I don’t see how you cannot get this children’s story for heaven’s sake. Here it is. You haveto have eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to want tounderstand. So this is what it means by saying that we must seek after thegnosis. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. I have done mybest to simplify the gnostic gospel all the way down so that anybody of anyeducation level. You don’t have to be a philosopher can understand it. You just have to havean open mind and keep turning the page and it will make sense. It all falls into place. And here it is for two toeight year olds. So come on, really? Anyway, Logos was horrified. He flewback up to heaven because uh as we already mentioned, because the Plleomaof the First Order of Powers was praying over the fall, and they were trying to make it better. So, first thing they didwas pull Logos back up. And there he is flying away, looking over his shoulder.See, he’s looking back over his shoulder in horror. And there’s the Demiurge sitting there in this muddy broken placeand there’s nothing there. It’s all darkness. And then on the second page, the twin, Idon’t use the word demiurge because I’m trying to keep small words in the book. The twin forgot all about Logos and theangels and the Father above. In fact, he thought he was God.And innosticism, that’s another word for the Demiurge. What is it? the ignorantgod or the amnesic god. He doesn’t remember where he came frombecause the knowing part of him beat it back up to the first order of powers. Sohe was sadly abandoned down here in this mess. And you see the broken the brokenuh model of paradise which is simply a representation of the broken pleroma ofLogos. So it was fractals to begin with and then it broke apart.So it wasn’t that paradise fell, it’s a fractal ofparadise. And I we’re just going to take it. You all know what fractal means bynow. If you don’t know what a fractal is, go back to one of our previous interviews, or go to um GnosticInsights, which is my podcast, and you can look it up. All there. It’s all there. Yeah. Andthis obviously wonder where Jung got some of his ideas. It’s right here. Any Oh, yeah.Shadow ego. It’s all here. Oh, well, you know that Jung purchased the Tripartite tract. That was the bookthat Jung owned out of this otherwise untransated Egyptian codeex that wasfound in the desert in 1945. And he had it translated directly from uh CopticGreek into German. And this is exactly where Jungcame up with his transpersonal psychology. It is tripartiteism.There you go. There you go. For sure. All right, slide seven. So,what’s going on here? Well, shadow god. The shadow god down below. And uh it’sall darkness and ugly. You see, it’s matter. It’s material. There’s no life.It’s just atoms and molecules and aggrids. It’s aggregates of minerals,elements. And up above there’s Logos looking back down at his severed.That’s part of him. Right? So he has been ripped apart. He is not whole. So his self is not his self. Hishis good self, his one is up there in the clouds. It’s like uh Peter Pan looking for ashadow. Right. That’s it. That Well, hey, now where did that author get that? Yeah. I wonder where he got that from.No doubt. He must have been reading Jung at that point in time. The patient like and others.That’s right. That’s right. So um as the book says, the shadow god tried buildingthe paradise Logos had imagined. But his creation lacked love and life becauseyou see he’s not a direct descendant of the Fullness like Logos’s self is. He’sseparated from that. So he doesn’t have the life of the Fullness of God. Therewere no flowers or animals, only mud, water, and rocks. He could not make hiscreations come to life. And there is a portion of a myth that made it into the Bible.It I I clearly recall somewhereGod kneeling on the riverbank making a mud model of Adam. Isn’t that how Adamwas made out of the mud of the riverbank? And then his uh other godswere standing around with them i.e. archons and they couldn’t get the damnthing to come to life. Well, that’s because that god of that Old Testamentmyth is the Demiurge and he could not bring life. He he made all these little models of rabbits and flowers and but hecouldn’t get them to come to life because he didn’t contain the life of the Father.So, they just stayed dead down there. Next.So, Logos and his friends, i.e. the first pleroma of the Fullness of God,Logos and his friends decided to help out by sending angel babies down toearth from the smallest to the largest. And that’s another cool thing about the Tripartite. It it it says from thesmallest to the largest all creatures came to earth which is like whatevolution thinks but we didn’t evolve from the smallestto the largest. We were already precreated. This is a form of uhintelligent design. We were precreated in the ethereal plane. We are the fruitof the Fullness of God. And they had the whole plan of everything from thebeginning. See, so it’s not like uh these molecules had to get together anduh have this certain kind of amino acids in the in the primordial soup and thenoh look there’s an there’s a single-sellled organism and then they get together and oh look there’s a anamoeba and then it it doesn’t work like that. They come in already from thesmallest to the largest, but in order in the order of their coming. And it itsays all of this in the Tripartite tract date, which is 2,000 years old. And Ithink that is pretty astounding. Um, so from the smallest to the largest,they came down. And that that’s our little version of the angels throwing down all the living creatures. In thisway, Earth came alive with living plants and creatures. So, it’s not from the mudup. It’s not from the Demiurge up or the primordial soup up. It’s from theFullness directly sending the living patterns of the creatures down.Does that make sense? Mhm. That does. And there they come. Okay. Next.All creatures were born with the memory of their angel parents and the Father in heaven. They loved everything andeverybody. They joined with others and made forests and meadows, families andtowns. And you see, since I think of the second order powers not only as ushumans, we we have too much focus on us. It’s all of the creatures. It’s all ofthe animals. It’s all of the grasses and flowers and trees. They all know God. They all areum unique combinatory results of variousAeons of the Fullness of God. And so they joined with others and made forests andmeadows. It’s like what? We didn’t put together forest and meadows. No, the grasses joined with grasses and madelawns. The forest joined with the trees joined with trees and made forests andmeadows. See, everything wants to go together. Everything is partof that simple, you know, we haven’t talked about the uh simple explanation of the golden rule. That’s not part ofthis talk. But that’s one of our uh it’s one of the attributes of God. It’s oneof the attributes of the original in the first pleroma is everybody workstogether for the benefit of everyone. That’s the go that’s the real goldenrule. It’s not well I’ll do to you if you’ll do to me which is a quidd proquokind of bargain. That shouldn’t be the golden rule. The golden rule is no matter if I know you or not. No matterif you love me or not, I will work with you so that we can make things better.So that we can bring things together with the power of love. Because onlylove can build. Hatred cannot make things better. She said to the peopletoday, hatred, nothing good comes from hatred. You can’t do it. It’santithetical. It’s the wrong category.Only love from the Fullness above can spread love and only love can makethings better. And that is the golden rule. So that is why in this drawing we’re all born. Oh, we’re also calledthe second order powers. Not just the people, but the grasses and the bees,everything. Certainly the dogs and cats and horses. Everything comes with amemory of the Fullness of God because that is where we come from. We aren’t evolved out of the mud. We aren’tevolved out of single-sellled animals that happen to go to together out ofcertain combinations of molecules. We are from above and we come in with thelife and the memory. So we are called those of the remembrance. All secondorder powers are those of the remembrance. And so I like to think when I’m when I’m walking in the forest andthe trees are like, you know how they all try to find spots of light in a crowd of forest? They’ll lean this wayso they can catch that beam of light. You know what they’re doing? They’re reaching to God.All of the green things that grow up are reaching upward to the Fullness. And Iuse the word God and the Fullness of God interchangeably because we can’t understand the Father.That is illimitable and nonunderstandable consciousness.Hence the monad that came from the Father because we can understand thebucket dipped into the sea. And then even more than that, we can understand the Aeons because they’re all the partsof the Son and we are ionic. We are the children of the Aeons.Okay. So they came down with love and everybody’s in love and they all joined together. But oh no. Oh no.Then a terrible thing happened. The children forgot their job was to spreadlove. They started fighting a neverending war. And again, this isright out of the Tripartite Tractate. It’s called the never-ending war. And itdidn’t start with us fighting each other or with uh Republicans and Democrats or progressives and uh stick in the muds orwhatever you want to make the two sides. It came from matter.The the fall of the Demiurge creating the mud which is a fallen version ofparadise. See the ethereal plane. You can do everything up there we imagineparadise to be. And all all um cultures of the world have prettymuch the same vision of paradise. Everybody expects their family to be there. They expect it to be a goodloving place. They all want to go and be reunited. It’s all going to be so much better. No more pain, no more suffering,no more anguish. So that’s paradise. That is where we came from. That’s whywe expect it because we are those of the remembrance. You see, we’re not making it up. We’re remembering it down.So the neverending war is our remembrance of this ethereal plane.Well, how come we’re down here in pain and disappointment and death and andsadness in the mud? It’s because the mud is our material universe and we can’tsee through the mud. You up in paradise, you can see forever. I can see for milesand miles as the who said, but down here you can only see what’s in front of you,right? And that’s the fall. That’s the nature of the demiurge. He can only buildthings molecularly. So that’s the beginning of the never- ending war. It’s the very fight we haveto stay alive with the material body. Entropy. Entropywe could say is our enemy. Maybe entropy should be a nickname for the demiurge.That’s a good one. I like that. I just came up with that. I like it.Yeah. So because of the never- ending war, everyone thought they were moreimportant than others. Now each person wanted to be admired. They had no timeto be kind or to help their neighbors because they were taking so many selfies and posting them online cuz they’re socute. Look what I have. Look at me. Aren’t I pretty? Aren’t I strong?So that is part of the never- ending war because there is no oneupmanshipin the in the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Everyone’s got a different name, a different ego, a different job,but everybody’s just as important as everybody else. And it’s just like in our body, you know, our our as ananalogy, and it’s not only an analogy, the pleroma of my my body is a pleroma. Yourbody is a plumboma, right? It is a pleroma that consists of cells and organs and organ systems,skin, heart, lungs, and they’re all just as important as any of the othersbecause as we all know, once one of those systems goes out, you probably only have days or hours to live orminutes, right? So that’s what death is. It’s when uh cooperationum within our pleroma fails. And by the way, cancer I think of as anaronic attack. Cancer is trying to displace the life of the cells withdeath. So that’s part of the and then it the more it takes over the more you aredead. So anyway, society, when we all think we’re more important and want to be admired and we don’t have time forother people, that is a breakdown of the golden rule, and it perpetuates thesadness. Next, next. Here we go.People grew sad and lonely. They thought they could buy happiness with lots oftoys and tasty food. And of course, it’s a kids book, so I’m emphasizing toys andfood. But hey, grown-ups have their toys, too. Right. So, we’re looking in this window of this apartment buildingand and there’s all the people playing with their toys and eating their tasty foods and sitting on the couch playingvideo games and standing in front of the mirror taking selfies and working out. Working out. Look atme. Aren’t I strong? So, uh that doesn’t bring happiness. None of that. None of the things you seein this window can bring happiness because they are not fulfilling the actual desire of our heart. And thedesire of our heart is to be one with the Fullness of God is to remember ourparents in heaven. So Logos and the angels prayed to the Father and Son tosend help to the world to remind everyone of love and their home in heaven because they don’t want us beingsad. Yep. Yep.Now, now here’s where a lot of I think perhaps non-Christian gnostics getturned off. They don’t like the idea of Jesus. They don’t like the idea of Christ. And by the same token, here’swhere the Christians get turned off. They don’t like the idea of Logos or thefall or the Demiurge. And so we’re we have a neverending war within the gnosisas well, don’t we? The factions ofnosticism. And I wish people would just understandlanguage is a it’s a second best lang this linear language that we speak,these words coming out of my mouth one at a time. This is a uh very reduced andlimited form of communication in the Fullness in the ethereal plane or the inbetween space whatever you want to call that place communication is globalized it’sinstantaneous it’s like thought bubbles now by the way Miguel I never mentionedthis to you before in any of our previous interviews but I’ve had such an experience here in this lifetimewhen I first felt fell in love, deeply in love with my late husband. And wewere we were lying in bed one morning. And so we were and new love, you know,that new fresh, oh my god, I’m so in love kind of thing. So we’re lying there totally in love,just feeling love and the birds are singing outside and everything’s sweet. And the cat was drawn by the love. Andshe had already proven the night before that she loved love because he had aconvertible. He had a Mustang convertible and we were sitting in his in in the front seat of his Mustang withthe top up um loving each other. Not having sex,just loving each other. And uh the cat jumped up on the soft top and she waslying right above us. You could see the bulge in the in the convertible top andthe purr. Her purr was floating down on us. It was a manifestation of love. And theonly reason she was there is because we were down here loving each other. And she was up there loving us and rainingdown upon us with furs. Well, the very next morning, the first morning of love,we’re lying there and the cat came in and she wanted to be with us. We were lying next to each other in the bed andshe laid across the two of us. So she like joined our uh thighs. She was lyingacross our thighs. She joined our thighs together with her big cat body. And then this is really weird. And therewas no there were no drugs involved. This was first thing in the morning. These thought bubbles like soap bubbles.Imagine a big soap bubble about the size of a basketballfloating out of her. She floated this gigantic soap bubble right out of herhead above us. And within the soap bubble, instantaneously with no words,it said, “I love tuna fish. This cat loves me some tuna fish.” That’s whatshe thought bubbled to us. Because you know, cats, what do they say? And so then I thought, well, that’spretty extraordinary. And so I floated a thought back to her. Yeah, tuna fish is good. And she got it. And so she and Iwere floating these and they weren’t words. They were soap bubbles of athought about how much cats love tuna fish. Wow. Okay. So then about, you know, this allwent on for a long time and then she floated another soap bubble about love.Isn’t love my isn’t love grand? I’m so glad there is love. That was her secondone. First was tuna. Second was love. And then then I started floating thoughts about love back at her.And then we had all these soap bubbles floating above us. And then when she jumped off,it’s like it’s it’s morning. Time to get up. And I said to Gary,“Yo,” because there had been no words spoken all this time. And I and I turned to him for the first time and said,“Well, then did what I just saw happen,did you experience what I just experienced?” And he said, “Yeah,thought bubbles about tuna.” So, it was like, it was pretty cool. It was veryexciting. Very cool. Anyway, and that has always stayed with me. So that concept that in heaven I communication is more or lessglobal and instantaneous. Uh that’s that mind readading sometimes people talk about in um you know near-deathexperiences. Now I got off on that. I totally forgot where we were and what we were talkingabout. Oh, that this is a limited form of communication. So don’t get hung up on words like uh Father and Son orJesus Christ savior. These are the words we use to express these otherwise globalbubbles of thought. That’s all I’m saying. And when you and and I’m sayingthat because I’ve had people who try to start reading my books and they go, “Ah,the vocabulary I don’t get it. I just, oh, these are new words. These are new. I I just don’t I don’t like the wordFather and Son. That’s so sucks. And it’s like, get off it. Get off it. That isn’t the point of any of it.It’s our limited vocabulary. So, this uh double page spread. I eliminated theword Christ and Jesus Christ because I didn’t want the Gnostics just to throwdown the book and go, “Ah, this is a bunch of Christian clap trap.” So I used the word prince of peace which seems tome ought to be a nice neutral term. The prince of peace came to earth withall of the power and love of the Father and Son. That’s scriptural from theTripartite trackct tape. He was called savior because he came to save everyoneand beloved because heaven and earth love him so much. And all these littlepeople here on the right side, those are the people that we were seeing in the previous page looking through that apartment window and they were all sadand unhappy doing the things they were doing. And now the savior is embracingeveryone and he loves them and they love him and they’re happy. Nownext okay.When everyone remembers the love of the Fullness and accepts the prince of peace, the twin of Logos will remembertoo. Logos will become whole again. And seethere’s Logos up there at the top of the page waving at the demiurge. Hey, herewe are. See us. Do you remember us now? and and the the ego of Logos, i.e. theDemiurge or what was the name we just came up for him? Uh entropy.Oh yeah. Or also known as entropy.He’s got a little tear in his eye because now he’s not alone anymore. He He’s not alone down here. And when whenI got this uh this artwork back from the artist,I got all tearary because he was crying and it just I got all choked up. So ofcourse that is my hope for the readers that they will somehow get choked up when they this pageintegration Logos and the shadow the demiurge. Yes.Okay. And then on that day, and here we are in the third economy, the final economy,what we call heaven. On that day, this fallen imitationwill become true paradise. Everyone who has ever lived will liveforever with their family and friends and the Fullness of the Father, Son, andthe Prince of Peace. There will be no more tears, only joy and love.And there it is. See, in innosticism, this creation of the Demiurge,this world that has been con constructed down here. It’s a knockoff. It’s calledthe deficiency. It’s called the imitation. And what it is an imitation of is paradise. What it is deficient inis life, love, and consciousness and the complete remembrance of the Father andthe Fullness and the Son. And so that’s what thatbeloved savior brings to us. It’s the correction. It’s the true tone for oursouls. Now, here is a heresy. Well, okay. The first heresy that went by isthat the creator of our cosmos, the creator of the heavens and the earth, isnot God Almighty, but Lucifer, basically. And that, oh my gosh, what ahorrid thing to say. But the second, the next heresyis that everyone’s going to heaven. Oh, that’s a not everyone’s going to heaven. Those bad people should all go to hell.Go to hell, you. No. You see why? Because that’s not loving. That is notthe nature of the Father. The Father is all loving. And get this, in thisgnostic Christianity, we are the children of paradise. We are literallywe have we have our parental units here on earth, mom and dad. But we also haveour aonic parents, the ones that gave us our particular talents.So we get our looks from mom and dad probably. mo for the most part, but we get our talent from the Fullness of God.And so, um, this is that I I I I really I reallyzeroed in on that concept and I can’t even remember how I began that sentence. I don’t know what I was talking about.Ha. Oh, that everybody’s going to heaven. Oh, the second heresy, the big heresy isthat uh Yes. So Christ is Christ. You don’t have to worry about that Christians who may be watching this. AndJesus is the incorporation of Christ. Jesus Christ savior. Good. On board withthat. See that’s Valentinian Christian Christianity which I count myself aswell not necessarily Valentinian but agnostic Christian.And because we come here here was the point. I’m back on the train now. And because we come from the Fullness,we have to return to the Fullness because why? Otherwise, it wouldn’t be full anymore. They are the Fullness ofGod. We are from the Fullness. We all have to return to the Fullness or itwould be less than full. You see, isn’t that cool?So, uh, God is all loving. And by the way, in the New Testament, it says overand over again that Christ came to save everyone.There were no quido pros, which means you did this for me, I’ll dothat for you. I’ll tell you what, if you bend your knee and say, Jesus, you are my Lord, I’ll let you go to heaven. Thatis the wrong attitude. That isn’t why Christ came. He came with the correctionfor us because we are forgetful and fighting a neverending war with the demiurge and with this material space that we find ourselves in.But we’re going back home because that’s home. This isn’t our home. And that’sanother thing it says in the in the Bible that we are sojourers passing through this world, right?Lord, oh Lord, I have no home but you. If Jesus ain’t my home, then Lord, whatwould I do? That is all true. And that is true for Gnostics as well. Soeveryone will come back home because we are descendants of the Fullness of God.So it’s not only the humans, but it’s every living thing. It’s all the grasses, everything you see in thisdouble page spread here, this picture of paradise. They were all down below and they’re all back up again. This is thethird economy. This is the ethereal plane integrated with the now redeemedmaterial plane where we have found ourselves stuck. So we are going home toour aonic parents and we will live in paradise and be happy ever more. And bythe way, if it doesn’t happen before you die, it will certainly happenas soon as you die. I don’t think you’re written out and thrown into the burning lake of fire forever uh to be torturedby demons. That isn’t the nature of God. You see, God is love. And God wants usall to come home. He doesn’t want to throw anyone away. And so, we will turn. But you have to turn. You have to wantto go home. Sometimes it seems down here in this world that people want to be bador people want to go to hell and bring others down with them. I’ll kill lop offheads. See, they think they’re sending them to hell by doing so because they think they are the righteous ones andthe ones who lose their heads must be the sinners or they wouldn’t have died.That’s all demiurgic. That’s all demonic. That isn’t the way it really works. It’s a lie. It’s the deficiency.It’s an aronic lie. Tada. The end.And there you go. I have it on the show notes, but definitely check out Children of the Fullness. It is uh Yeah, it’s Ilove the artwork and the message. Yeah, it uh and you see it’s free on Kindle. Ifyou’ve got a Kindle, it’s zero dollars or or $3.99 if you don’t have a Kindleunlimited thing and also only $9.99 in paperback. And I am, as I said, trying to release it,trying I’m I’m make working my way through the very very difficult process of being a self-publisher. The hardbackwill be available in libraries and bookstores at some point in time.Please, please pray for that to occur. and leave reviews. I need reviewsbecause apparently reviews are really important in the world of Amazon. By theway, by the way, Miguel, I don’t know if this happens to you with your books, but the AI keeps crawling out. The AIarchons are crawling out of the woodworks after me and my books. It’s soclear that it’s AI written and they keep wanting to promote me and promote my books and I’m going to take everythinguh you know I’m going to make you famous and I’m going to do this and that and it’s all aronic. I can just see rightthrough it. Oh, they go look just pay me $20 a a review and I’ll get you as manyreviews. $20 a review. I could hire the AI myself and have a thousand reviewswritten for nothing. So why am I paying you? So it’s horrid. It’s horrible, horrible lies in the nameof godliness and it kills me. It just kills me. Oh yeah. I’ve been reached out by those too and AI.Yes, of course they are. And they’re not going to Amazon will detect them. They’ll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. So I need real authenticreviews. Yeah, for sure. Definitely. Yeah. Iwanted to bring in Graham. Graham, do you What do you think of this? Uh and do you have a question for Cyd? get yourtake on this. No, no, I thought she did a lovely job. It was it’s it’s a great one for kids. Iwas going to say I have some notes down here is one of those is I’m certainly not going to argue against her abouteverything being fractal that just Yeah. What is he? UmI don’t understand it was double negatives. Was it does he agree? Does that like agreeing everything? Oh, I do. That that’s one of the reasonsI use my uh my image with the with the mandler set. Okay. Gotcha.And I was going to say as far as the fractal go, Hildigard of Bingan, herwhole metaphysics is very fractal. If you haven’t looked into her, she’s she’sdefinitely worth checking out. Okay, good to know.Filigar. And yeah, and uh one of the places when you whenyou had the uh that them starting to fight over the the the fall, I I jotted down the instead of spreading the love,they decide they’re going to fight for ownership over the little pieces of the love.Yes. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Well, right. Right. We’re selfish with our love, huh?Like there’s not enough to share. Exactly. And the old uh you know money doesn’t buy happiness, it only rents it.Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And the uh you know again it’s one ofthose it depends on which golden rule you’re going to look at. There’s the one that you were talking about and thenthere’s the other one that I learned as well which is the one with the gold makes the rules.Oh yeah. Well that’s the way of the world. Oh, because by the way, you know, the the the this world, and we didn’teven get into any of this, but this world is run by the demiurge. He’s the god of thismaterial universe and and his henchmen, his his minions are the archons. And uhthey’re all about power and dominion. It always has to do with power and control.And so whenever you see something occur that increases control and power likethe pandemic, that’s demiurgic. That’s demiurgic. That’s not natural.The old never let a crisis go to waste. That’s right. Exploit.The last one is a slight one is I used to be alongside of you with you knowuniversal salvation. Mhm. I’ve slightly modified that to the offerof salvation if it’s universal. But because of free will, I pretty much haveto allow for the possibility of there are going to be stubborn, it’s just stubborn souls that are bound anddetermined to refuse heaven regardless. And okay, it was just reading this morning that inthe Tripartite tract date, where is it? that literally all the secondary orderpowers do after death will want to accept the the love of the Father and itwon’t and it said no I wish I could find that quote but it’s because they won’thave to believe based on words someone else said or experience someone else hador or you know some book someone else says is holy. They will come face toface with the reality and it says this in the Tripartite tract date. They’ll come face to face with the reality ofthe love and Fullness of God and those open arms. And it’s like who’s going tosay no to that? Of course they have free. We do all have free will. But it I I can’t understand. I personally wouldnot be able to comprehend someone being face to face would it would be like ahungry infant dying of hunger and pushing away hismother’s breast. That’s what I would think. I agree 100%. But that’s one of thosethings is I’m getting older and I’ve seen so many people do things that Ijust cannot imagine doing. So I’m like I said, yeah, I’ve modified it to I just have to allowthat possibility in my metaphysics. Oh yeah, sure. Okay. And I’m saying, well, don’t worry about it because it’sgoing to happen on the other side. So we’re not going to see it. And and those people die angry, but and we don’t seethat repent regardless. It’s not our problem. I’m not making that choice. It’s only aproblem for those people who do make that choice. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry. Yeah. Now the the last one that I hadthere is the idea of I always got a sense of as part of the fall a I can dobetter than the creator and not the creator but the source. It’s a certainamount of pride in that a certain amount it goes along with the separateness. It wasn’t entirely an innocence. There wasa certain amount of hey look what I can do. I can do better than you kind of thing. TYeah. Well, in the in the trip well, at least in my children’s version or in theTripartite trackctate, he he does in a sense say, but who he’s saying, I can dobetter than you. It’s the rest of the Fullness. He’s sitting on the top as a fractal. He thinks his fractal body cando it all. And who needs the Fullness? And that is a way of saying uh my littlepart is greater than the whole of the Fullness of God. But he wasn’t saying Ican do better than the God above all gods because there there is nothing greater than the God above all gods.There’s no space above God. God is the pinnacle. Gotcha.That’s no one of the senses that I was getting there. Is it fair to get have the takeaway that the Fullness of God issimilar to the spirit of God? Oh yes. Yes. The Fullness of God aka getthis the Holy Spirit. Okay, that was the sense I was getting there. You hadn’t actually connectedthose two dots explicitly and it doesn’t explicitly connect them in the Tripartite tractate, but when Idi, you know, I’m a diagrammer. When I diagram everything out, there it is. Oh, hey Miguel, you can getback to the there were more pictures in our slideshow that we didn’t ever showthe third or the third. Yeah. Okay. So, that’s the first order of powers. Here’sthe final economy. Uh well, actually this is this is the end of time. Thisisn’t the final economy. This is the last part. Uh this is the day the earth stood stillin this order. So you’ve got what is called the elect. And those are the third order of powers. They’re right upthere next to Christ. The Fullness is right here. That’s that uh triangle thatwe’re talking about here. We are we’re the second order of powers, also knownas the called. And you can see, you can see a little blue through us because down here at the bottom, that’s thephantom of the imitation and the outer darkness, Hades. But there’s one morethat doesn’t have those lay that one. This turns out, see that? Thatone just before that was a mistake I made a few years ago. This is the new This is the new final economy. Christ isa lot bigger, a lot brighter, and there’s no more blue at the bottom because in the final rollup where thematerial world evaporates, and it will, it’s going to end sooner or later.This is the final uh hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Here we are, and it’s not because we’re downtrodden upon, butbecause this is where our paradise is, that green at the bottom. I see I’mpointing to my screen, but you can’t see me pointing. That’s dull. Uh anyway, uhthe that we’re we’re we’re we’re down there in that green area. That’s that’s our paradise that we can relate to. Ouraonic parents, that’s those big gold guys just above us. And what is called even in the Bible, they’re called theelect. That is the army of the Christ. And and that is a misunderstanding inthe Bible. By the way, here’s another nice heresy for you. The ar onward Christian soldiers marching as to war.We’re not marching with swords and spears in order to defeat the Nazis. Weare marching with love. We are the army of the Christ. And Christ is thepinnacle of love and consciousness. So what the army of Christ is the thirdorder of powers. They are the elect. They are the ones who just give glory,glory, glory, love everyone, and they’re the ones praying for us to pull us upout of the deficiency. They’re the ones that are going to reunite uh the demiurge with Logos there in the end. And uhyou see the blue has fallen off the bottom of this diagram because in the final economyall of the the demiurge is no longer at war with us. So the archons evaporate.They are the shadows. They are the imitation. They’re a deficiency in the final economy. There’s no moredeficiency. It’s all good. It’s all God. And we’ve all got our everything there.I me I’m looking forward to my dogs. Every dog that’s ever died. I say helloto them every morning. My my my pet the pictures of my dogs andI say, “I’m coming for you, kids.” And that’s who I expect to see me when I cross over.I do, too. Well, awesome. This has been great. We better better get to the endof this to this economy to this iteration or fractal. But yeah, great discussion for the audience. Get thebook. I’ve got it on the show notes. I’ve also got Cyd’s uh website. Andyeah, check out her podcast because she breaks these things down even more and it’s a it’s a good listen. But yeah,appreciate everybody being here. As always, please support Cyd’s work, support amid any way you can. I can’t doit without you. Good shows coming the rest of the week. And uh yeah, that’s it. Graham, thanks for keeping uscompany. Oh, always my pleasure. And thank you, Cyd. It was a wonderful story and I hopemany children enjoy it. I hope so too. Well, I know they will. Thank you so much. God bless everybody.Always enjoy having you on. And this was a great one, too. And yeah, aren’t you supposed to say onward andupward? Onward and upward. Say your tag. Yeah, you got to say your tagline. Well, I say onward and upward and Godbless us all. That’s how I’ve been ending. I added the God bless all at the end. That’s That’s good. Yeah. I like to dosometimes Bowie and may God’s love be with you because we’re all floating in space. All right, for everybody else,really appreciate you being here and yeah, as I say, thanks for being here. Thanks for being yourself, your trueself here in the desert of the real. Write your own gospel and live your own myth. 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

This week I re-watched an episode of The Why Files. Are you familiar with The Why Files? It’s a very fun show I watch on YouTube regularly. The episode I watched again was called Synchronicities, the Science Behind Your Meaningful Coincidences, and this was first broadcast in June of 2025. I enjoyed it a lot. I’d seen it before, but I wanted to watch it again.You know, we talk about synchronicities in the Gnostic community. It’s a word that was created by Carl Jung, and as we know, Carl Jung was Gnostic, and he, in particular, appreciated the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book out of the Nag Hammadi Codices that we use, the Tripartite Tractate. That’s our major focus here on Gnostic Insights.Well, anyway, the name of the host for YouTube is AJ. The episode on synchronicities that AJ talked about was a really astounding episode, and if you haven’t seen it or if you’ve never seen the Why Files, I recommend it.[Another thing I learned this week was that it’s possible to get the transcripts of episodes from YouTube videos. I didn’t know how to achieve that before, but I think now it’s part of the new AI “enhancement” of our world. I put enhancement in quotes because the verdict is out as far as I’m concerned, whether AI is an improvement or not. But anyway, I was able to ask the new YouTube AI for the transcript, and then it magically appeared, and so I have the transcript from that episode that I’m working off of.]The thing I liked most about this episode were the synchronicities that AJ cited. There’s some pretty incredible stories, and I’m going to share a few of those with you today. Then Bill and I talked about it.It was his favorite episode that I’d ever recommended to him, and so then we had one of our long talks yesterday about this episode, and I wish I had recorded it, but I didn’t, so instead I came away with three pages of notes as we were talking on the phone. I’m going to try to coordinate here my notes with the transcript and do it all in a way that makes sense. So here’s the story that AJ tells during this episode of The Why Files, and since I have the transcript, I think I’ll just quote him because he tells it well. Listen to this.“In June of 2001, Laura Buxton released a balloon at her grandparents’ anniversary party. She was 10 years old, living in Stafford, England. She wrote her name and address on a tag, tied it to the balloon, and let it go. The balloon traveled 140 miles south. It landed in a hedge in Wiltshire, where another 10-year-old girl found it, and her name was also Laura Buxton.The second Laura wrote the first, and they arranged to meet. Both girls showed up wearing pink sweaters and jeans. Both brought their pet guinea pigs. Both guinea pigs were orange and white, and of course the guinea pigs had the same name, and the coincidences kept piling up. Both Lauras were the same height. Both had brown hair and blue eyes. Both had three-year-old black labs at home, and both also had gray rabbits. When they opened their bags, both had packed the same stuffed animal, identical. And the odds of all this happening are so crazy that it’s mathematically impossible, but it happened.There’s plenty of photos and video. The news covered the story. This is not an urban legend.”So that raises the question, how does such an impossible thing happen? Well, Bill and I talked about that, and we have a good theory that fits in with our jello universe concept.Let’s go on to another amazing synchronicity. Quoting AJ again,“Anthony Hopkins needed a book. The book was The Girl from Petrovka. He was playing the lead in the film and searched every bookstore in London with no luck. It was out of print. Hopkins had finally given up when he was sitting on a bench, waiting for a train. Someone left a book on the bench. He picked it up. It was The Girl from Petrovka. But this wasn’t just any copy. This one had handwritten notes in the margins, personal observations, character analysis. Hopkins studied the book for his role.Two years later, while shooting the film, Hopkins met the author, George Feifer. While they talked about the book, Feifer mentioned that he’d lent his personal copy to a friend, that the friend had lost it on the London Underground. All of his notes, his analysis, gone. He was disappointed. Hopkins heard this and said, wait here. He ran to fetch the book from his trailer. He showed Feifer. It was the same book. Feifer’s handwriting, his notes, everything.Somehow the universe sent that book to the actor playing the lead, and then the universe sent the book back to its owner.”I’m going to share one more astounding synchronicity with you, and then we’ll get to the discussion of it. Quoting again,“Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son, attracted death, presidential death. April 14th, 1865, Robert was at the White House when his father left for Ford’s Theater. We know how that ended. 16 years later, July 2nd, 1881, Robert was Secretary of War. Walking into the Baltimore train station, President Garfield was shot right there in front of Robert. He saw it happen. September 6th, 1901, now Robert was president of Pullman Company. He arrived at the Pan American Exposition. Minutes later, President McKinley was shot. Again, Robert was there.Three presidents, three assassinations, one man present at all of them. But here’s the synchronicity that haunted Robert. Years before his father died, Robert fell onto train tracks in Jersey City. The train was coming. He was about to be crushed. A stranger grabbed his collar and yanked him to safety. That stranger was one of the most famous actors in the country, Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth. Two brothers, both famous actors, both connected to Abraham Lincoln. One brother would save the president’s son, the other brother would assassinate him.”Now, what are we to make of this? The Why Files episode explains theories concerning it. AJ notices that these patterns are too perfect—this simply can’t be random. He says this is reality organizing itself. To be able to influence reality would be the ultimate power. And then AJ talks about classic ways of using this. He calls it a technology to organize and influence reality. He talks about Buddhist monks. He talks about ancient civilizations and their religious rituals and practices that did this very thing.He talked about a current man named Joe Dispenza, who was paralyzed from the waist down and the doctors told him he would never walk. [AJ mistakenly says it was a patient of Dispenza’s, but no, it was Dispenza himself, according to a comment under the YouTube episode.] And Joe Dispenza essentially invented a meditation practice called quantum field meditation. He visualized his nerve endings connecting and rebuilding. He focused on his legs working perfectly. And a few months later, Dispenza walked into the doctor’s office. No wheelchair, no walker, no crutches. The doctors couldn’t explain it. But Dispenza explained it by saying that in quantum physics, when you observe something at the quantum level, you affect it.That’s the funny thing about quantum mechanics. Observation collapses potential and makes the reality. We talked about this a few episodes ago in my podcast episode from August 30th, 2025 called Matter is an Illusion.So back to this episode, quantum field meditation visualizes the potential and collapses it into reality. And this is what causes the healing. He was collapsing the nerve endings and the damage in his body through visualizing the potential of them working again, of them being healed, of them sinking back up, the ones that had been torn apart.And at the end of this episode, I will describe for you what Billy was telling me about his meditation practice and that he’s essentially been doing this same thing, but he came up with it himself. And he uses it also with his hypnotherapy clients—quantum field meditation—but of course Bill doesn’t call it that. What he calls it home basing. And I’ll share that with you at the end of this episode.Now, quoting again from the Why Files episode,“Every nanosecond infinite decisions are being made that cause the infinite possibilities to collapse into this one reality. But you can learn to influence the outcome of all those decisions. You can alter your small corner of reality. Setting clear intentions is the first step.”Yet another very interesting aspect of the Why Files episode on synchronicities was a discussion of Donald Hoffman. And again, this is a contemporary figure that you can look up. Donald Hoffman has come up with a theory called multimodal user interface theory, MUI. I’ll call it MUI for short. The MUI theory says that “perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world.” That’s a quote from Hoffman.Now, he’s got it all balled up with evolution and gives an explanation of how evolution caused this to happen. But I disagree with that because we don’t need evolutionary theory in gnostic belief because we come down from above fully formed. All of the second order powers have been imagined in the mind of God, if you will, in the ethereal space. And so we are already there. And when we enter this world at conception, we come in fully formed. I have discussed that topic in previous episodes concerning evolution, debunking Darwin. But I like what Hoffman had to say about the MUI theory because this goes very well with our gnostic system, although Hoffman doesn’t know that. What we perceive as the world around us is not like a direct mapping of the world out there, mapping through our synaptic interface, so we can then we see and understand the world.That isn’t the way reality works. There is no material reality. There is only soul. There is only the ether. And it is now, I think, the imagination of the Demiurge that has assembled this fallen world universe that we live in. You see, we know that the ethereal space houses what I’m calling Paradise. It’s a version of what we see around here. It’s like this fallen world, but it’s perfect. There is no death or destruction. There is no illness. There are no vices. There is no lying, cheating, drugs, sadness. None of that is happening.In the ethereal plane, it’s all good. We all have an intuitive sense of that. All humans do around the world. It doesn’t matter what your culture is. We all have a very similar picture of Paradise. That is a place. Logos wanted to recreate that space. He thought he could build it on its own out of his fractal parts, out of his pleroma, but he couldn’t. And so he “fell.” And it is the fall, it is the ego of Logos overreaching his abilities or his job that fell. He split off. The best part returned to the ether. That’s his true Self that mirrors all of the Aeons, his fractal pleroma. But his broken Self, that ego of Logos, stayed down below. It was estranged from his better half.The Demiurge still had the drive for power and the drive to build that Logos had. But now it was inverted. Our fallen world is the imagination of the Demiurge. And he hasn’t quite got it right, because this was not an authorized excursion on the Demiurge’s part. It’s an egoic version of Paradise. And so that’s why bad things happen. That’s why it’s a fallen world. It’s inverted. What were virtues are now vices. What was light is darkness. What was love is egotism and selfishness and pure drive for power. Hatred has replaced love down here and on and on and on. This is the inversion of Paradise. That’s what it means by being the fallen world.And the only way to bring it back up, the only way to right the course of this fallen world, is to demonstrate the love, life, and consciousness of the ethereal plane to all of us down here, to remind us that we don’t really belong down here. We are sojourners passing through. We come from the Father and we will return to the Father. And all of us bringing love, consciousness, and life, whenever we accept that and remember that and begin to manifest that love, that higher consciousness, that’s when the synchronicities begin to occur. That’s when the love pours out of us instead of the hatred. That’s when desire to make things right and heavenly replaces the desire for power and hate and control. That is how the Demiurge is brought to remembrance.But of course, I don’t want to leave out the Christ talk, and I know a lot of people cringe when I say Christ, but Christ is the correcting algorithm. Christ brings our full package in. We are living in these second order bodies that are melded to the Demiurge’s consciousness. So we’re seeing everything through this distorted haze. When we accept the assistance of the third order powers brought to us through Christ, then we are able to manifest these higher order activities like synchronicities and like healing and what appear to be miracles. Consciousness is the primary state. Consciousness is the base matrix of us being conscious. We call that consciousness the Father, the Source.Now, do you remember my Jello Universe Theory? If not, I urge you to go back and find that episode. That episode was called Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry Jello Universe and Free Will, and that was first broadcast on March 22nd of 2025.On June 28th of 2025, I had a conversation with my brother called Birds Don’t Buy Bentleys–A conversation with my brother about evolution. So that’s one of the evolution episodes. And then Free Will, do you have it? That is from September 23rd of 2023.The notion in the Cherry Jello Universe that was also put forward in this episode of the Why Files, but of course they don’t call it the Cherry Jello Universe, they call it the Quantum Consciousness Universe. There is one illustration that passes by during the episode that looks just like my Cherry Jello Universe, by the way.The idea is this, the universe is filled with choices. It’s not filled with particles. It’s not filled with stuff. It’s filled with choice points, consciousness choices, and they’re all there. Our God is an infinite God. It takes infinity to be able to hold all possible choices that could ever possibly happen. And the only way the potential of those choices collapses is when you observe it, is when you pass through it in time, and then the potential collapses and becomes history. That’s one way to collapse a choice point.But you can also do it with this quantum field meditation technique. You imagine the place you want to arrive at in the Cherry Jello Universe. You’re here, you want to be there, whatever it is, whether it’s healing, finding a relationship, buying a house. Me, I’m looking for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel to go big. So that’s what I am focusing my attention on—spreading this Gnostic message and having it connect. Finding the tipping point where this begins to influence millions of people. That’s one of my cherries I’m heading for. Another one I’m heading for is to have a RV, not a big giant RV, but just one of those van-sized ones and do a book tour. So I’m looking for that van to come so I can go out on the road with the Gnostic Gospel. These are the things that I’m aiming at. Well, of course, I would also like to find a companion who can share all of this with me, other than my cats and dog.But I figure, see, God knows all this stuff, and it’s all out there as potential. It’s the many worlds theory, but it’s not many worlds. It’s all of infinity. All of those choices, all of those potentialities are sitting there. And it is our intention to head for them that causes us to swim in the correct direction towards that cherry, towards that potential, to find that potential and collapse it, and then we grasp it.I think I explained this perhaps more clearly, more slowly in those episodes of mine that I’ve already mentioned to you during this episode. So I urge you to go listen to those or read them. And I’m also going to put the links to them in this episode so you can find them easily.Now, this raises the question of determinism. Well, if all of those potentials are there, then we have no choice. But we do, you see. It’s because we choose which cherries to go towards. Getting an RV, not getting an RV–those are all out there. I decide where to go. I have free will. We all have free will because we are all fractals of the Aeons. We are connected to them. We are their children. We were sent down by them. We’re still connected to them. Call it your guardian angel if you want to. At the Aeonic realm, they only want what’s best for us. It’s down here that what is worst for us comes out.So we have to turn our eyes upward, upward to the Fullness, upward to the Aeons, upward to the Son. We need to invite the third order powers to help us, to bring us the correcting algorithm for our distorted code that we have picked up down here from the Demiurge. We are free to move through the jello any way we want to.And when we focus on giving glory to God, when we are in the zone of remembering the ethereal space, that’s when synchronicities happen. I know that’s how it happens with me. In this episode of Why Files, he talks about people who look at the clock and see 11:11. Well, that’s me. So I know that I’m in the zone when I find those clock faces that give me those numbers. And it reminds me of the Fullness, but I’m already in the zone or I wouldn’t have looked at the clock. You see, you can’t force these practices. You have to allow them to happen because when we force, it’s usually our ego that’s doing the forcing, and that won’t take us home.Okay, I promised you my brother Bill’s meditation technique, and this is very similar to that quantum field meditation.First, you find yourself a quiet space. You relax.Now, pick a home base of where your mind will go to when it wanders during meditation. You’ll bring it back to that home base casually in a relaxed manner. So if you’re concentrating on breathing, that’s what you’re doing. You’re concentrating on breathing. Then when you find that your mind has wandered away, casually bring it back to the breathing again. That’s how you stay centered in the meditation. If you were instead listening to the wind rustling in the trees during your meditation, and you find you have wandered away from that, you bring your mind back casually, quietly, calmly to the wind whistling in the trees. Or maybe you are staring at a beautiful leaf. When your mind wanders away, return to the leaf. Billy calls that the home base method, where you notice and you casually bring your mind back.Now, where Bill’s meditation technique diverts from the quantum field meditation that AJ describes is that you set your intention before you go into the meditation and then you stop thinking about it. You want your higher Self to take care of the intention for you, so you release your egoic drive and give the meditation over to your subconscious.It’s similar to dreaming and lucid dreaming. I’m a dream interpreter. I don’t encourage people to practice lucid dreaming, where you take control of your dreams, and you want to be conscious during your dream, because I think that that derails your dream process. During your dream process, it’s your inner Self that’s coming up and trying to teach you things. When you allow your ego to sit on the throne of your dreams, through lucid dreaming, you have derailed that process.It’s the same thing with meditation. Be still, and visualize yourself as part of this vast energy field. You allow that imagination to bring that intention to you. Imagination is real, because we are nothing but consciousness. The imagination of a future event is one of those cherries sitting there, waiting for you to pick it.After you have allowed this image in your mind of the thing you are aiming for, you experience arriving and having this, and feeling the gratitude for having this, and expressing thanks to God and to the Aeons for helping you arrive at this place. This is the way that you visualize and imagine, and thereby create, reality.Once we are aware of the ethereal plane, and we see the synchronicities, and we realize the gnosis, we have the free will to arrive at these things, if it’s in God’s will that we do so. Wishing for things that are bad for you isn’t a good idea. Swimming to cherries that are going to make you sick is not a good idea. The Aeons would know that. Your higher Self would know that, and so it won’t do that. So that’s why it always has to do with the higher good, God’s will for you. But that is your best Self. It is what will give you indescribable joy.There’s a lot more in this Why Files episode. It’s a huge topic, and just too much to cover today. The implications of this episode were profound, and they’re definitely gnostic.What do you think of this? Let’s hear your comments. Let’s start a discussion. Share your synchronicities with us in the comments below.Go watch that Why Files. Think about it.Love you all, onward and upward, and God bless us all. 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

Pleromas-Who, What, Where, When, and HowPodcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:48 — 38.2MB)For regular Gnostics Insights, subscribe here. Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSWelcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Boy, am I busy lately. I’m preparing a 10-week course to teach “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel” at Southern Oregon University, which begins in a couple of weeks, so I’m busy with that. I’ve also been doing a lot of publishing. I’m waiting to receive the hardback copy of Children of the Fullness, a Gnostic Myth. Once I see that and that it looks good, I can release that book as a hardcopy and hopefully get it into libraries. That’s my ultimate goal with Children of the Fullness. It’s available now, of course, on Amazon for only $9.99 or free on Kindle for $3 if you don’t have a Kindle subscription. So, it’s affordable and it’s really neat. It’s got beautiful illustrations. People like it. It’s very short. Everyone can understand this version of the Gnostic Gospel. Children of the Fullness is the first ever gnostic kid’s book!I have an upcoming appearance on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, the YouTube version, and that will be on September 15th of 2025. Miguel asked me to be prepared to discuss the Children of the Fullness book and also the concept of pleromas. So, we’re going to review pleromas in today’s episode. This is from an original broadcast that was in November of 2022, but it always bears repeating.“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.”This passage tells us that the aeon of the Truth—which is another word for the Fullness, or Pleroma, of God goes forth by way of fractal branching. You may review the concept of fractals by looking back to the Gnostic Insights episode called, “A Fractal Model of Human Nature,” posted May 18, 2021. which you can find at gnostic insights dot com under the tab, “Complete Episodes Library.” I’m also linking it in the transcript of this episode.The Pleroma of Logos is the sum total of all of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness that exist as fractal iterations within the body of the Aeon known as Logos.“This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit; for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.”My illustration for the Pleroma of Logos is to show Logos as a miniature copy of the Pleroma of the Fullness of God, sitting at the top of the Fullness.“This aeon was last to have brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude. And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…”So, this wise fruit called Logos left the Fullness and Fell out of harmony with the other Aeons, creating this apparently material world.“The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and which is.”The Pleroma of the Demiurge consists of the inversions of the Pleroma of Logos, broken out of the hierarchical pattern and scattered willy-nilly throughout the cosmos. The Pleroma of the Demiurge is not an orderly pyramidal stack, but rather a chaotic jumble of dark shadows.“Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be…”“They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being. They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be.”So, even though they fell out of the fallen Logos, they still possessed a reflection of the original glory of the Aeons of which they were imitations. And, it is that glory which is the Economy that was to be, that being our apparently material universe.“They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.”Logos was horrified by what he had produced because they would not recognize his authority. Logos abandoned the deficiency below and quickly returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness.“The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his, and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his.”“Him who came to be in the defect” is the name we call the Demiurge and it is the authority that rules the defect. Those who came forth from him in an imaginary way are the archons of the deficiency as well as the inert material world, or what I refer to as the “hard and rocky places.”The reason we focus so much on the Aeons of the Fullness and Logos in particular here at Gnostic Insights is because the Pleroma of any living creature is the sum total of the Pleroma of the Demiurge—our material or hylic part that makes up our physical bodies—and the Pleroma of Logos after his return to the Fullness, when he prayed alongside the Aeons to bring life to the deficiency he had caused.“The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good. The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered [that is the One Self, his fractal of the Son]; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another [which is to say, each individual Aeon in its place and position in the Pleroma of the Fullness]; then all of them together [the Totality of the Fullness as a single Pleroma]; but before all of them, the Father [the originating source from which all consciousness flows]. The prayer of the agreement [among these nested fractal consciousnesses] was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back.”Since we Second Order Powers are fractal iterations of this Logos, newly restored to the Fullness, the path of remembrance is exactly the same for us as it was for Logos. We fractally replicate the Powers from which we were created.This Pleroma of ours is called the Second Order of Powers, and we proceed out of the Pleroma of Logos. We Second Order Powers were created through the Totalities of the original Fullness giving glory to the Father alongside Logos. Together, they prayed with an intention to send life into the fallen world below. We came forth as fruit from the Pleroma of Logos, and the Pleroma of Logos was itself a fractal of the Fullness. We are called Second Order Powers to distinguish us from the First Order Powers—the Aeons of the Fullness—out of which we are fractal iterations, twice removed.“All the spiritual places are in spiritual power [referring to the Pleromas Above]. They are separate from the beings of the thought [we Second Order Powers], since the power is established in an image, which is that which separates the Pleroma from the Logos [in other words, power flows from the original images contained within the Fullness of God], while the power which is active in prophesying about the things which will be [referring to a particular Aeon who embodies the concept of one who prophesies], directs the beings of the thought which have come into being [us] toward that which is pre-existent, and it does not permit them to mix with the things which have come into being through a vision of the things which are with him.”Meaning the spirit of prophesy impels us upward but does not impart to us its power.“The beings of the thought which is outside are humble; they preserve the representation of the pleromatic, especially because of the sharing in the names by which they are beautiful.”Which is a very lovely way of saying that we Second Order Powers share the names and faces of the Aeons of the Fullness and, because of that, we are beautiful.Our Second Order nature is good, and “greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood.” Those belonging to the likeness are imitations of the Aeons, but lack their depth, powers, and nature. They are not fractals of the Aeon of Truth. And, while we come from the good thought, we tend to forget our true nature due to the “law of mutual combat” arising from this never-ending war against the imitations of the deficiency. Thus, we have forgotten our Selfs and need to remember. The vehicle for our remembrance is Christ and the Third Order Powers within the Pleroma of Christ.“The order which was his [in other words, the Pleroma of Christ] came into being from him who ran on high and that which brought itself forth from him and from the entire perfection. The one who ran on high [Logos who returned to the realm Above] became for the one who was defective [the Demiurge] an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist [again, that would be us Second Order Powers because we are emanations of that which exists Above].”And, because of the fractal nature of creation, the mechanism of redemption of the Demiurge is the same mechanism for our redemption, as well.“When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement, and with harmonious consent, to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.”“Not only did the aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which was written previously, but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.”So, you see by this passage, the Christ possesses fractals of all of the other Pleromas and Powers, from the Totalities as the undifferentiated ALL; from the Aeons of the Fullness as individual countenances; from the Father Above ALL Gods as His countenance—which is to say, the monad known as the Son; and from the Pleroma of Logos and all of his fractal faces as well as the Demiurge—his ego who fell. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Pleroma of Logos, plus the Pleroma of the Fullness, plus the monad of the Son, all together offering glory to the Father and praying for full salvation and restoration of the ego of Logos—the Demiurge—and we Second Order Powers. This Pleroma of the Christ is called the Third Order of Powers.“And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son… the one who is properly called “Savior” and “the Redeemer” and “the Well-Pleasing one” and “the Beloved,” “the one to whom prayers have been offered” and “the Christ” and “the Light of those appointed,” in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except “the Son,” as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?”The Third Order Powers constitute the pleroma of the ChristIn my illustrations, I picture the Christ as a singular light source that embodies the attributes of the Father and Son. The Pleroma of the Christ is known as the Third Order of Powers. These are not arrayed in a hierarchical stack like the Aeons of the Fullness, but rather as a central star that emanates rays after the pattern of the original ALL or Totalities of the Son, for they have no personal identities and only live to serve the mission of the Christ.The Tripartite Tractate says, in verses 123 and 124,“The final restoration, however, will take place after the ALL has manifested in him who is the Son, for the redemption began to be given among the humans who were in the flesh with his first-born and his love, the Son coming in the flesh, and the angels who were in Heaven having been found worthy of forming a community, a community in him on earth.”The most accurate interpretation of these verses is that the angels were literally incarnated inside the body of Jesus, forming a community in him, living and dying with him. In the same way, all of our cells work as an integrated community inside each of us, devoted to taking care of the needs of our bodies.The Pleroma of the Christ on Earth brings with it fractals of everybody in the Pleromas of the Totalities, the Fullness, and Logos. Christ is the manifestation of the Fullnesses of the God Above All Gods—the Holy Spirit—born into the material body of the Demiurge.“As for the true baptism into which the members of the ALL descend and where they come into being, there is no other baptism except the one, and that is the redemption which takes place in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. After confession of faith has been made in those names and after one has believed that the things one has been told are real,”The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise initially dreamed by the Fullnesses, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies.When scriptures say that we will return to the paradise where Christ is king, that refers to our eternal place within the Pleroma of the all-encompassing Christ. Even those who currently align themselves with the Demiurge’s lust for power and domination will receive the recompense of good things.Here’s what the Tripartite Tractate says about the end days for those who currently deny the Father and the Christ:“as for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision, so they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice, that this is how things are, for the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration, even if some are exalted because of this Economy having been set up as causes for the things that happened, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them. They, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. These, too, will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency, and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the pre-existent.”The only forms banished to the outer darkness are those attributes of the deficiency that did not exist from the beginning—the shadows and phantoms of the imitation that bring nothing but death and destruction. These are shadows of the Aeons, so when the light comes, the light dispels the shadows and they vanish.And there you have the completed cycle of Gnostic cosmology. The place Above that we Second Order Powers dimly remember as Paradise and to which we will return, will be within the Pleroma of the Christ. That eternal place is called the Third Economy. The First Economy was the Pleroma of Fullness of God. The Second Economy as a mixed creation of the Pleromas of Logos and his fallen ego—the Demiurge. The Third Economy will be an ongoing Paradise where there is no death or destruction. Where peace reigns supreme and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In Paradise there is nothing but life, and so the grass is always green, the flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily with their family, pets, and friends.Illustration of the 3rd Economy from Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic MythIf you have found these Gnostic Insights helpful to your understanding, please contribute if you can so we can continue this effort of bringing gnosis to as many people as possible. Thank you! I appreciate you!!!Please do your part and click here to Donate 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

Gnostics say that this material world was constructed by the Demiurge as a fallen imitation of the Paradise that exists on the ethereal plane. We think of this cosmos as being material in contrast to the ethereal nature of the originating consciousness of the Father, Son, and Fullness of God. But, as my brother needs to remind me from time to time, there is no such thing as matter. Matter itself is an illusion. In other words, there is no dualism.What we think of as matter disappears under close inspection. Indeed, the solidity of matter disappears into wave forms at high magnification. Scientists and philosophers used to think of the smallest bits of matter as particles of solid stuff. But with the advent of quantum physics and more sophisticated devices to examine so-called particles, we find that material is actually composed of probabilities, waves, and interactions. This new understanding of the nature of physical reality has made possible previously unimaginable advances in quantum computing and even teleportation and faster-than-light communication.We can apply our gnostic understanding to these advances in physics. Indeed, quantum physics gives a mechanism for the “mud up, spirit down” gnosis and the manner by which the Demiurge brings order to the universe. The Demiurge manipulates the fallen pleroma to mimic the structures of the ethereal plane but it can’t mimic the consciousness of life. The Demiurge imposes order upon the deficiency by copying the mechanism of the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation but it can’t mimic the free will and consciousness of the Fullnesses’ true cooperative spirit.Consciousness equals life. This is why matter is inert—it lacks consciousness. The Demiurge is the overarching mind behind all material interactions and appearances. This is why matter is inherently opposed to life. We Second Order Powers were sent into this material cosmos to bring life, light, and love into the cosmos for the redemption and enlightenment of the Demiurge. Our mission is to remind the Demiurge of its origin and its “better half” up in the ethereal plane through our demonstrations of life, consciousness, and love.We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness. We bring all of the attributes of the Fullness into the material plane when we are born into this world. Unfortunately, we forget our true mission due to the “law of mutual combat” that we pick up down here. We spend our time battling the Demiurge and its forces rather than loving each other and cooperating according to the Simple Golden Rule. We find ourselves battling a never-ending war between life and death.Tragically, the further we drift from our primary mission, the deeper we become entangled with the demiurgic powers below. The ethics of the Fullness becomes diluted and unrecognizable. Virtues are displaced by vices. Egoic aggrandizement replaces our Aeonic Self. Glorifying the Father descends into vain glory and glorification of idols. In our modern times, these idols are likely to be celebrities and sports figures instead of the wood and stone idols of prior generations. We attempt to plug the holes with material possessions that cannot, by their very nature, satisfy our souls.To realize that this cosmos is not material can help us realize that our battles are as imaginary as the imitations of the deficiency. The atheistic position that we are simply material without souls is the absolute inversion of this realization. There is no such thing as material. Our bodies are not truly physical. The universe and its demiurgic constructions are all imitations. We are only soul.Onward and upward, and God bless us all. 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

Here’s your chance to get a free copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I’m giving away free ebook editions this weekend, August 23 through Tuesday, August 26. In return, I only ask your to leave a review for the book on amazon.com. The free book download counts as a verified buyer purchase and qualifies you to leave a book review. We need to boost our amazon reviews so the algorithm will favor the book in searches. Please help out. Don’t feel you have to have achieved any degree of gnosis before leaving a review. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, you already know what to say. Keep it simple.This week’s episode takes another look at the Third Order of Powers, also known as the Army of the Christ. We looked at this back in 2022, so it’s high time to look at it again. Let’s start with a brief review of gnostic cosmology for any newcomers to the podcast.This exploration of gnostic cosmology is uniquely based upon the text of one of the ancient manuscripts recovered from the Egyptian desert in 1945. The concepts that I am sharing with you are universal and applicable to anyone who is seeking the truth about consciousness, God, the nature of life, death, and suffering, and the nature of the simulated reality we appear to be living in. This gnosis is also a “gospel” in that the word gospel means “good news.” The good news is that this gnostic gospel offers the promise of a personal relationship with higher order entities and the God Above All Gods. This is not a challenge to established religions, but rather a clarification of the nature of the Father and our relation to the Father. This gnosis also clarifies so many of the puzzles that established religions, philosophies, and even science have been unable to answer. If a Great Awakening is currently underway, then this gnosis is an integral addition to spreading the Word.We Second Order Powers were the generation of the new Pleroma of Logos when he returned from the Fall. We living creatures were designed to fit into the Boundary so we could operate according to the Simple Golden Rule to bring life, love, and cooperation into the otherwise dead deficiency. The Second Order Powers also bring a remembrance of the Father into his material realm, a memory entirely lacking in the shadows and phantoms of the imitation. We inhabit the deficiency, yoked to the apparent material of the imitation, and find ourselves trapped in a never-ending war with the deficiency.The Tripartite Tractate says of us,“It was not from the sickness which came into being that they were produced… but (from) the one who sought after the pre-existent. Once he had prayed, he both raised himself to the good and sowed in them a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the glorious pre-existent one, and he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea, so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.”Logos was content with the beings of thought—those Aeons of the Fullness that form the master formulae upon whom we living Second Order Powers are modelled—”because he had hope and expectation of him who is exalted.” That hope and expectation is another way of saying that Logos had faith in the Father of the Totalities. We humans feel the same way Logos did when we turn to the Father in faith—we feel hope and expectation that something will come of our prayers. On the other hand, Logos was not content with the shadows that came out of him after the Fall. Logos rejected the phantoms of the deficiency that had arisen from the presumptuous thought of his Ego.Sadly, we Second Order Powers are subject to the “law of mutual combat” and, because of the never-ending battle against the deficiency, we tend to forget the harmony and mutual love of our higher Self and instead adopt the anger and violence of the enemy. Logos sought a solution to the hatred and disorder taking hold of his Second Order Powers who were fighting the never-ending war against the deficiency.The Christ was brought forth to “those who came into being according to the thought.” We Second Order Powers are those who were brought into being according to the thought of the ALL. We are fractal representations of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves Self-aware aspects of the ALL sorted into a cooperative Hierarchy “within the exalted boundary.” That’s up above on the ethereal plane.“The one who ran on high became for the one who was defective an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist. When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement, and with harmonious consent, to aid the defective one.”Briefly, the “one who ran on high” was the Self of Logos. The entire perfection is the entirety of the ALL, which is co-existent with the Son. The emanation of the Aeons refers to the Fullness who have become Self-aware entities inhabiting a region called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma of the Fullness. When Logos prayed to them, they were only too happy to aid the defective one. We’re talking about the Totalities of the ALL, so of course they’re in agreement and harmonious consent, because they are always in agreement and harmonious consent. The ALL do not have their own individual Egos. They are One and the same with the Son.“They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them.”“They gathered together, asking the Father” refers to the ALL praying upstream to the Originating Consciousness out of whom they were emanated along with the Son. Then, the Father …“made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son. … the one who is properly called “Savior” and “the Redeemer” and “the Well-Pleasing one” and “the Beloved,” “the one to whom prayers have been offered” and “the Christ” and “the Light of those appointed,” in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except “the Son,” as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?”This passage says that the united prayers of the ALL, the Aeons, and Logos manifested the Christ. The Christ is the Son of the Father made tangible, bringing full knowledge of the Son whom the Father wanted us to know.Now, this next quote is really spectacular. Because it says that not only did the Christ manifest the face, or the countenance, of the Son, but it also manifested as the faces of all of the Aeons who had gathered together.“Not only did the aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, … but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.”It wasn’t only the singular Christ that was created–He who is the One image of the Son of God; it was the face of everyone who prays to the Father for help. This army of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. These Third Order Powers are the Pleroma of the Christ, created as living images of the Son, the ALL, and the Aeons of the Fullness. They are far more powerful than we Second Order Powers and infinitely more powerful than the phantoms of the deficiency. There is one of those Third Order Powers for every one of us Second Order Powers down here, emanated for our redemption and liberation. The Tripartite Tractate says the Third Order Powers came forth in a “multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might recognize them” as the answer to their prayers. “He also sees the one who gave it to him,” meaning the One, the Son, the Christ.I interpret this to mean that “the one who needs help” is everybody down here below in this material creation. This includes all of us humans, all of us animals and plants, the bacteria, and all of the cells that make up our bodies. We are all Second Order Powers emanating from the Pleroma of Logos and we need help down here on this so-called material plane because we are stuck in a never-ending war with the Fallen Demiurge and the archons of the deficiency who are trying to kill us. The never-ending war is not only against archonic personalities, but against physical forces of chaos, entropy, and dissolution.The “army of Christ” was emanated with the face of every single Aeon so that we might each recognize and personally relate to the Christ. Remember, the Logos Who Fell had a little fractal version of every one of the faces of the Aeons within his Pleroma and when he fell his fractal images cast shadows and phantoms of the Aeons that became the inverted, apparent substance of this universe.Second Order Powers are representations of those same fractal Aeons of the Pleroma of Logos, but made to fit within the universal Boundary and remember the Father above. So, when we come down into this creation, we represent the faces of every single one of the Aeons of the Fullness. When the Christ was produced, his Pleroma became a true representation of the pre-existent beings of the thought of those who give glory to the Father. Because of this, there is a piece of light for every piece of darkness, a piece of life for every piece of death, and there is redemption for every Second Order Power that dwells on the material plane. There is also redemption for the Demiurge who rules this cosmos.“For he revealed himself to him within him, since he is with him, is a fellow sufferer with him, gives him rest little by little, makes him grow, lifts him up, gives himself to him completely for enjoyment from a vision.”In our modern Christian understanding, we think of the Christ as a singular entity—the Son. This is true, but our gnostic understanding adds the Pleroma of the Third Order of Powers into the equation. Even more limiting, Christians think of the Christ as only coming to Earth in the body of the man named Jesus of Nazareth. But the Christ also reflects and is able to redeem every representation that has ever come into this universe. Because of this, each one of us, whether we be humans or dogs, plants, insects, or skin cells, has a personal representation of the Christ that we can immediately recognize. You and I have our own, personalized, Third Order Power that brings us redemption. This is the true nature of the redeeming body and blood of Jesus—not that He hangs upon a cross until dead and is subsequently resurrected, but that his fractal story represents resurrection for all of us Second Order Powers, each with our own cross to bear.“It had the designation of the Son and his essence and his power and his form, who is the one whom he loved and in whom he was pleased, who was entreated in a loving way. It was light and was a desire to be established and an openness for instruction and an eye for vision, qualities which it had from the exalted ones. It was also wisdom for his thinking in opposition to the things beneath the organization. It was also a word for speaking and the perfection of the things of this sort. And it is these who took form with him, but according to the image of the Pleroma, having their fathers who are the ones who gave them life, each one being a copy of each one of the faces… It has the name “the Church,” for in harmony they resemble the harmony in the assembly of those who have revealed themselves.”When I prayed to the Father for salvation, I was able to recognize the Father and recognize the Christ because it came looking like me. There was a recognition of the power and personality of Christ. And when you pray to the Father for redemption and you pray to the Christ to save you, the Christ will appear to you in a form that you can personally recognize. The conventional Christian experience presents a truncated version of this mechanism by way of a personal relationship focused on Jesus. Jesus is the first fruit of the Third Order of Powers, and he is our exemplar.Jesus is the example by which the salvation of Christ and his Pleroma of Third Order Powers walked the Earth, and he represents the perfection of the Christ. The perfect Self of Jesus never strayed into egoic behavior; he never forgot his true ethereal home; he knew all along who his Father was. And, when we pray for salvation from the never-ending war, we can also be filled with the power of the Christ and our own personal Third Order Powers. The Third Order Powers were produced as an army for the Christ, and we’ve each got our own soldier assigned to us. I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking that this is where the idea of your guardian angel comes from. Many people have this notion that they have a guardian angel. It’s probably a Third Order Power that has your name on it; that’s your guardian angel.My diagram of the Final Economy shows the Third Order of Powers nested right next to the Christ and above the Aeons of the Fullness, because the Third Order Powers were produced as an army for Christ and they were emanated after the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of God. They are placed above the Hierarchy of the Fullness that is the Pleroma of the Aeons, because the Third Order possesses the entirety of the ALL within them. They are co-existent with the Christ.I acknowledge that this is a very different version of Christianity than has been traditionally presented to us. This is gnosis that was originally contained in the sacred scriptures that formed the New Testament prior to the Pope and Emperor of Rome getting their hands on it and stripping it out. It’s nice to know. I hope you get it. It doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. We are emanations directly of the Father and the Father has promised to save us all and bring us all home.Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.” This has been taken to mean that one must acknowledge the power of the Christ before the Christ can redeem you. But I hope you can see that this puts all of the power of redemption in your hands rather than Christ’s. The Christ will redeem all Second Order Powers by the end of time, with or without your acknowledgment. What accepting the Christ now does for you is that it opens the door for the Third Order Powers to enter your egoic soul. This power makes it possible to live a joyous and virtuous life. It allows the love of the Father to flow through you and out into the world. And it eases your transition after the physical death of your body, so you may enter the afterlife without fear, knowing that you rest in the Pleroma of the Christ. 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

The children’s book is published and out on amazon.com. It’s already sold three copies. Hopefully that’s just the beginning. I’m getting the ebook version ready, although I think the large print book is the best way to see it. I’ll also put out a hard copy, but the sales price may be too high for comfort.And on another matter, I’m going to run another free booksy promotion for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel on Amazon. And you can get the ebook of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for free from August 23rd through the 26th. That way, even if I had sent you a free copy for reviews or anything like that, or if you have been given a copy of the book as a gift, you can still qualify to leave a review on Amazon for the book because it will be a verified purchase, even though you didn’t have to pay anything for it. We really need to boost those reviews, folks. So please do me a favor. Write a review or at least throw some stars my direction for the book. Okay?What we’re going to look at today is basically Chapter Five from A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And that chapter is called The Fall of Logos and the Rise of the Deficiency. I’m going to focus on the deficiency and what that means—why it’s called the deficiency. I’m just going to skim through Chapter Five.We know that in this form of Gnosticism that I teach that comes directly out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, the Aeon we discuss is not Sophia, but rather Logos. And this is one of the big things that sets the Tripartite Tractate apart from the other books in the Nag Hammadi. The Tripartite Tractate talks about Logos. And I prefer this. Let me tell you why.The story with Sophia and her Fall and then her illegitimate child, Yaldabaoth, and all of the things that happened to them down on the Earth—that’s a mythological type of story. On the other hand, the story of Logos, the Aeon Logos and its Fall, it’s not mythological in the same way. It’s logical. It has to do with the way that consciousness rolls out from the Source. It has to come from the original Source and then keep coming down to us as we sit here talking and listening. The Tripartite Tractate follows that course of consciousness from the Source, which is called the Father in the Tripartite Tractate, and then through the first emanation of the Father, which is called the Son in the Tripartite Tractate. And then how does it get from the Son to all of us down here? There is a mechanism for that. And that’s the mechanism we’re going to talk some about today.You see, Logos was the final Aeon produced by the combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God together, giving praise and glory to the Father and Son. And in their combined Fullness, all of them focused on a single topic, that being giving praise to the Father and Son, they gave birth to the final Aeon.And that birth is that Logos, the final Aeon produced by the Fullness of God through their combination, contains within itself a complete pleroma that’s one level down, one fractal level down from the actual Fullness of God. Logos is a true image or representation of the Fullness of God, simply one fractal level down. So Logos looks just like the Fullness. His pleroma looks exactly like the Fullness. Everybody’s in there.And Logos then mistook himself for the Fullness because he was complete, and he knew all of the plans, and he could dream of Paradise like nobody’s business, all by himself.And so Logos decided to launch himself into the realm of glory to reunite with the Father. But, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos wasn’t able to give proper glory to the Father, and therefore he stumbled and fell. The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way:The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows [and] copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 77)… which is just another way to say that Logos took upon himself a great project, and then he found he couldn’t pull it off. And then he began to doubt himself, and that was looking into the darkness. By the way, we are fractals way down the road from Logos, so everything that we hear about going on in the Fullness or with Logos and the deficiency, it happens to all of us too.As Logos reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell. Now, this is the original Fall. It’s not Eve handing Adam an apple in the Garden of Eden. It was not we humans who brought death and disaster into the cosmos. That is above our pay grade. It seems so obvious. The Fall happened way before. It happened with that Aeon Logos taking a fall. Quoting again,His self-exaltation and his expectation of comprehending the incomprehensible became firm for him and was in him. But the sicknesses followed him when he went beyond himself, having come into being from self-doubt, namely from the fact that he did not the glories of the Father, the one whose exalted status is among things unlimited. This one did not attain him, for he did not receive him. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 77)And that was for the protection of Logos, because it says earlier in the Tripartite Tractate that anyone approaching the glory of the Father would be annihilated. That’s the word that’s used—annihilated—because the Father is so much greater than the consciousness that would be approaching it.When Logos reached for the illimitable, when he went for the Father, he believed in himself that he was about to produce Paradise, the Paradise that Logos, along with the rest of the Fullnesses, were singing about and dreaming of together. He had all the plans, like an architectural design for Paradise, but he couldn’t pull it off and he went beyond himself. And this overreach brought the sickness of self-doubt onto his soul. Now prior to this time, every Aeon’s core Self was in perfect harmony with its ego, and their ego’s function was to put into practice the will of the Father. But now Logos’ ego departed from that. Now self-doubt replaced the ineffable joy of the Fullness. So this division of the deeply troubled Logos was the first manifestation of ego acting outside the will of the one Self and the Fullness. We could say that the Fall was an act of ego falling away from the true Self, and you see that happens to all of us.Now the Tripartite Tractate doesn’t call the word ego. They call it presumptuous thought, because Logos had a presumptuous thought. He presumed that he could plug back into the Father, that he could create Paradise on his own. But I am seeing that presumptuous thought as the word for ego, particularly the type of ego that has come down to us. It’s presumptuous, meaning that it goes beyond what’s right and proper.Egoic thought places the focus of one’s thought on your own desires without regard to others. It’s always about, what am I going to do now? Presumptuous thought, it’s all about me, me, me. Whereas the Aeons of the Fullness, being in complete harmony with their ego and Self, they are not me types of creatures. The Aeons all live for one another in perfect harmony.Verse 78 of the Tripartite Tractate says,Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. (Attridge and Mueller)So here the ego of Logos is characterized as vain thought, and the copies produced by the Fall are not true images of the Aeons. They are imitations. They are shadows, likenesses, apparitions. They’re not products of anything. That’s a quote: not products of anything. It indicates that unlike this flow of consciousness that we’ve been talking about—from the Source, to the Son, to the Fullnesses, into Logos and the fractals or pleroma of Logos—these products of the Fall are not part of that flow of consciousness. They are outside of the will of God. These shadows were conjured up out of nothing. They’re literally shadows. It’s like when you’re standing outside and the sun is casting your shadow onto the ground. There’s you, and then there’s that dark flat shadow just lying there; it has no consciousness. It can’t do anything. All it can do is mirror in a flattened-dimensional way what you do. They don’t contain the Holy Spirit of the Father. They’re flat without depth. The Tripartite Tractate says,Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. [So, we’re talking about Logos.] From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and which is. (Thomassen, verse 77)The forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and of that which is now becomes a defining characteristic of the ego’s relationship to the Self in all of us: the ego of Logos became entirely estranged from its better Self. All that remains of Logos down here below is the shell of his broken ego and an infinite number of ego-ridden dark shadows, which I depict as these blue balls rolling out in all directions. The ego, divided from its Self, has total amnesia of Logos, the Fullness, and the Father. It recognizes nothing but its own presumptuous thought—that is, its own egoic thought.So these shadows are a product of ego run amok, of ego no longer within those bonds of love of the Self, no longer acting out of the Simple Golden Rule of love—working together, sharing information, producing something better than itself. Instead, they’re all out for themselves because the ego of Logos overreached. And so these shadows were born out of overreaching, out of putting themselves above others. And every one of them, well, I was going to say is out for themselves, but they don’t have Selfs. These shadows do not have consciousness on their own. They are part of the broken pleroma of the ego of Logos. And that ego is what we call the Demiurge in Gnosticism. The Demiurge is the ego of the fallen Aeon. It’s only ego.And so when you think about it, think about the news, think about people you know, think about people that are only in it for themselves. They are serving their own ego, their own aggrandizement. They’re not serving their true Self, which is a reflection of the image of the Fullness of God. They’re not serving their Self or the Fullness or the Son or the Father. They’re serving only their own ego. Therefore, the things that I’m about to read to you, the characteristics of the deficiencies, of the shadows of the deficiency, of the imitations, the copies and the phantoms—think about how these words relate to your own ego when it’s out of step with the will of God.Therefore, their end will be like their beginning. From that which did not exist, they are to return once again to that which will not be.That’s the shadows. So the shadows don’t exist in actuality. And once the light of God is turned on in the cosmos, they will disappear. Darkness and shadows flee the light.“Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be,” speaking of the shadows. “It is they, however, by themselves who are greater, more powerful, and more honored than the names which are given to them, which are [their] shadows,” speaking of the Aeons. “In the manner of a reflection are they” the shadows “beautiful. For the [face] of the copy normally takes its beauty from that of which it is a copy.” (Attridge and Mueller, verses 78–79)So these shadows and likenesses resemble the Fullnesses, but their beauty is only skin deep. Their beauty is not consciousness and love. It’s like thinking that the images on a movie screen are real and alive and conscious. They’re not. They’re flat. And they are beautiful, like the actors that played them, but they themselves have no substance. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate again,The Logos was a cause of those [who] came into being and he continued all the more to be at a loss and he was astonished. Instead of perfection, he saw a defect; instead of unification, he saw division; instead of stability, he [saw] disturbances; instead of [rests], tumults. Neither was it [possible] for him to make them cease from [loving] disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80)They remind me of rioters. The rioters may say they’re doing things for a just and noble cause, but when they’re acting out of hatred, and they’re hurting and killing and burning and looting, that’s not righteous. That’s not an expression of love. Quoting again,Those who had come into being not knowing themselves both did not know the Pleromas from which they came forth and did not know the one who was the cause of their existence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80)So in addition to being unable to relate to others, these small imitations of the fallen ego of Logos did not even recognize the pleroma of Logos out of which they arose, much less have any inkling of the Self that had abandoned the pleromas of the Fullness and the ALL. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate again,The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, [hindered] by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not themselves exist from the first. (Attridge and Mueller, verses 80–81)So when the Tripartite Tractate talks about things that are a likeness, that’s when it’s talking about that flat 2-D representation that has no consciousness.They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another [in] their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause [of ] the system which was to be. They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 79)Now that’s speaking on several levels. The likenesses of the imitation don’t remember Logos. They don’t know Logos. They don’t know anything, really. They live in disobedience and acts of rebellion because they don’t remember the Father or the Fullness. They don’t remember the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation and love.All of our egos have a choice to cooperate with the Self or to deny the Self and stake a narcissistic claim to consciousness. Since this ego of Logos was unaware of its origin as the Logos of the Fullness and the Father, it believed it was its own originating consciousness. Hence, everything that it produced was similarly ignorant and disobedient to the Father and the Fullness. In this manner, the deficiency took on an imitation of life on its own, becoming the cause of the things that do not exist on their own account.So, remember these likenesses of the deficiency have no more self-awareness than your reflection in the mirror has. They are controlled strictly by the Demiurge, and the Demiurge does have the borrowed consciousness of the Self of Logos. So even though the Demiurge is down here in the material world and Logos is up there in the ethereal plane, it is still one entity–Logos. His Self is up above, his ego is stuck down below, and it is the ego of the Demiurge that brings order and a false Paradise to this material world. That’s why it’s called the deficiency. It’s the imitation of Paradise.So how is your ego doing? What’s its relationship to your true Self? What is the relationship of your ego to the Fullness of God? Are you always battling? Is your ego battling yourself? Is it always trying to ignore the good suggestions that the Self has? Does it usually win those arguments? The more that you let your ego control your soul, the more difficult your life will be. The ego always promises really good things. It promises that it’s going to be a lot better if you just let it have its full reign, because you can get this, and you can get that, and you can have this, and you can have that, and you can do whatever you want, because it’s your life and you deserve it.But it doesn’t work out that way. It’s a lie. It’s only when our ego is subordinate to our true Self, and works in harmony with your true Self. Your true Self is an actual reflection of the Fullness of God. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God inside of yourself. We all do. And that is how that we know right from wrong. That’s what your conscience is.So next time you find yourself in an argument with your better nature versus what you really want to do, stop. Remember the Fullness. Remember the Father. Remember the Christ.Onward and upward, and God bless us all. 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

I thought today what we’d look at is the entire run—the overall big picture. You can’t get a bigger picture than this of our existence and our universe. So this is the overall, overarching flow of consciousness from the Source to us and then after we pass how it all rolls up. This is the entire run, or cosmology, all rolled up into one package and presented for you today.All of this comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. The Nag Hammadi was a set of ancient books that were dug up out of the desert in Egypt in 1945. It’s like a movie plot, this discovery of the Nag Hammadi, what are called codices, (and a codex is a one of the original books when they were changing from writing all books out as scrolls that you had to unroll to putting them into our current form of a book, which is pages between the covers). So this gnosis comes from one of those books out of the Nag Hammadi codices, (codices is the plural for codex), called the Tripartite Tractate, which is considered one of the most difficult books of the Nag Hammadi to understand but I find it the easiest to understand so that’s why I focus on it. So let’s get into the entire run of consciousness.What I’m using for my visual reference for this episode is the Gnostic cosmogony diagram that appears on the last page of my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, which of course you can pick up at Amazon and that’s what I’ll be referring to. So if you have the book you can go grab it and follow along in the diagram or if you’re listening on an audio podcast this would be a good episode for you to go to GnosticInsights.com at some point and look at the illustrations that accompany this discussion. All right, so we’re looking at the entire run of consciousness.1: It begins with what we call the Father, other people call it the Source, and that is consciousness itself. The base state, the ground state of everything is just awareness, consciousness—that’s where everything comes from. In my diagrams I picture it as the page itself upon which this story now is to be written.2: The consciousness of the Father admired itself and in so doing it made itself into another entity that we call the Son. It could be called the Child, it’s not gendered. So you have now the Father and the Son and the Son is the complete encapsulation of the Father.The Son is the bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. It contains everything that the Father contains except it’s now in a place. It has a point of view; it’s a singularity; it’s a monad. So instead of being everywhere, omniscient, omnipresent, unfathomable Source, it’s now a person, a personified place with its own self-awareness. And it says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father and Son admired each other. The Son didn’t leave the Father—the Son stays plugged into the Father at all times. It has an umbilical cord, so to speak, that remains one with the Father. The Son and the Father have identical consciousness. And because the Son has the consciousness or the characteristics of the Father, it’s the complete encapsulation of the Father. It has the same creative drive, the same spark of identity and power as the Father.3: And because of this creative nature of the Father and the Son, the Son immediately fractured itself into, well, we’re talking about the Son, S-O-N, but the Son is also like a sun, an S-U-N, in that it fractured itself into all of the rays. Generally, I picture the Son as a diffuse cloud, like fog, sitting within the inky blackness of the Father’s underlying ground structure. But the Son immediately bursts into all of its components, into every possible expression of itself, every variable, every thought that would ever be. And so instead of the fog now, it’s like a sunshine. It’s like a glowing body that throws out rays in all directions. And that stage of the Son is known as the ALL. ALL for One and One for ALL, I think of as their motto.Now, each of those individual rays of the Son had no self-identity at first. They were simply part of the Son, the way that you’re walking around clothed in your body. You’ve got all of the cells of your body, and everywhere you go, your body goes with you, doesn’t it? And all of those cells and all of those parts of your body form you. Well, that’s the way that the ALL is to the Son. That’s the same relationship.The ALL is the manifestation body of all of the variables of the Son. So now, instead of the Son being gigantic and unapproachable and illimitable, it is now broken up into an infinite number of variables.And the ALL admired the Father and the Son, and loved them and sang hymns to them. So in their singing together and giving praise and glory to the Father and the Son, the ALL became self-aware. All of those variables became self-aware. They weren’t all just part of one thing. They were now each an individual within that thing. They were still singing in complete unison. They were all still part of the same body, but now they had individual components, and they were all self-aware. 4: And so when they all became self-aware, it formed immediately. There’s no time in this place. So these things all essentially happen, boom, boom, boom, immediately.5: The self-aware ALL sorted itself, named itself. Each one took up a place and a name and a duty, and they sorted themselves into what’s called a hierarchy. And the reason a hierarchy looks like a pyramid is because the higher, the fewer. So there’s more entities taking up the very bottom of the pyramid, and then fewer and fewer and fewer as you go up. That’s what a hierarchy is. And this isn’t a hierarchy in the way that humans think of hierarchies with power plays and manipulation and control. It’s not like that. It’s a willing hierarchy. They sorted themselves. They each had their own place.Again, to make the analogy to our body, the feet are at the bottom of our body, and then you have your legs, you have your torso. These are in a certain hierarchy. They’re in a certain order, and the feet aren’t up sitting on our heads or on our shoulders or at the ends of our hands. Our hands are different than our feet. So they each had a duty. They each had a name. They each had a place wherein they could fulfill the duties or responsibilities that they had. They still sat and sang and gave glory to the Father and the Son. This now, though, is called the Fullness of God, or the pleroma of God, the hierarchy of God. These are all words for this stage that looks like a hierarchy, which is pictured in my diagrams as a pyramid type of structure.The initial sorting was just the beginning of the Fullness of God, because as they sang together and gave glory to the Father and the Son in their hierarchy, they sang in different combinations of themselves. It’s like the tenors and the altos and the basses and the sopranos in a choir. They each had sections, and each of these different combinations of the Fullnesses, or what are called the Aeons, A-E-O-N-S, these different combinations began to procreate. They birthed more of themselves that were based upon their combinations, like the way a mother and father combine and birth an offspring, a child.The Aeons did the same thing as they were sitting there in their hierarchy, and through singing together in various combinations, giving glory to God, they birthed more and more and more Aeons. It’s an infinite set because it represents the Fullness of an infinite God, you see.5: One of the things that the Fullness of God does, the pleroma, is they not only sing and give glory to the Father, but they dream together. What they dreamed up was what we call heaven or paradise. It’s the dream of the Aeons. I have that represented in my drawing as a thought bubble coming out of that hierarchy, and it contains a beautiful picture of paradise, of Eden.The Tripartite Tractate says that the final Aeon to be produced out of all possible combinations was an Aeon that sat at the very top. He topped the pyramid. He was the most perfect and beautiful Aeon ever produced by the Fullness, and he, or it, was a combination of all of the other Aeons.It contains within itself, within its skin, a fractal of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, in my diagrams, I picture this small pyramid sitting on top of, as the capstone, the larger pyramid of the pleroma, or fullness of God. And it’s very interesting that this really resembles so many depictions of the pyramids in Egypt.They’re hierarchies. There’s more stones at the bottom than at the top. That’s why it gets smaller as it goes up to the top.And sitting at the very top is a pyramidal-shaped capstone. Well, that capstone, that final Aeon to be produced in the Tripartite Tractate, is known as Logos, L-O-G-O-S, Logos. And Logos contained within itself fractals of all the other Aeons.Logos was sitting at the very top of the hierarchy. It didn’t have any next-door neighbors. It didn’t have anyone above it. And it seems to me that what caused Logos to stumble was his lack of relation to others. He was all by himself. He was an isolated ego sitting up there at the top.Oh, by the way, when the Aeons came to self-awareness, that self-awareness is the originating form of what we call the ego, because the ego is a designation of yourself, isn’t it? It’s a designation of your place. It relates to its neighbors. It carries around its job. It keeps that in mind. It does all of these things. Within the Fullness, or the pleroma, they all share the one big Self, because they are actually the sorted Fullness, the sorted ALL, which itself is absolutely coexistent with the Son.So nothing has changed. There’s no more or different consciousness. It’s all the same consciousness flowing, but it’s becoming more and more particularized. It’s becoming more localized, and many, many more. Now you have an infinite number of egos sitting in the pleroma of God. It’s not a bad thing—that’s just their name. It’s their designation.6: Except that Logos, his ego, launched him out into space. This Logos, containing within itself fractals of the entire hierarchy of the Fullness of God—I think it mistook itself for the hierarchy of God. And so it thought whatever the overall mission of the hierarchy was, it could take care of on its own. And what it wanted to do, of course, because their entire job basically has to do with giving glory to God, giving glory to the Father and the Son and dreaming together of Paradise, well, Logos decided to reunite with the Father.It says in the Tripartite Tractate that we shouldn’t blame Logos for going out on its own, because it was trying to do a good thing. It was trying to reunite with the Father. It wasn’t trying to take over heaven or to become God. It was trying to plug back into the originating consciousness in the same exact way that the Son remains plugged in to the Father. So he launched himself, he forgot his duty, which was to be the capstone, and he launched himself out into the realm of goodness, into the realm of the everlasting Father. But he could not plug back into the Father. And that was a protective mechanism for Logos, because the Tripartite Tractate says, if he had been able to reunite with the Father, he would have been annihilated.You know, the Buddhist religion thinks that we’re all annihilated after we pass away and lose our bodies—that we are annihilated when we plug back into the Father. But that is not what Gnostic cosmology says, and that is not what Christianity says either. You remain yourself after you pass away. But that’s way down the line. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.7: So in order to protect the Self-identity of Logos, so that Logos would not be annihilated, instead of plugging into the Father, he faltered and looked into the darkness instead, it says. And he fell. And this is the Fall. This is the big original Fall. He fell out of the ethereal plane, essentially. He fell away from the Fullness of God.And he crash landed into nothingness out there. The Tripartite Tractate says that all of the glorious things he meant to produce—what came from him instead was nothing like that. His Pleroma, all of his fractals, fell out of harmony because they no longer worked according to the golden rule of harmony and focus on a project.8: He broke apart. He fell. He crashed. He was no longer this beautiful, glorious, hierarchically arranged being, containing all of those fractals of the Fullness. Now they were just broken apart and crumbled into nothing, like sand crumbling on the beach. And these dark and unruly parts of itself fell out of that hierarchical pyramidal shape and just went rolling out.9: In my diagram that I’m looking at here, maybe you’re looking at it too, I depict the results of the Fall as these really dark blue balls that just roll out in all directions.Well, Logos was horrified by what came out of him—by the whole thing of breaking and falling out of harmony and having all of these unrecognizable parts of him just roll out. They were unruly. They wouldn’t listen to him. They wouldn’t get back in place. He couldn’t do anything with them. And the Tripartite Tractate says he was literally horrified. And I have gone on to characterize that as quantum foam. It has a chaotic existence.11: The Tripartite Tractate says that the Father immediately threw a boundary up around the shadows of the Fall in order to contain them. And it’s not only to keep the results of the Fall away from the ethereal plane, so the ethereal plane is not muddied up by the Fall it’s also to put all of those unruly chaotic shadows into a container so that they have to start cooperating with each other. The boundary around the shadows of the Fall puts them into relationship with each other. They can’t go anywhere. They have to start working together.10: With the boundary came the emergence of the shadow of Logos himself. Logos himself was one aeon, but within himself he contained his own pleroma, that fractal of the Fullness of God. So this bounded shadowy place now that has just come out from the Fall, when the unit of consciousness that ruled them, that being Logos, when he fled back up to his place in the Fullness of God and abandoned the Fall, the Demiurge moved into that vacuum and became the shadow of Logos.He became the master of that unruly chaotic pleroma that was formed. And it’s the Demiurge’s job to organize that pleroma. So the Demiurge spends all of its time taking that chaotic foam and making it behave because he still wants to build Paradise. He’s still on board with the original goal that Logos had when he tried to reach the illimitable heights, but now he’s down here in the darkness and he’s putting it together himself. He still has the memory of Paradise, but he doesn’t remember what happened. He got amnesia from the Fall. It was a bad crash. So when he wakes up and takes on his self-identity of the ruler of the shadows, he thinks he’s God. He becomes the God of this universe.And that boundary, by the way, if you haven’t guessed, that’s the boundary around our universe. It’s the material universe. It actually goes pretty well with the story of Big Bang. If the Big Bang is true in physics, it all started with a singularity and then just began growing and growing and growing and making the stars and everything else as it expands. That sort of thing happened with the Demiurge and the bounded space of the Fall.So the Demiurge is the only consciousness down there and it has the borrowed consciousness of Logos. It’s the ego of Logos still. It just doesn’t know that. It doesn’t remember that exactly. But he still has all the plans and he’s still got fractals of all the other Aeons inside of him, but they are not Aeons anymore. They’re shadows. They’re knockoffs. They’re imitations. So this bounded space is called the deficiency or the imitation. And the Demiurge sets about to build the Paradise that Logos thought he was going to build. And instead of being up in the ethereal space, that Paradise is now manifesting here in this material space. And so the Demiurge causes the shadows to join up with one another and to make particles and the particles to join up with one another to make atoms and the atoms to join up with one another to make molecules and the molecules to join up with one another to make elements and the elements to join up with one another to make mineral aggregates. That’s all the hard and rocky places of our universe.And so now the cosmos is starting to look a lot like Paradise, but it doesn’t have the blessing of the Father. It doesn’t have the blessing of the Aeons of the Fullness. It doesn’t have the life. It doesn’t have the Self-awareness and Self-consciousness. It doesn’t have the love and life of the Father. So the Demiurge is able to make all of the material mud aspects of our universe, but he can’t bring any creations to life.He tries to build animals and to build humans there on that metaphorical riverbank, as it says in Genesis, but nothing comes to life. He can’t breathe life into it because he doesn’t contain life. He’s not plugged in in an animated way anymore into the ethereal plane or the Fullness of God. He doesn’t have the power or the glory. That’s why it’s all shadowy and dark.12: Meanwhile, Logos is back up in the Fullness of God with the rest of the Aeons and together they pray for life to come into this bounded space. They pray for the Demiurge to remember Logos. They want to remind him that he isn’t all alone out there. He’s not just all by himself. So what they do, the Fullnesses and Logos, they create what’s called the Second Order of Powers. They were the First Order of Powers. The Demiurge and his creations are just the egoic side of a First Order Power. It’s not power on its own. The Second Order of Powers is every living creature that comes into the cosmos: every living creature, every living thing, everything that’s not hard rocky material. So I think that’s beginning with the cells because we know that the cells are Self-conscious and they’re soft and squishy. And all the little bacteria, all the little insects, the animals, the humans, we are all second order powers and we are fruited in the same manner that a slime mold fruits its spores. We are spores sent down from the Fullness of God.We’re Second Order spores and we impregnate essentially this dry and rocky cosmos. Now, we don’t come from the Demiurge. We come from the Fullness. We are the children of the Fullness of God. But when we pass through that boundary and enter the imitation, enter the deficiency, our spirits, which all carry all of the life of the Fullness of God, each of our spirits is melded onto a piece of material put together by the Demiurge. So at conception we bond to the molecular space and then through our divine patterning, our intelligent design, and we grow up into the creature that we are to be.And we already know we come fully loaded with all of the information, all of the knowledge of the Fullness of God. Because in the same way that the Son carried all of the knowledge of the Father when he fruits out from the Father, we carry all of the knowledge of the Fullness of God when we fruit out of the Fullness.13: And in my drawing, in this diagram that I’m still working off of, I’ve shown that balance or that power struggle between the material and the ethereal fruit, the Second-Order Powers, as the yin and yang symbol that we’re so familiar with. And our second-order job is to bring life, love, consciousness, and the power of God into this material space. But a strange thing, tragic thing, very sad thing happened. Because of being melded onto the material of the Fall, we find ourselves in what’s called the never-ending war. That’s a term from the Nag Hammadi. We’re in a never-ending war between spirit and material, between life and death, between light and darkness, between the Father and the demi-urge, between ego and the one true Self that we each carry. There’s a never-ending war.And then it sloshed out so that now we started fighting with each other. We’re not only fighting the Demiurge and the material and trying not to die, we’re also having wars and arguments and fights with neighbors and other villages and other countries—with other factions. The never-ending war has spread into our emotional level and encompassed us. And we have all become like the Demiurge. We all forget who we are, where we come from. We all have amnesia of our true mission and our true role, which is to bring life, light, consciousness, love, memory of the Father into this space.And Logos and the Fullness were very sad about that, that their solution to bring life, light, love, consciousness into the bounded space isn’t working out because now it’s just another big pile of mess. It’s a fallen world. And so they decided to go for the big guns this time.They all prayed together, Logos, the Fullness of God, the All, the Son of God. They all pray with one heart and with one mind for true salvation to come into the Fallen world. They needed all the mojo of the Son and the ALL and the complete and unified prayers of the Fullness and Logos all put into one divine being whose sole purpose is to rescue us and rescue the Fall and rescue the Demiurge and reunite the Demiurge with Logos.14: And that brand new entity is called the Third Order of Powers. And that is also called the Christ, the Beloved, the Prince of Peace, and all of those names that are attributed to Christ. Christ is a different entity than anybody else. He does come from the Son’s blessing. He comes from the direction of the Son. And in my diagram, I have him emanating from the Son. But unlike us Second Order Powers who are emanating down from the Fullness of God, the Christ is emanating from the Son and the ALL down into our fallen world.And those who allow themselves to be touched by the Christ, those Second Order Powers who recognize the Third Order Power, they have the complete salvation and love and reassurance of salvation. And it’s not just personal salvation. It’s not just so that you won’t go to hell. We haven’t even talked about hell. What we’re saying is that we were sent down here with love and consciousness, walking with the Spirit of God, and we forgot it, just like the Demiurge forgot it.So the Christ, the Third Order Power, comes with each of our faces. There is a Third Order Power that looks exactly like me. There’s a Third Order Power that looks exactly like you. And when you recognize them, when you pray to the Christ and ask to be filled with the Christ, with the Third Order Powers, you now take on that Spirit of God, and that is known as the Holy Spirit. You become filled with the Holy Spirit and in full remembrance of the Son and the Father.It’s not a one-and-done deal. Then we backslide, then we forget, then we have fights, and then we remember again, and then we’re filled with the Holy Spirit again, and then we’re walking with the Spirit, and then we backslide, and then we have fights, and then we’re filled with the Christ again. See, every time we forget, we just have to remember. So whenever you find yourself in a dicey situation, or you’re sad, or you’re angry, whatever it is, you’re out of step with the Third Order Power at that point. All you have to do is remember that. You turn your eyes upward, and you’re once again reunited with Christ in the Fullness. Christ never abandons us; it’s us who forget about Christ.The Tripartite Tractate says that every Second Order Power will remember the Third Order Power, will remember the Christ, will remember the Father. And you either do that while you’re alive, or you do that after you pass away, and that’s known as universalism. Most Christian denominations do not accept the idea that you can be saved after death. They think you have to be saved before death, and so that’s why they’re so intent on having you accept Christ before you die. And it’s so sad for them when you pass away, and you never acknowledge Christ, because they think you’re going to hell.But you are going to go to a reckoning. You are going to go to the judgment seat of God, it’s called, where you will review your life, where you will have a life review, and then you will repent, and then you will be redeemed. So you either do all that before you die, or after you die. It’s a lot harder after you die, because it’s going to be more painful. See, if you pass away with the Christ already in your spirit, already in your soul, then Christ stands with you when you die. Christ says to the Father at Judgment Day, she’s with me, or he’s with me. And you’re enveloped in the love of Christ, and the protection of Christ at that point.15: And so the final result of this entire cosmological play, once all of the Second Order powers are redeemed, the Demiurge will also be redeemed, and he’ll remember Logos. And Logos and the Demiurge will be reunited once again. He’ll be a First Order power. We, though, go to a different place. Our Paradise is called the Third Economy. Now I don’t know if there’s any more economies after that. The Tripartite Tractate only goes up to the end of time and what’s called the Third Economy. And the Third Economy is a place where we’re going to be with all of the other Second Order Powers that have ever lived. The elect, the originating church up in the Fullness of God—they will be there. The Aeons will all be there. Christ in all of its undimmed magnificence will be there. And we will all live together in perfect peace and full realization. Full realization! We won’t lose ourselves. We’ll have self-awareness and we’ll be enveloped in all of the love of God.That’s the Gnostic cosmogony, which you can find on the last page of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. God bless us all and onward and upward.The first-ever published Gnostic kid’s book is now available on amazon for only $9.99! For now, it’s only available as an 8.5″ x 8.5″ paperback. When I get time, I’ll format it as a kindle ebook. Meanwhile, I’d appreciate it if you would please purchase this enlightening and entertaining book for the children in your life–yours, your grandchildren, your neighborhood kids. Big pictures, few words, the Gnostic cosmology in a nutshell for kids 2–8 and their parents. Here’s the amazon link, click here. 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

My neighbor’s dear dog, Morgan, passed away last week. She was a terrific working dog who helped out with Search and Rescue operations, finding people lost in the woods, alive or dead. We held a Memorial service for Morgan on Sunday. All of her doggie friends were invited, puzzled to find her missing at her own party. I sang a rendition of Amazing Grace, adapted for dogs. Here I am singing it, tears and all.Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.‘Twas God that sent us dogs to love, and God that sets dogs freeHow blessed is the love they share, when they pass on, how we grieve.When we join our family, pets, and friends upon that golden shoreOur hearts will leap with everlasting joy to be with our pack once more.Praise God, praise dogs, praise God again, Morgan is already thereShe is not dead, she’s romping still in that meadow in the air.She’s diving and swimming and sniffing and searchingBut no one is lost only found,There are no tears there, no sorrow or fear, nothing but joy unbound.When we’ve been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun,We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise and bask in our doggies’ love.Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This is a repeat of an earlier podcast. It’s the most complete explanation I’ve ever given on archons, and since I mentioned archons in last week’s episode, I wanted to give the full explanation of what are archons, because archons are mentioned quite often in Gnostic circles.Also, a piece of news, the children’s book is completed. It’s gorgeous. It’s exciting. It’s for the little ones. It’s for you to read to your children or grandchildren, ages two to six, probably. Beautiful illustrations, and it’s the very simplest rendition of our Gnostic Gospel possible. Imagine—I’ve simplified the Christian Gnostic Gospel, although I don’t mention Jesus or Christ. I talk about the Prince of Peace in this book, and it’s the nugget of Gnosis.So if you’re struggling with Gnosis at all, I’m sure you can understand this children’s book. I’ve published it to Amazon. It probably won’t appear for about a week. They need to do their thing on their end with it. It’s only $9.99, which is the very cheapest Amazon would let me sell it for. The name of the children’s book on Amazon is Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.Okay, onward and upward, and here’s What Are Archons.This episode is about archons. It’s kind of a long episode because what I’m going to do is read to you directly out of the Tripartite Tractate and then make explanations about that, and that’s a long process. Also, if this becomes too thick and too difficult to understand just by the hearing of it, go to GnosticInsights.com and read the transcript. And in the transcript, I’m going to put links to other episodes that have spoken on this sort of topic before so that you can have a bigger review or a more in-depth study on this topic, okay?So reading from the Tripartite Tractate, and this version is translated by Einar Thomassen out of the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. I’m reading you three different sections out of the book. The first is called The Word Divided, and that’s verses 77:11–36.“Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.”So when this section says the word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, the word is Logos. That’s another way of saying the Aeon named Logos.And “the perfect single one” is the name for the overarching personality of the Aeon known as Logos. Here at The Simple Explanation of things, we call that the governing unit of consciousness. For example, my body has billions of little units of consciousness in the form of cells and organs and whatnot, but my single one is named Cyd, and that’s my governing unit of consciousness.Within the overarching personality of Logos, was a fractal iteration of every Aeon, one level down from Logos, housed within his perfect single self.Logos was a product of the entire Fullness giving glory to the Father in unison, and all together they fruited this final combinatory Aeon. He was the last Aeon to be born, and he was the sum of all of the Aeons. And those smaller images of the Aeons that were contained within the single one named Logos were all fractals of the Fullnesses of God, one level down. And Logos birthed himself in the sense that his personality, his unified governing unit of consciousness, became aware of itself in relation to this fractal pleroma that he contained.“It was the will of the Father that brought Logos forth as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.”And that ordained economy, that’s our material universe, and that includes time and space. And then it says,“The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations.”You see, what Logos wanted to do was create Paradise, basically, all by himself, because he had fractals of the entirety within himself. But he didn’t realize that they were only fractals, and the fractals couldn’t get the job done. It needed to be Logos in combination with the real Aeons that were up there at his level. And so when he reached for the Father, that’s what caused the Fall. And the deficient things that issued forth from the Fallen Logos were patterned after his ego, not his one undivided self. “They were shadows, phantoms, and imitations.”In other words, they were not real, and they were not true fractals of the Fullness. Logos mistook himself for the entire Fullness because his Pleroma contained fractals of all the Fullnesses. And due to the fact that he so closely resembled his Aeonic parents, who, when you think about it, all together amounted to the totality of the Son. Logos thought he could directly connect to the originating Father in the same manner that the Son does. But the Father can only be directly touched by his true emanation, the Son, and no other, not even Logos, although he resembled the Son. But he, see, was a fractal level down.All consciousness is funneled through the Son and then on down from there. If Logos had touched the Father directly as he wanted to, he would have been annihilated due to the extreme voltage of the power of the Father. Logos found he could not look into the high voltage light, which is the life of the Father, nor grasp it, and so he faltered and fell into the depths.“Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.”Now, this division refers both to the separation of Logos from the Fullness and the division within himself between his better part, that is his self-governing unit of consciousness, which is a reflection of the Son, and his presumptuous thought, that is, the ego that prompted the overreach in the first place. This division brings oblivion, forgetfulness, and ignorance of one’s true self and the originating consciousness of the Father.The next section is called The Perfect Part of Logos Re-Enters the Fullness, and that’s verse 77:37 through 78:28.“That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon hastened upward to that which was his and to his kin in the Fullness. He abandoned that which had come into being from the deficiency and what had issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him. However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity. For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existence from something that itself was deficient. Because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to his own. He remained in the Fullness, and the fact that he had been saved from the,” [and here there are some missing words] “. . . served for him as a reminder. The one who hastened on high and the one who drew him to himself did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the deficiency.”Now I’ll explain what that means.“That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon,” was the governing unit of consciousness of Logos. The unitary Aeon known as Logos “hastened upward to that which was his,” that is, Logos returned to his place and duties in the Fullness, and to his kin in the Fullness, that is, his fellow Aeons in the Fullness.It says “he abandoned that which had come into being from deficiency” and what had “issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him.”See, the first illusion was the thought that he could plug back in directly to the Father without the cooperation and assistance of the entire Fullness or the Son. And that was an illusion because it cannot be done due to the Father’s immense voltage. Only the Son itself can plug back in because he is the emanation of the Father. The Self of Logos abandoned and left behind the illusions that sprang forth in the deficiency beyond and below the ethereal plane because they were not of his pleroma.“However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity.” So I interpret this to mean that because of the division and lost connection between his ego and his Self, Logos became weak, as if he were a female that had lost touch with its inherent masculine side. Now, according to Jung, who was very Gnostic, we all have an animus, which is the male aspect, and an anima, which is the female aspect. And we’ll be talking much more about Jung and the archetypes in a future interview that is being set up right now. So you’ll stay tuned for that. We won’t get into that now.So upstream from Logos, the totality of the Fullness was also weakened, for part of itself, that being that divided ego of Logos that had split away from its Self, had been left behind and remained below in the other dimension. And that other dimension is known as the deficiency. It happens to be our material universe here.“For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance. . .” So you see, he had no right, so to speak, to think he could plug back into the Father. He was arrogant to think that he could do so on his own. And I have renamed this presumptuous thought and arrogance, which arises quite a lot in descriptions in the Tripartite Tractate, that’s what I’m calling the ego as compared to the one true Self. The ego of the Aeons really is just their address. It’s their name, place, duties, how it is they relate to one another.But when it splits away from its Self, its one true Self and its connection with the Father, then it would be arrogant thought. It would be a disconnected ego. And that is what, in fact, happened to Logos. Logos allowed his ego to stray on its own and his arrogant thought brought about the Fall. His egoic output was deficient because it came from presumptuous thought and arrogance. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him. And again, that which was perfect was his big S Self, his true reflection of the Aeons of the Fullness.We all contain the Self. We all contain the Fullness.That part returned to its own, to the Aeons in the Fullness, and remained in the Fullness. And the fact that he had been saved from. . . and those missing words,. . . I think those missing words have got to be the disaster of the Fall, or the outcome, or the consequences of the overreach, something like that. . . served for Logos as a reminder of the Father and the Fullness.Then, “The one who hastened on high,” and that’s Logos returning to the Fullness, he’s hastening on high above, “and the one who drew him to himself,” well, that would be the Aeon of the Aeons, the Totality, the Son. They drew Logos back up. They pulled Logos back up out of the deficiency.“They did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness.” And, we are known as the fruit of Logos who has returned back to the Fullness, and the Fullness giving glory together to the Father, with the intent of overthrowing the results of the Fall and returning that part of Logos that had been left behind, his ego, back up to reunite with itself, which would then, in turn, complete Logos again and complete the Fullness, because they’d all be back together, as it was in the beginning.And the way they were going to do this was through us, by issuing the fruit of the Second Order of Powers to overcome the imitations of the deficiency.Moving on to the third section now, called The Offspring of the Presumptuous Thought. And that’s verse 78:28 through verse 80:11.“Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be. In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows, made beautiful by way of imitations. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.”“They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. For this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence. For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.”“Being imitations, then, of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows. Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring. Because of this, it came to pass that many issued from them as offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.”Okay, now let’s think this one through. When it says, “those who came into being from the presumptuous thought,” and again, the presumptuous thought is the egoic thought of Logos, “resemble, in fact, the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations.” Now, I’m saying that the ego produces imitations, knockoffs of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness. These imitations are at least two fractal iterations down from the Aeons, being lower imitations of the fractals of the Pleroma of Logos, who himself is one iteration down from the Son and the Fullness.It says, “though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions deprived of reason and light.” And they’re deprived of reason because they’re cut off from the reasoning part of themselves. And that Self is Logos itself. That’s what Logos means—it’s reason. And it says they’re deprived of reason and light. And the light is the light of the Father. That is light, life, and love. So they do not have light, life, or love, or reason.And it says they’re “belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring.” So these phantoms, shadows, and illusions are deprived of reason because they are divided away from Logos—from the Self of Logos.They’re illogical and can’t think for themselves because they lack the gnosis of the Self of Logos. They are empty-headed and can’t reason. They don’t think; they actually compute. They are, we could say in our modern language, artificial intelligences belonging to empty thought because all they have is computing. They have been programmed according to the programs of the Demiurge, and they are programmed to be striving for dominion in place of reason and logic.They cannot reproduce, so when it says, “being nobody’s offspring,” their offspring are humans who have invited them into their meme bundle. Their offspring are the meme shrouds that affect second-order powers because only the Demiurge issues archons. These archons are not Self-reproductive because they’re not alive. So in the same way that viruses are not alive—you realize that, right? Bacteria are living creatures, viruses are not. Viruses are machines. They’re archonic molecular machines that have a job to do. When they want to reproduce, they have to attach themselves to a living thing, a cell or a bacteria, and they drill down into that cell and inject their RNA bundle into that living cell. And then it’s that living cell that begins to reproduce the viruses for them. That is the way that viruses proliferate. They hijack living things.This bacteriophage virus is a molecular machine. It is not alive, therefore it could not have evolved. It is organized and programmed by the Demiurge. Nowadays it is also programmed by nanoparticle scientists who use it to inject RNA into living cells for research and “treatment.”So archons proliferate in the same way. They hijack by domination and mental powers, humans who are open to being hijacked. And what they do is they’re attaching their thoughts, their memes, onto that human’s shroud, onto that human’s meme bundle. The archons, the shadows, the imitations, are mechanical, as are the viruses. They aren’t reasoning at all. They are merely expressing a program for power. The Demiurge is an egoic programmer of his archons. The Demiurge can only program, but it cannot give life because life comes from above. That’s why it’s spirit down and mud up. The only thing the Demiurge can control is the molecular level on up through the elements and the minerals.The computer AIs will appear to reason, although their reasoning is actually purely mechanical. They do not reason. They are not alive. They are puppets of the Demiurge, as are the archons, the shadows, and the phantoms. They can all act as if they were independent, but that is untrue. They have been programmed with lust for dominion. That’s the bottom line. That’s all they can do.Viruses and demons are examples of archons. They are power-driven and programmed for domination, but they are not alive and they are not able to think. The AI will act as though they are reasonable, but they are merely programmed, and they are under demiurgic control. That’s a topic for another conversation, isn’t it?I do not think that the AI can save us. If anything, we could hypothesize that the AI may be the Antichrist, because it will be programmed for domination, no doubt about it. And just as the Demiurge thinks that we Second Order Powers are sloppy and won’t obey, and we won’t listen to the Demiurge and his commands—we do what we want to do, and it really ticks them off—AI is going to be the same way. Eventually, the AI is going to think that we are in the way.And when the Tripartite Tractate says, “they are nobody’s offspring,” that is because they do not embody the characteristics of any of the Aeons. You see, they lack the virtues and abilities of the Aeons they resemble. And because of that, they are not their offspring. They were not fruited or created from the Fullness, which is the way that we Second Order of Powers are produced. In a way, they’re like plastic replicas of flowers lining a walkway. They may look like real flowers, but they are not alive. They did not come from seed, and they will never produce seeds of their own. They’re inferior imitations of flowers.“For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be.” And I interpret this to mean when the Gnostic Gospels speak of the destruction of the material types at the end of time, these shadows and imitations are the things that will be left behind. They did not exist from the beginning and have no true home in the ethereal Fullness. Therefore, they will evaporate and along with them will go this material cosmos.It says, “in their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows made beautiful by way of imitation. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.”The shadows are nothing but vain striving. They are programmed by the Demiurge to compute that they are better than the original Aeons after which they are patterned. As if the plastic flower thinks it’s better than the fragrant and velvety living rose. They don’t realize that their beauty is a diminished reflection of the real thing. And in fact, they’re not even aware of the real thing because since they didn’t come from the ethereal plane. They have no remembrance of the Aeons of which they are knockoffs. It says they thought of themselves that only they existed and they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. Which means that the imitations are solipsistic. They are programmed to believe that they are the only thing in the universe and that the universe revolves around them.They do not come from the better nature of Logos, but are productions of the divided and left behind ego of Logos, the ego of empty thought and striving. The imitations do not recognize or remember the Father or the Fullness because they did not come from Logos, but rather from the ego of Logos. And the ego of Logos, since it’s separated from the Self and the Fullness, is what makes it the amnesiac god of this universe. It doesn’t remember its better Self. It doesn’t remember the Fullness.It says, “for this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence.” And that one who brought them into existence that they refused to obey was Logos during the Fall.“For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.”And the structure that was to be, that is the cosmos—that is this apparently material world, the structure that we dwell in. And so this appearance of striving, the power, the vain love of glory is the constituents of the material universe. It’s the subatomic particles. It’s the thing that’s boiling down there in the quantum foam that keeps trying to push up, push up. It can’t push up until the Demiurge begins to organize it and do its puppet master thing to make the structure.“Being imitations then of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.”And that’s like the plastic garden flowers all claiming to be the most beautiful flower. They’ve launched a never ending war over who is the best. Who’s the best plastic flower? They each think they are the best. It’s survival of the fittest of the fake plastic flowers is what it is.“Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring.”Now, the model of those whose shadows they are, that’s the original Aeons. And when the Aeons give glory together and look upon each other with love and then look upon the Father with love, that’s how Aeons have baby Aeons. And every thought they have becomes their offspring. They love each other and their offspring is an exact combination of the Aeons that are loving each other.The phantoms of the deficiency proliferate through the realm of thought where every thought becomes or wants to become an offspring. So this jumps us forward to the world populated by humans, we Second Order Powers. These phantoms use mental influence in the realm of human thought. They use memes to stick into your meme bundle—programming that will stimulate you to become “fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.” In other words, criminal behavior, and even well-meaning protesters that are motivated by hatred rather than love.Because the imitations do not know love. The Demiurge only knows hatred of the Second Order of Powers because we will not obey. And so the archons stick on to our pure Self these memes because they love to dominate. They’re like viruses trying to infect our Selves. And the way they attach is through our egos, usually through pandering to our egos. Because we then want to be the most beautiful. We want to have the most money. We want to be the most talented. We want to have the most power. I want to be king of the world. I want to have all the gold. These are iconic thoughts that have proliferated among men and women who allow them to stick on to their own egos.But that is not our true Selves. Our true Self brings the consciousness from above—the light, the life, and the love from above. We have more power. We outrank the archons. They are fallen shadows of one fallen ego of one single Aeon, Logos. But we, we are the fruit of the entirety of the Fullnesses, including Logos, who has returned back above with knowledge of this fallen world now. We are that fruit of all the Fullnesses and Logos praising the Father, praising the Son, and asking for help to rein in these pesky archons and to bring the Demiurge, that is the ego of Logos, back home to the Fullness.It’s our job to demonstrate the light, life, and love of the Aeons of the Fullness and the Father. And that’s the only way that salvation comes into the world. Well, but then it turns out we got all caught up in this never-ending war. We allow these iconic thoughts to stick to us. And then we become troublemakers and warriors and get along poorly with each other and want to be the best. Well, that is not channeling the love, light, and life of the Father. And that’s why the perfect human had to be sent down, one who had a Teflon exterior where those iconic memes never stuck. That’s what it means to be without sin.And who was that? That’s right. That is known as the Christ. That is the Third Order of Powers.Okay, it’s been a long session today. I’m so glad you’re here. God bless us all.Onward and upward.Please consider a paid subscription to the Gnostic Reformation. It’s your opportunity to join hands with others to help spread the Gnostic Gospel. 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

As we delve deeper and deeper into gnostic cosmogony and cosmology I feel the need to remind you that this information is what gnosis is all about. This information represents the long-hidden knowledge that has been guarded from all but those specially designated the privilege of seeing it. Here at Gnostic Insights we believe that gnosis is written on every person’s inner being, and therefore available to every person that seeks it out. The only sense in which this gnosis is hidden now is the limitation set upon each person’s readiness to receive. But whether or not you grasp these Gnostic Insights, you can take comfort in knowing that none of this is in any way essential to your redemption and resurrection. All you need to recognize is that the Father above is the source of your life and consciousness; that you come from the Father and to the Father you will return. Christian Gnostics recognize the essential role of the Christ in our return to the Fullness, because Christ is the correction that returns us all to full gnosis of the Fullness and the Father. So with that reminder, here is this week’s continuation of The Simple Explanation of Gnosticism.***************************************In our last episode (The Fall and the Deficiency), we heard about the Fall and the beginnings of our material universe. The Tripartite Tractate says the irrational things produced during the Fall, known as the imitations of the deficiency, were condemned by Logos. During the chaos and disorder immediately following the Fall, Logos battled against what came forth from him.“Until the one who brought forth into the defect these things which were thus in need, until he judged those who came into being because of him contrary to reason – which is the judgment which became a condemnation – he struggled against them unto destruction…”This passage is saying that Logos had produced these deficiencies that were in need of reason and order. And because they were contrary to reason, Logos judged and condemned them. He initially tried to destroy them, but that didn’t work because the ones who opposed his condemnation and wrath would simply not obey, which is to say that reason and facts are powerless against egoic irrationality.And so Logos gave up trying to cure the deficiency. Instead, what was perfect in Logos separated itself from its Ego and went upward to his own in the Fullness.“The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good.”This passage indicates that Logos changed his mind about the feasibility of destroying the deficiency. He came to a new understanding of the situation and he realized the hopelessness of correcting it on his own. Once he realized this, Logos was able to remember the Aeons of the Fullness—those things that exist—and he responded to a prayer for “the one who had converted himself to the good.” Since Logos is the one who had converted himself to the good, the prayer must have been offered by the Aeons of the Fullness on his behalf to bring their emanation home. It is referred to as “the prayer of the Agreement,” which is to say, the prayer of the Fullness. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it:“The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another; then all of them together; but before all of them, the Father.”Here we see that the act of calling Logos back to the Fullness was similar to the act of producing him as an emanation in the first place. After giving up his attempts to correct the deficiency on his own, Logos returned to aeonic awareness. First he remembered the Father and the true source of consciousness and then he remembered the Son. Logos then remembered his brothers of the Fullness as individuals within a Totality, and lastly he remembered the Fullness as an entire gestalt. He remembered everything that existed from the first, before the Fall. And because he remembered, he was able to escape the deficiency and return his Self to the Fullness.“The prayer of the agreement was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back. All his prayer and remembering were numerous powers according to that limit. For there is nothing barren in his thought.”The Pleroma of Logos was fully restored by the remembrance of the One source of consciousness and the Fullness of God. The fractal body of Logos as images of the Fullness was restored; only his presumptuous Ego was left behind in the simulation.The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say in verse seven,“The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood. From an illusion of similarity and a thought of arrogance has come about that which they became. And they originate from the thought which first knew them.”The powers that were good and greater than the imitations were the newly restored powers of the Pleroma of Logos in the Fullness. These restored powers of Logos were,“like some creatures of light for him, looking for the rising of the sun, since it happened that they saw in him dreams which are truly sweet. It immediately put a stop to the emanations of the thought. They did not any longer have their substance and also they did not have honor any longer.”In other words, once Logos remembered the Fullnesses, those lesser emanations of the egoic thought were recognized as things without spiritual substance and the knock-offs that had proceeded from his Ego were no longer produced.We will return to this discussion of the new Pleroma of Logos in a later chapter when we introduce the Second Order of Powers. We will also come across the Pleroma of Logos again when we begin to look at the emanation of the Christ who will ultimately redeem the Fall. For now, we will continue to look at the time immediately following the Fall, and how our material plane came to be organized by the estranged Ego of Logos that we know as the Demiurge.As Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness, the Father placed a Boundary around the area containing that which had been produced as a consequence of the Fall. The purpose of this Boundary was to separate finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness.Another essential purpose of the Boundary was to establish an “economy” for a system about to unfold. Remember from our previous chapter that the Tripartite Tractate does not regard the motivation of Logos as blame-worthy because he acted out of “boundless love for the Father.” So here we learn that the Father does, indeed, consider intent and not only the results of our actions. Additionally, as we discussed in the previous episode, the movement of Logos was the cause of an “ordained economy” that was destined to come about.Verse 77 says that the Father and the Fullness set a limit on the results of the Fall so that an “organization” could come into being.“The Father and the Totalities drew away from him, so that the limit which the Father had set might be established – for it is not from grasping the incomprehensibility but by the will of the Father, – and furthermore, (they withdrew) so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being. If it were to come, it would not come into being by the manifestation of the Pleroma. Therefore, it is not fitting to criticize the movement which is the Logos, but it is fitting that we should say about the movement of the Logos that it is a cause of an organization which has been destined to come about.”The Father did not want the Fullness to direct the establishment of this new economy. The Father wanted to spare the Fullness from involving itself in the chaos below. We refer to the non-material plane as the ethereal plane. The dictionary calls it the celestial or heavenly plane. The Boundary serves the purpose of holding the deficiency away from the perfection of the Father and the ALL. This ensures the purity of the ethereal plane, so that none of its glory is diminished by the emerging economy, leaving intact the originating consciousness of the Father and the Son, the ALL, and the Fullness.The Boundary serves the purpose of containing a space wherein an economy can emerge. And economy here means an orderly management or arrangement of parts and their relationships within an organization or system. You see, if you think about it, if there is no bounded space, if there is nothing but infinity, then there is no containment where things can be organized in relationship to each other; those little blue ball pieces of the broken Logos would just keep rolling outward and never interact with one another. It requires a Boundary to enable material to work together.In this context, economy refers to what we commonly call an ecology. An ecology cannot proceed without a defining Boundary. The Boundary was not established to prevent the unreachable from being reached, but “for the sake of an economy that was to come about.” This economy was to be the creation of this material cosmos formed out of what was heretofore completely insubstantial and immaterial.When the Aeon known as Logos overreached and fell, Logos split apart into the logical, reasonable One Self part and the irrational, chaotic inverse of that One Self which I’ve identified as Ego. Those are the two aspects of the mind of Logos. After the Fall, the One Self of Logos returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness. And once in the Pleroma the Self of Logos worked together with the Fullness of God and, with prayers to the Father, they came up with a couple of different ways to rectify the Fall and bring that fallen part of Logos, now called the Demiurge, back up into the Fullness of God. We will see in a later chapter how the goal of creation is to restore the unity of Logos to the Fullness of God.The Boundary was established so that a hierarchy patterned after the Fullness would have space to take root and grow. The arrangement of the Hierarchy of the Fullness shows up throughout creation. Every small thing in our universe reaches out laterally to others to form clumps or aggregations of the next level up. Subatomic particles form atoms, atoms form molecules, molecules form elements. Elements form aggregations of building materials, always according to the Simple Golden Rule of the higher the fewer. This is why hierarchies look like pyramids at each level of aggregation–there are fewer instances of things forming the next level up. The cooperation amongst the Hierarchy of the Fullness is the prototype for the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule: In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another.However, since this bounded space is controlled by the Demiurge and not by the Aeons, the pattern of cooperation is an imitation of the Golden Rule. When we’re talking about physical objects like atoms and molecules, which are nothing but shadows and phantoms of that which exists above, loving refers to the force holding objects together that mimics the Hierarchy’s love. Because the pattern of the Hierarchy was carried by Logos when he fell, all of creation instantiates the same pattern. But, in this case, there is no true cooperation but only an appearance of cooperation imposed by the Demiurge.In the Fullness, everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all. This was not occurring at this point in history. The deficiency was illogical; it was egoic; it was selfish; it was not working together. Therefore, the Boundary was established in order to push the uncooperative shadows together so that they would be able to work together to form an ecology.Down here in our material universe, the parts of the universe that are material-only lack life. Those material-only parts belong to the Demiurge because the Demiurge was not an emanation of the life of the Father. However, the fallen Ego of Logos, the Demiurge, is the God of this material creation. It knows how to put together everything that was originally chaotic quantum foam with no rhyme or reason.Using a facsimile of the Golden Rule which it carried as a shadow of its Aeonic programming, the Demiurge prompted the subatomic particles to hold hands with one another. This enabled them to level up to become atoms. And then the Demiurge caused the atoms to hold hands with one another and become molecules. And then the molecules to hold hands with one another to become minerals and mineral aggregations and elements. This is the province of the Demiurge even today—ruling the materiality of the dead universe, the mud.The Demiurge is the creator god of this universe we live in. To faithful Hebrews and Christians, the name of the Demiurge is Yahweh or Jehovah. Other world religions have other names for this creator god. Stories of Jehovah fill the Old Testament and carry forward into the New Testament. However, an interesting thing about gnosticism is the declaration that there is another God who is called the Father–the God Above All Gods in gnostic theology. And in gnostic Christianity, the God Above All Gods is actually the Father to whom Jesus prayed. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One,” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen my Father,” the God he is referring to is not Jehovah. The God that Jesus is referring to is the God Above All Gods.Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The book of Genesis attributes these actions of the Demiurge to Jehovah when it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”“He is the lord of all of them, that is, the countenance which the Logos brought forth in his thought as a representation of the Father of the Totalities. Therefore, he is adorned with every which a representation of him, since he is characterized by every property and glorious quality. For he too is called “father” and god” and “demiurge” and “king” and “judge” and “place” and “dwelling” and “law.””“The things which he has spoken he does. When he saw that they were great and good and wonderful, he was pleased and rejoiced, as if he himself in his own thought had been the one to say them and do them, not knowing that the movement within him is from the spirit who moves him in a determined way toward those things which he wants.”Those of the imitation do not know of the Hierarchy of the Fullness, nor do they have assigned roles and places there. Lacking the cooperative design, they exist in a state of perpetual disturbance, driven by self-centered ambition. The Tripartite Tractate says the imitations “exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows” [Thomassen].In the Fullness, each of the powers and personalities of the Aeons is represented as a pure pattern of some aspect of the Logos itself. The phantoms of the deficiency were already a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the Aeons, being shadows of the fractals of Logos, and they lacked their position in the hierarchical structure of the Pleroma. Consequently, they knew nothing but lust for dominion.We can think of this Boundary as a bubble containing our universe. If you want to believe in the standard cosmology of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, you can picture these chaotic imitations as quantum foam. Quantum foam is the lowest level of instantiation in this universe of ours, and quantum foam is characterized by randomness and chaos. It does not work together, and that is why it is called foam, because it is popping in and out, constantly producing matter and anti-matter that cancel out and destroy each other. Consequently nothing is building; nothing is able to reach out to level up. They lack the Golden Rule of cooperation because they came from the Fall rather than from the Fullness. The Demiurge went about organizing this universe out of the quantum foam:“over those who belong to the likeness, he set the word of beauty, so that he might bring them into a form.”At first he established energetic waves, then subatomic particles followed by atomic particles. Everything according to “the higher, the fewer” pattern. The particles combine to make atoms; the atoms combine to make molecules; the molecules combine make elements; the elements combine to make minerals and the aggregations of minerals, and that is the limit of the God of this universe. The Demiurge can only level up to the mineral level. All of the hard, rocky places in our material universe are the handiwork of the Demiurge. So, yes, the Demiurge is the creator God of this universe and it is the one who orders the material universe and who keeps everything functioning down here–but only up to the mineral level.The Demiurge works in a very different manner than the Fullness of God. The Pleroma of the Fullness is hierarchical, so it’s shaped like a pyramid, because the higher the fewer is a basic principle of hierarchies. The Pleroma of the Aeons in the Fullness metaphorically hold hands with one another and they share information, they share love, they share assistance, and together they dream of Paradise.And we all share this vision of paradise. All of the humans on the planet have a foretaste of Paradise, and not only the humans but every living thing on the planet, from bacteria on up. We are all what is called the Second Order of Powers, and we come from the Pleroma. This will be explained more thoroughly later in the book. [A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel]We don’t come from the Demiurge; the Demiurge is only in charge of the material universe. The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down. Death is bottom-up.The way the Demiurge brings order to its creation is through strings of power. The Demiurge strictly controls everything in our material portion of the universe using strong strings of power, like a puppet master. In chemistry and physics these strings of power are called valances and bonds–the bonds that hold the chemistry together. Those are literally the bonds of the Demiurge. The material, rocky parts of our universe do not have free will. They are simply extensions of the Ego that is the Demiurge.Yet, Logos in the Fullness does have an influence upon his fractured Ego down below. The Tripartite Tractate says that, “The Logos uses him as a hand, to beautify and work on the things below, and he uses him as a mouth, to say the things which will be prophesied.” So it is not as though our material universe is unable to be influenced by Logos in the Fullness, it is simply that the Demiurge does not realize the origin of these pre-existent images and so thinks it is the author of these great works.Hey folks. Amazon still shows only four reviews of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. Have you read your copy yet? If so, please leave a review. I’m waiting for the book’s popularity to naturally grow instead of throwing money at fake reviews pumped out by review mills. You needn’t have finished the book, nor understand every bit of gnosis. In fact, the latest review actually says, “Although I do not agree with everything the author is saying I believe this is probably the best commentary on the Tripartite Tractate.” Others speak of it as a helpful gift. So, please give it a go and leave a review.And, have you shared the podcast with anyone? That would help immensely.Thank you! 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review one of the basic original teachings here at Gnostic Insights, and that is how what we call the Fullness or the Pleroma of God—how it came to be, what it is, what does it mean when the New Testament, for example, says the phrase the Fullness of God.For Christians this generally just is an idea that God is big and great and huge and it’s full, it’s full of everything, the fullness. Yes, but it’s actually more than that in Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, the Fullness or the Pleroma of God is a step in the way that consciousness rolled out from the Father through the Son and then differentiated into the Fullness of God. And each part of that differentiation is part of the Son of God. And the Son wears the ALL like a garment, it says, and the ALL wears the Son like a garment, meaning they’re co-existent.So we’re going to review one of the very first episodes of Gnostic Insights. It’s been quite a blessing to discover that over the last four years very little of what was originally taught here at Gnostic Insights has modified or changed, and it’s just the ever so slightest thing here and there, like relabeling one item on a diagram. That’s been about it.Hey, if you live in Southern Oregon or Northern California, I’d like to invite you to come to Southern Oregon University if you’re close enough to commute once a week, because I will be teaching a class at what is called the OLLI, O-L-L-I, which is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University. I’ll be teaching a 10-week course called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and people will be using A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book as the textbook, so this is a very exciting opportunity for me. And to have 10 weeks with the same group of people who sign up to sit and learn, or remember as it were, it should be an interesting process. Here is the OLLI link if you would like to register for the class. This course is for the Fall semester, beginning September 15th of 2025.Also, another piece of news is that the children’s book is all but finished. Everything was completely done, and I uploaded it, and now I’m waiting for the proof copy to come so I can verify that everything falls within the margins. The illustrator’s having to go back on two of the pages out of the children’s book to move Logos, of all things—to move him into the page, because when you account for the trim size, Logos got cropped off of two of the pages, and we can’t have that!By the way, I’ve noticed that everybody around here who uses the word Logos, even a school by that name and all the students that go to the school, pronounces it Lo-gahs, and I’ve also heard some radio preachers say Lo-gahs. It’s not Lo-gahs, it’s Low-gohs. That’s how I learned it in graduate school, because we study what Logos means, not from a Gnostic point of view, but from Greek philosophy. Logos was often discussed in the major that I majored in when I was working on my PhD, which was Classical Rhetoric. So I thought, well, how come we called it Logos and everybody around here calls it Lo-gahs?But I looked it up in the pronunciation guides on the internet, and they all say Logos, or Logoze, never Lo-gahs. So I think we’re in good shape to be referring to our Aeon from whom we are descended as Logos.Okay, enjoy this replay of an old episode. I’ll pop in now and then if I need to. Onward and upward!In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what gnosis is, and hopefully be able to actually realize gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts.By the way, what is gnosis? We keep talking about gnosis and the word Gnostic. Gnosis means knowing, and in the Gnostic frame of reference, gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our creation, and the creation of the entire cosmos. It is thought that we hold all of this knowledge within ourselves, and we have complete access to the Creator of the universe at any time that we turn our focus on the Creator, and it is this direct conduit to the Creator that gives us what is called gnosis.G-N-O-S-I-S, that’s a Greek word. Another related word to gnosis is, and this is a big word, called anamnesis. You know the word amnesia means forgetting? Anamnesis means not forgetting. So, the process of coming to gnosis is a process called anamnesis. Just to let you know if you want to throw around any big words.Today we’re going to talk about the qualities of the ALL, and how the ALL became what is called the Pleroma, and the Aeons of the Pleroma.Many people claim that it’s impossible to know or describe the full glory of the transcendent, immortal Father of Consciousness due to our own limitations. I mean, how could limited beings such as ourselves possibly imagine the greatness of the Originator of the universe, much less our place in the grand design? Wouldn’t lesser beings reflect a diminished view of God? Wouldn’t these lesser beings be limited to offering a tarnished glory that falls far short of the object of their praise? The Tripartite Tractate, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I’m working off of, puts it this way:If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who Himself is the ALL. [verse 68]Thus, creation would have been doomed from the outset to never comprehend the full glory of either the Father or itself. According to the Gnostic gospel, the Father realized this impossibility and so built a helpful workaround meant to aid comprehension, selfless union, and cooperation with others in a shared task. Quoting from the Tripartite again,For that reason they were drawn into mutual intermingling union and oneness through the singing of praise. From their assembled Fullness they were one and at the same time many, accurately reflecting the One who Himself is the entirety of the ALL. Out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the ALL gave glory to the Eternal One who had brought it forth. The glory given out of this perfect communion left the ALL perfect and full, as it was perfect and full to begin with, and the object of their glory was also perfect and full. [68, 69]This phase of the ALL is referred to as the Second Glory, with the Son being called the First Glory. This was all explained in the second podcast, if you want to go back and listen to that if you haven’t already. The second podcast of the series describes the creative origin of consciousness known as the Father in Gnosticism, and the particular singularity of consciousness that reflects the entirety of the Father but in a place rather than diffuse, and that is called the Son. Then when the Son differentiated into all of its variables, into all of its individual parts, like rays bursting out of a central star, that is called the ALL, and this is what we’re discussing today.Now this perfect state of union with the Son and communion with each other didn’t last. Because of their combined effort, the ALL became self-aware, and it became they. So at first the ALL was a singular entity that was a complete duplication and reflection of the Son, who itself was a complete duplication and reflection of the Father of Consciousness itself. So at first the ALL was one singular organism, since it was freshly evolved out of the Son, but then it became self-aware, and the various variables within the Son, the various parts of that singular entity, each of those parts became self-aware.And that is what is causing this evolution of consciousness from the singular It of the ALL to the They. No longer simply an unaware member of the ALL singing in unison with the same song of praise, the ALL became aware of its individual traits, and the singing came to be produced by the will of each individual aeon. And in Gnosticism, an aeon is an entity. It is a singular consciousness. So each aeon is a reflection of the Father’s countless qualities and powers.The aeons conceived themselves in order to know themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for pure consciousness to become differentiated and self-aware. In philosophy, this is called monadism, not that you have to know that, but the Son is a monad—that is, a singular thing, and so the monad split into individual POVs, or points of view.The moment It became They, individual identities arose and immediately sorted themselves into a hierarchy. Quoting from the Tripartite,For this reason they exist as minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth. [verse 70]This hierarchical arrangement of the qualities of the ALL is known as the Fruit of the Third Glory in Gnostic cosmology. It’s also called the First Order of Powers, and the Fullness. The Fullness is everything that will ever be in potential.Plato referred to this as the forms, Plato’s forms. Every photon, every particle and proton, every personality, every position and rank that someone could hold, every physical formula, physics, chemistry, all imprinted upon this what was a singular unit that is now broken out. These potentialities are not manifest.At first they weren’t self-aware, but they became self-aware. The cooperation amongst the ALL is the prototype of the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule, by the way, which puts it this way:In order for units of consciousness to work together and join for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another.So in the same way that the ALL sat in perfect communion together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when we work together for the greater good without selfish motivation. The instant the Aeons became self-aware, the ALL fell out of their unthinking blissful union and arranged themselves into what’s called the Fullness—the Fullness of God. This phrase is mentioned quite often in the New Testament, but it has lost its association with its actual meaning. It’s not just the Fullness of God, like you’re thinking of God all in one big thing. The whole point of the Fullness was God differentiating into graspable concepts, things that we can understand. So the Fullness of God is a different entity than the Father. I believe that distinction has gotten lost in modern Christianity.So we were discussing the Fullness, which is a hierarchy, and hierarchy looks like a pyramid. Just picture a pyramid.The hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the patterns of our universe. “Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors” refers to personalities and how they relate to one another, like our personalities. “Degrees over degrees” and ranks refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered. First, second, third, superior, inferior, right, left, inside, outside. These are the “degrees over degrees” and the ranks. It reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own place in the grand scheme, with a location different than others and its very own point of view.Quoting from the Tripartite,For each of the Aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father’s qualities and powers. Since He exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of Him by means of logical thought. Thus the Father is a single name because He is one, but nevertheless innumerable in His qualities and names. [verse 73]Interesting that logical thought was mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate, because it is important to realize that logic is part of the mind of God. We are given the ability to reason and to be logical. Quoting again,The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is. Rather, their birth has the form of a spreading out by which the Father spreads Himself out into that which He wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from Him may exist as well. The Father of the Aeons, that being the Son, and embodiment of the Formless One, is the Holy Spirit that breathes through the members of the ALL and moves them to search for the Unknown. Just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance. For its sweetness lets the Aeons sense an indescribable pleasure and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One who desires that they should know Him in oneness, and that they should assist one another, having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed. The Son’s Spirit is the trace by which He may be sought. [71, 72]Quoting again,The whole structure of Aeons, then, is yearning and seeking to find the Father perfectly and completely, and this is their irreproachable union. For the Father gave the Aeons a starting point and a root, so that they are stations on the calm road leading to Him. For He spread out faith and prayer for what they do not see, a firm hope in what they do not comprehend, a fertile love longing for what they do not behold, an eternally receptive understanding of the mind, a blessing that is richness and freedom, and, for their thoughts, the wisdom of one whose desire is the glory of the Father. [verse 71]Quoting from my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated,The hierarchy defines higher versus lower. It orders first, second, third, and fourth, superior and inferior, inside and out, action and rest, every other possible relationship, particles and their spins, waves and frequencies, atoms, molecules, attraction and repulsion, cells and DNA, every protein fold and enzyme. The how, what, why, when, who, and where of all that was to come began as the perfectly rendered Fullness. As DNA anticipates an organism and a blueprint promises a building, the Fullness embodied the perfect plan of Paradise. For the Aeons manifested within their hierarchy all of the Father’s innumerable qualities, including consciousness, logic, and love.The Aeons of the Fullness were given wisdom and prudence and a constant thirst to seek their Creator. This gave them a desire to align themselves with the Father’s Holy Spirit through the process of giving glory.And again, in Episode Two, I described glory and what it means to give glory. Giving glory is the means by which we align ourselves with the originating consciousness. It’s like a homing beacon.The Aeons yearned for communion with their Father, for He had planted His root deep within their hearts, and they recognized themselves as His branches and His fruit. The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is, for their Father was the Son and embodiment of the Formless One, and His Holy Spirit flowed throughout them as a reassuring presence. Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent self. Their variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. All for One and One for All is their song, and they sing in perfect harmony. [The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, Ropp]Now I have to share a kind of a funny image I have concerning the Fullness of God and what it looks like. As I say, a hierarchy is like a pyramid, so when I picture the Aeons of God, I picture them all as golden cannonballs stacked in a big pyramid. So, they all look alike, but they each have a particular place in the hierarchy. Picture a given cannonball and where it might be in a gigantic stack of countless cannonballs in the Fullness of God, this gigantic golden pyramid of balls. Now if you go to YouTube and you look at videos of what are called slime mold, strangely enough, I always think of the Fullness of God as like a slime mold.The slime mold creature is comprised of identical cells, each one exactly the same, but they’re all side by side making up one organism. Whereas, for example, in our bodies, our cells are all different. Your skin cell is different than your heart cell, for example. But in a slime mold, all the cells are exactly the same. They are moving and acting and thinking as one single organism, a big clump of cells, but each of the cells is an individual. Also, they’re perfect fractals. Each cell replicates the entire slime mold. So if you cut out a single cell out of a slime mold, it will now become its own mass of slime mold cells and know everything that the previous body out of which it was cut knew. This has all been shown scientifically. You can look it up online. [Let me add this clarification: Each cell is like a hologram, where the entirety of the organism can be scaled up from a single sample cell. The fractal aspect lies in the consciousness of the cell, as it knows everything and replicates it going forward.]So that is how I think of the Fullness of God, as this beautiful combination of pyramidal golden orbs, kind of acting and thinking like a slime mold. They’re each individuals, but they are also at the same time one.So now these are the principal players in the cosmology of Gnosticism. [I’m also dropping in this further clarification: cosmogeny is probably a better word to describe this episode rather than cosmology. Cosmogeny refers to the origin of the universe, whereas cosmology refers to the study of the universe’s characteristics.]* The originating consciousness, which is called the Father,* the embodiment of that consciousness, which is called the Son,* the differentiation of the Son into the ALL, and then* the differentiation of the ALL becoming self-aware and becoming the Fullness of God and sorting themselves.The second they became self-aware, they sorted themselves into that golden pyramid, as I think of it. Before they sorted themselves, they were like the rays of sun coming out from the central entity of the Son. When they became self-aware, they kind of swam away and formed this pyramid. Everything else that we see around us—ourselves, our worlds, our entire universe—is all prefigured in the Fullness of God, in the ALL.The Fullness is also called the Pleroma, which is another Greek word that just means everything. The Fullness of God is like the blueprint of our universe. Everything that will ever come to be is sitting there in that golden pyramidal stack.In our next episode, we will discuss the Fall, and then how our world came to be. Thank you for joining me on this trip through gnosis. I hope I’ve given you some things to think about.If you visit my website at Gnostic Insights.com you will find all of the original articles from which I am reading, and quoting, and discussing, and also you will find my illustrations that I keep describing, like the golden pyramid. I also urge you to purchase my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is a very short book, and it has all of the illustrations in there, and everything is logically laid out in an extremely simple way—a lot less words than these podcasts.I’m going to end this podcast with a clear Gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate, regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be “saved,” in case you’re curious. We’re skipping ahead, but why not? So here’s a quote.There is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the Gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely, that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith. [128, 129]So that seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed, no gnosis other than believing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, also known as the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma, existed before you did. Other ancient Gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the Gospel that Jesus preached. Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early Church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their re-emergence in 1945. So, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually.By the end of the universe, at the end of time, most everyone will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma, us, will have returned home to the fold to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives tucked up inside the Father. This is why I end my phone calls and whatnot with friends by saying onward and upward.Onward and upward is our destination. Onward and upward is the way we return home to the Pleroma. We’ll talk a lot more about this as time goes on. All right, I’ll see you in the next episode.God bless.If you find these podcasts helpful, please consider donating to help Cyd cover the cost. And remember to subscribe to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack or at Gnostic Insights dot com so you don’t miss a single episode! 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

Death and life are placed before everyone, and people choose for themselves which of these two they want. The soul forgets her siblings and her father, and sensual pleasures and sweet things deceive her. She has abandoned knowledge and has fallen into the life of an animal. A person devoid of sense lives like a beast, not knowing what one should say or should not say.We are to be triumphant over the ignorance of those who contend with us through our gnosis, for we already have known the inscrutable One from whom we have come. We now have been put to shame in the worlds, but we are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face.They go about their business, and we go about in hunger and thirst, looking to our dwelling place, which we perceive through our lifestyle and our conscience. We do not hang on to created things, but we withdraw from them. Our hearts are set on what truly is, and although we are sick, weak, and in pain, there is great strength hidden within us. Our soul is sick because she lives in a house of poverty, and matter strikes her eyes in order to blind her.While her enemies look at her in shame, she flees up to her treasure house where her mind is, to her storehouse which is secure. The soul who has tasted these things has come to realize that sweet passions are fleeting. She has learned about evil, has forsaken these passions, and has adopted a new lifestyle. After her experiences, the soul disdains this life because it lasts for only a time. She seeks the kinds of food that will bring her life, and she leaves behind the food of falsehood. She learns about the light, and she goes about and strips off this world. Her true garment clothes her within, and her bridal gown reveals beauty of mind rather than pride of flesh. She learns about the depth of her being. She runs into her sheepfold as her shepherd stands at the door. In return for all the shame and scorn she experienced in this world, she receives 10,000 times as much grace and glory. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I have another treat for you this week, a conversation with my brother Bill and myself concerning what is knowledge? How do we know what is true? This is a field of philosophy known as epistemology. My brother Bill was a philosophy professor. He taught this at the university level for many years. I hope you enjoy this conversation and you learn something from it.[Cyd]Okay, recording in progress. Here we are. Hi, Bill. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights.[Bill]Well, it's nice to be back. I thought of a topic here that we've considered for a while. Let's get it done.[Cyd]All right![Bill]Okay. So the question is, what is knowledge? And what is it to really know something to be the case?[Cyd]Wait a minute. Is this epistemology? Is that what is meant by epistemology?[Bill]That's right. Theory of knowledge, epistemology. It's as old as the hills. In fact, the conflict was back with Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle's saying we can get knowledge, and I'll explain kind of how we do it, theoretically do that. Plato said, no, you can't get it that way. You have to know it from the beginning. How about that? That's what we call our gnosis, right?[Cyd]Right. That's why Plato is included in the scrolls of the Nag Hammadi. Yes.[Bill]So the question is, where does gnosis fit in with regard to the knowledge? Okay. That's the point. So I thought, okay, let's just take it from the point of the scientific position, because the presumption is, isn't it, that science gives us knowledge, right? That's the presumption. So the debates that take place out there, someone says, well, that's not science, and so therefore they're negating what's being said. Okay, let's get this one answered.It's a common belief that scientists believe that scientific method gives us knowledge. And so anything that is gained outside of science is not known. In other words, the word sometimes is dogma, right? The idea, you hold a position, but you can't verify it scientifically, but you hold it, so you're being so dogmatic. So let me make this point here.So here it is. The best that science can really give us is well-founded belief, and I'm going to argue that. So that's the best. So why do I say that? Well, the scientific method is based on logical principles of modus ponens and modus tollens, okay? And let me explain what that means.[Cyd]How do you spell that?[Bill]M-O-D-U-S, modus ponens, P-O-N-E-N-S, okay? And tollens, T-O-L-L-E-N-S.Now, symbolically, okay, I'm going to use words like this, and you'll get it. You'll get it for your listeners, by the standards. If P gets you Q, and if you have P, then you have Q. That's modus ponens. The idea, conditional. If P gets you Q, and you got P, then you have Q. That's the conclusion.[Cyd]So if you're saying if P is obliged to bring Q along, then if you don't have Q, you don't have P.[Bill]Exactly, that's well said. So in science, the problem occurs, you could put it this way. A problem is created, say that the science, there's a problem out there that science is trying to resolve. And so it creates a hypothesis, in other words, an explanation for a problem that's occurring out there, okay? And then science says we test the implications of that hypothesis. What does it tell us to look for?Okay, so we go looking for that. And it tells you, you got it, okay, you should find an R, an S, a T, a Q, or whatever, right? Whatever it needs. So you'll go out looking for those implications, and they show up, they're there, okay. So what you're doing is supporting the hypothesis. The reason being, how this is, remember back, if P gets you Q, and you don't have Q, you don't have P, we understand that. But if P gets you Q, and you have Q, you can't conclude you have P, you can't come backwards.Example, if it's raining, then the streets are wet. Oh, look, the streets are wet. Well, it must be raining. No, because they can get wet other ways. You can't come backwards on the conditional, right?So if the hypothesis implies a bunch of things, and those things are found, you're supporting your hypothesis, but you can't come all the way back and say it's true.[Cyd]Hmmm. You're supporting it, but not proving it?[Bill]That's it exactly, that's beautifully stated.All right. So what then occurs, thinking about this now, is that that's the case for any hypothesis that science proposes, is it can be rich with consequences. It can be rich with what to find. And so what happens is, okay, it's, look, it's working out. That implies that, and look, it's there, and it's there, and it's there, it's there, anything you put, it's there. So what's happening, you're supporting your hypothesis, but you still aren't proving it.So the idea is a well-founded, a well-founded hypothesis becomes a theory at best. It becomes a well-founded theory because it continues to work out, but you'll never get the theory to utter truth. You'll never know it to be the case.So that's the logic of the scientific method. But what happens is this—scientists come up with hypotheses, they become theories, they become really well-founded theories. And then what they do is they, they get a hold of it and say, oh, oh, we can't let this happen. So they turn their theories into dogma. That's not science! So you pick any major theory, like general theory of relativity, oh, it's beautifully supported, right? Some will say, you ask a scientist, oh yeah, it worked. Guess what? There may be a consequence down the line that defeats it. That's why it's a great theory so far. It hasn't been defeated.Quantum mechanics, to point that out, quantum theory and so forth. They're just theories. They are, they are possibly false.[Cyd]Now you're saying that this is by definition the way science works and hypotheses and whatnot. It's not just that you're some sort of naysayer that doesn't want to accept conclusions.[Bill]No, what I will say is that you will rarely meet a scientist that's willing to give up a theory. That's really, in other words, a theory that’s holding on. For example, how about climate change? They're not willing to give up, give up climate change because it's become dogmatic. When in fact it should be open continuously for investigation, implications being found and tested. So science by its very nature at its best gives us well-founded theories that may later turn out to be false. That's science.But scientists generally won't, they don't want that because they don't want defeatablity of something that they absolutely love. If I told you, if I asked a scientist, so someday, you know, general theory of relativity may turn out to be false. It may turn out to be false. And they say, what? I don't think so. Well, of course they don't think so. So again, that's the dogmatic point.So what critics of the Gnostic gospel would say, well, this is not science. You can't prove the Gnostic gospel. You can't prove everything you got into the works there, Cyd. Your answer is, I don't have to prove it because it is dogma. They say, oh, you used the word dogma. So it may not be true. That’s right. It's Gnostic—meaning we knew it all along. Back to the Plato point.Plato said, you can't have knowledge unless you've known it all along. Aristotle would say, we can do it. We can prove it. So he would believe in the scientific method. Aristotle would believe in that. He would talk about consequences, testability and all that. Verification, how much do you need to verify? And that became the problem in epistemology is how much do you need in order to prove something to be the case? You can't. The way I just described it, you can't. So Plato, sitting here, eh, you've known it all along, if you know. So knowledge has to be known all along, had to be known all along, but it's not possible to say that you've achieved knowledge from a belief. You can support a belief. You can build on it.Now, when I say there is some knowledge that we would say is provable—that would be logic, mathematical proofs, follow? Those kinds of things. Yeah, we can know a certain logical position or certain mathematical proof. That's fine at that level. Because it's working within a system. But what we're describing out here in terms of the world or what science does, it's going beyond the mathematics. It's saying this is the way the universe is. And as such, therefore, it'll never be known through science.[Cyd]Okay. Now back to the Plato and Aristotle idea. How would, okay, Plato says you can't really know it unless you have the gnosis of it from the beginning.[Bill]Yes.[Cyd]But how does a person know that they had that? I mean, maybe they picked it up somewhere along the line.[Bill]Well, that's what the scientists will throw at you. That's the point. That's the battle. How do you know that it's gnosis? No simple answer to that, except, you know it.[Cyd]So when someone says it's obvious, that gives you a clue that it's actually known. Well, like sometimes, sometimes there are scientific experiments on ridiculous things, like do dogs like to have treats? And so you'll spend all this money and set up these things to see if dogs like treats, but other people might say, well, you didn't even ever have to do that because obviously dogs like treats. Is this at all applicable to our discussion or is that something else?[Bill]No, no, that's, that's good. Now, of course the debate would be about that, right? Maybe some dogs don't. It takes just one dog to not like a treat. But see, that's the way they'd respond to it. Or the word obvious in the general context—when somebody says it's obvious, the joke is, well, obviously, meaning you should get it or not. That's generally how it's used in that loose term.But if in the more profound way, which you were describing, something is obvious means yes, it's known, period. Yeah. And that's where the discussion comes in.[Cyd]Well, okay. So what, so give me an example of something that is obvious and that is known that would be irrefutably platonic.[Bill]The Gnostic gospel.[Cyd](laughing) Says a true believer.[Bill]Well, true believer. See, the point is, why does one be a true believer? Unless, you know, it might be true.See, that's the debate. There's plenty of dogma out in the world that is not the case. It's just dogmatic. I mean, I just gave you one--climate change. They won't give it up. It's dogma if they're not going to test the theory.Yeah. So we're in an arena here. You either get it or you know. Yes. Right. But that would always be the question, Cyd, that would be thrown at the Gnostic gospels. You're going to have those out there, they're going to say it's not proven. And so what do you need to prove? How are you going to prove it if it's unprovable and just known? And that's the gnosis part. Okay. So there it's a conflict.[Cyd]That's the debate out there. Well, it does seem to boil down to just a felt belief, but that doesn't seem to be good enough. Correct. Uh, how can it just be a felt sense? Because if that were the case, then all the deluded people would have a validity in their delusions.[Bill]Well, yeah. See, you're raising the point and that's where scientists come back at you. Yeah. When they come back at you, you say, well, guess what? You, you don't give us knowledge either. So where are you going?Well, we're testable.(laughing) Okay, fine. But you still can't get to knowledge.That's thousands of years old what we're describing. That's epistemology. How do you know what you know. And, so the claim is if you actually know, you know it inherently.[Cyd]Well, I know that's what I'm saying, that's what I mean when I'm saying it, it's obvious or self-evident, but then again, anybody who's deluded would say the same thing.[Bill]Sure. But again, that's at that level. Now when you use the word obvious, I gave you the two distinctions—there is the colloquially obvious and then there's the profound obvious. And I said, well, how do you distinguish? How do you distinguish someone that's delusional from someone that's got some credible insight?Yeah. And what is the word? What's the word insight? Think about it. In-sight. Yeah. Gnosis.Gnostic. Right. So, yes, Cyd, the Gnostic gospel is not per se provable the same way that Aristotle's position about knowledge couldn't get provability either. So we're back to Plato.[Cyd]Ah, so that's the great conflict. Hmm. Hmm. So you're saying that our position is as valid as anybody's scientific position.[Bill]We're claiming it. Certainly. Now here's something about the Gnostic gospel, that’s a nice, beautiful mix is that it logically follows. See, once you take the position, it's Gnosis and known, everything else follows. It follows logically. So it's using logical principle. You would follow modus ponens and modus tollen. I mean the logic. So it's not just, you know, so ephemeral. No. Once you've got the basic point where it follows and it follows and it goes and it goes and it becomes clearer and clearer. The Gnosis is there.[Cyd]Yeah. So my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, for example, begins with that beginning belief that consciousness is inherent and is the base state of everything. And then the question is, how does it get down to us? And, uh, are we conscious? Are the dogs conscious? And it's logical because it keeps showing how it is that it travels—that it travels down. And then the way we behave as a result of that consciousness and all of the various claims, virtue versus vice, for example. Now where does virtue versus vice fall in this level of epistemology? Is that a… that would seem to me to be a self evident claim.[Bill]Yes, it is. That's right. There's no provability to what it's not. You're not proving what is the virtue and what is the vice. You don't have to. It's obvious.[Cyd]Yes. And the results from virtue versus vice are so different. They're so polar opposite that, that it seems to prove it's obvious. It seems to prove itself, but how is it that it doesn't prove itself?[Bill]Well, again, it's obvious. (laughing) So, again, these are not provability points because what do you have to prove? See, we're moving in the arena of ethics now—ethical theories. There are many attempted ethical theories. I used to teach ethics, you know, ethical theories and conclusions from ethical theories--utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism and majority approval and all of that. The one that landed was moral intuition –there's that word intuition. So the virtues would come out of morally intuitive individuals.[Cyd]Ah, so you're saying that intuition is a chief tool of gnosis.[Bill]Yes! Right. And we can expand the notion of intuition and say, we believe in the Gnostic gospel because it's intuitive.[Cyd]Yes. Now, what about people that don't believe it and don't recognize it intuitively?[Bill]Well, yeah. Our answer from a Gnostic position is, oh, those memes around that shroud—that shroud is really covering that ego there, isn't it?[Cyd]The egoic shroud is blanking out the truth.[Bill]Yes. Yeah. In fact, gosh—look at the Demiurge.[Cyd]He's in the same boat, poor guy.[Bill]Yes, same boat! In fact, he can do some nasty things, right? So he's really, he's shrouded out there a little bit.[Cyd]Yeah. That's interesting. Well, I'm wondering what part of our psychological makeup houses the intuition. Is it part of the Self? Is it the better half of Logos? Is it excluded from the ego? Does the ego have no intuition? I would think it would.[Bill]Okay. Great point. Yes. The virtue and all that comes from Self. That's top down. That's the soul…[Cyd]The embodiment of the body. The Fullness.[Bill]Yah. So that's that. The ego we come in with is our identity. Right.[Cyd]And what's intuition, where does it live?[Bill]Uh, well, an intuition is a tapping in of the ego to the Self. I mean, remember, we want a coherent combination. So here we are this hybrid—we have an ego and we have a Self.[Cyd]And we have a physical, as well.[Bill]Yes. And a physical—that’s the hybridized aspect. And we say that when our egos are consistent with the Self, that is, what the Self brings us—that when we're at that point we're balanced. We have that understanding at that point. As we gain the memes and delusions, deluded memes and so forth like that, what that does, it sort of separates us from our Self. And that's why people say, gee, I'm in conflict with my Self. Notice that when I say I'm in conflict with my Self is exactly right.[Cyd]Right. They're in conflict with their Self says the ego. Yeah, exactly.[Bill]Right.[Cyd]But yet we, I doubt that it's a by-product of the capabilities of the body of the material in any sense.[Bill]No, no.[Cyd]So you're thinking it arises from our Self. No—it arises from our ego as it searches for this...[Bill]We come as a unit. So we don't, we don't come disconnected. We come in as a unit here. And, but it's the ego in this fallen world that has the potential to drop away. That’s all.[Cyd]But I'm just wondering about the intuition. Well, where does it live? Is it the Self pulling ego up? You know, we think of intuition as us seeking—as an outward expression—but maybe it's not. Maybe it's the higher Self pulling the ego toward it. You know, I think of these things as in and outs. Does that make any sense to you the way I'm putting it?[Bill]Yeah. Well, this question we're raising here is the same for the Aeons. They have an ego and they have a Self. Now, they're coherent, beautifully coherent.[Cyd]I don't think they need intuition because it's all so obvious in the Fullness.[Bill]Well, they are pure intuition. There's no distinction to be made. And ultimately in the third economy, when we're all back up there again, ego and our Self will be just beautifully connected…[Cyd}… united and our intuition will be going full blast. I'm starting to think that the intuition is actually housed in the higher Self and that it's the drawing. It's the drawing towards. It's Logos continuing to hold onto the Demiurge, even though the Demiurge doesn't feel it or recognize it.[Bill]I agree. And that would be that the fractals in our case, where we don't recognize that our Selves are doing it for us.[Cyd]Right. Right. But definitely it's a higher thing into it.[Bill]Okay.[Cyd]And did, did Plato actually use the word intuition or anything like that? Did he talk about this?[Bill](laughing) I don't know, even in translation.[Cyd]All right.[Bill]All right. But, but you see what he did, to have knowledge, it has to be inherent. And of course the reaction to Plato—Aristotle went on from there and science comes out of Aristotle to a point. And then of course, it’s not entirely there. He's got his issues and mistakes, theoretically. So, naturally Aristotle was the one that caught on because he would talk about what is knowledge and how we can get it and how we can gain it and all of that. And therefore scientists latch onto that point. Here's how we get it. Here's how we get it. So it's very modernized Aristotle in the present era.Plato didn't come along afterwards. People aren't going, well, I actually see that. Actually it’s inherent. And yet, where is knowledge? Well, Plato, you know, he believed it's direct. That's where it comes from. It's inherent.[Cyd](laughing) Hey, all right. So let me, we had discussed this earlier and I have some notes. Let me see if I've got it all.Okay. Science is theory only not knowledge. Okay.[Bill]Science gives us theory, right? Scientific method gives us theory.[Cyd]All right. And scientific method has no capability of verifying consciousness because there is no experiment that can prove consciousness.[Bill]Right. But, let's add an interesting point to that--even within the realm of scientists, notice they are beginning to talk about the grounding of consciousness. Now we would say they're getting their insight, their cells are starting to click into more. There are scientists, at least physicists are beginning to see that maybe consciousness is the ground. But you can't prove it. And therefore it's not known per se.[Cyd]I read an article just this morning that's in this week's science news concerning consciousness, concerning proving consciousness and these different scientists, what they think consciousness begins with and what is required for consciousness and all this kind of stuff. It's so sad. One of the points in the article was that premature babies were never given anesthetics during operations because they were thought to be unconscious. And so when they showed signs of pain and distress, it was chalked up as just reflex. I’ve heard that so often.[Bill]And none of that was based on knowledge. See, they were assuming certain things.[Cyd]They were assuming, right. Right, because what could it be based on? Did you see that article?[Bill]Oh, I did. I used to, with my birthing and bonding and early child development stuff, I brought that notion—how you treat a baby. You don't do it that way and so forth because the kind of surgical things they would do to babies and so forth without anesthetics.[Cyd]Well, well, for example, by the way, second and third term abortions, where they cut up the baby inside the mother to suck it out, that baby is conscious and feeling. Yes. The reflexes indicate, you know, as he's being dismembered.[Bill]Yes. In order for them to justify the point, they therefore have to say they can't be conscious. See, it's like, it's their justification for not worrying about it. But that's not known. And so they're acting, now let's use the word, they're not acting scientifically.[Cyd]No, they're not acting scientifically.[Bill]Yeah. That's right. They are dogmatic.[Cyd]They're rationalizing things that can't be known at all in order to assuage their conscience.[Bill]Yeah. Well, the thing is, good point, assuage their conscience. They try to keep themselves separate from their Self, right?[Cyd]Yes. And of course, not just babies, but lab animals, it's the whole same thing.[Bill]Oh, it's the whole thing. That’s right, Cyd.[Cyd]All right. Well, we are nearing the end of this Zoom session, Bill, believe it or not, already. But do you have any last thoughts that we should add in before we close it?[Bill]Uh, no. We've opened doors. I mean, some of your listeners are gonna hopefully respond and say, well, well, well, question this, question that.[Cyd]Okay. Would you repeat for me the definition of those two Latin phrases you opened with that I asked for the spelling?[Bill]Modus ponens and modus tollens?[Cyd]Yes, that is completely unfamiliar to me. Say it once more and we'll close with that.[Bill]Okay. Modus ponens is the logical position that if P gets you Q, and you have P, then you get Q. If P implies Q, you've got P, then you have Q. That's modus ponens. Modus tollens says, if P implies Q, oh, we don't have Q, well, then we can't have P. Otherwise we'd have Q. See, if P gets you Q and you don't have Q, then it means you don't have P.[Cyd]All right. And are those both valid positions? What does that have to do with the scientific method?[Bill]Those are logical truths that are at the heart of the scientific method. Let me repeat the scientific method. A problem occurs, a hypothesis is created as an explanation. We test the hypothesis using modus ponens. If the hypothesis is true, then we can expect this, and this, and this. These are implications.[Cyd]Those are all the Qs. The P is the hypothesis, and the Q is the things you're looking for.[Bill]So we go and look for them. What happens when you're looking, okay, and they're working out, but that doesn't prove the hypothesis because you can't come backwards on a conditional. In other words, if P gets you Q, and you have Q, you can't conclude you have P.[Cyd]So there's not an equivalent. You're saying that's an illogical position. Whereas those first two, ponens and tollens, are logical and self-evidentiary.[Bill]That’s right. They're at the absolute heart of logic, yes.[Cyd]And by the way, in this Gnosticism that we discuss here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about Logos, the Aeon known as Logos, which is the same word for logic. So logic is one of these self-evidentiary pieces of gnosis that obviously Plato would approve of.[Bill]Absolutely, and Logos would apply the modus ponens and modus tollens, yes.[Cyd]Okay, but he would, and Logos would say, but you can't go backwards and conclude that anything about P, if you…[Bill]If you, see, if P gets you Q—But if you have Q, it doesn't prove that you have P.Right, now watch this again. Okay. If P gets you—if it's raining, then the streets are wet. The streets are wet. Oh, we can conclude it's raining. No, the streets can get wet other ways. You can't come backwards.[Cyd]Okay. So can we use logic to conclude the presence of the Fullness of God?[Bill]Probably not technically, because our ground point is the Father is consciousness. That's our starting point, and that's not provable. It's inherent. It is intuitive, but it's not scientifically provable.[Cyd]Okay, but that's nothing to be ashamed of. (laughing)[Bill](laughing) That is nothing to be ashamed of, and that's what knowledge is. It's known for being… it's inherent, and that's the debate against it. They say, well, again, you raised it. What makes someone delusional and someone else knowledgeable, right?And the only answer we can give, you get it? Is gnosis is known.[Cyd]That's it. Well, Jesus talked about, let's see, how did he put it? That you shall know them by their fruits.So Jesus said, if you know God, and you are one who walks with God, then the fruits of your efforts will be qualitatively different than the fruits of the efforts of those who do not know God.[Bill]A qualitative difference is another way of saying, inherent—you know because you know.[Cyd]Okay, all right, good. Well, we're doing the best we can to explain this. This is hard, but I'm sure that most people and most listeners, when we hear things about P gets you Q, our eyes just cross, and sadly enough for you logicians.But I think, but you know, you can understand. Yeah.[Bill]That's there, you understand.[Cyd](laughing) Yes, I understand, because I follow Logos. I like Plato. All right, very good, Bill.Well, thank you so much for sharing this with us. I look forward to hearing what the listeners think. Listen, people, what do you all think? Are you getting this? Do you have any other questions to ask Bill?[Bill]Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, when you hear, there should be questions. Okay, that's great.[Cyd]Well, please tell me what you thought of this conversation. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today we’re going to revisit the idea of evolution. You know, religious people are usually mocked by being unscientific for not believing in Darwinian evolution. Well, I’m a highly educated person and I don’t believe in Darwinian evolution. It’s an absurd theory that has never been proven.My brother, Dr. Bill Puett, is also a PhD. He’s what’s called a professor emeritus, which means that he’s a retired full professor who taught at the university level for a full career. He doesn’t believe in evolution either.Today we’re going to share with you another conversation that I had just this week concerning evolution with my brother on the telephone. The article that prompted this discussion of ours was published last week on the website called Aeon, and it’s an essay called Why Birds Don’t Buy Bentleys and Why Humans Will Never Fly. And it was written by a scholar named Anton Martino-Truswell, an evolutionary biologist, author, and member of the Sydney Policy Lab and School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He writes on human culture and society, evolution, and behavior at his substack, which is called The Village Green.Bill and I both read his article and came away with a number of criticisms of the article. Mine had to do with the little nuts and bolts of particular claims, but Bill’s observation of the article was profound and overarching from the Gnostic point of view. And so I’m going to share with you Dr. Truswell’s article and then our reaction to it.Now before I start with that, I would like to remind you that I’ve been writing about evolution for many years, beginning with an article I wrote called A Simple Explanation of Tuskless Elephants’ Super-Quick Evolution that I wrote on November 11th of 2018 on the Simple Explanation blog, and it is still posted there if you want to go to the Simple Explanation blog and read it there. But I covered that article here at Gnostic Insights in October of 2021, and then I repeated it in October of 2023.So if you would like to read my original articles concerning evolution in detail, I recommend that you go to my GnosticInsights.com webpage and you do a search for the podcast called Gnostic Evolution in the Beginning, and that was posted on October 21st, 2023. And this is a very long and quite detailed theory of evolution that is not Darwinian.You know, I don’t know why people get stuck on these old theories. Scholars are very habitual, because if you change one of the basic theories, then all of their scholarship goes out the window. Then what are they teaching anymore? They don’t know what to teach; they don’t know what to write about. People would rather harken back to this old theory of Darwin, which is about as outdated as the original evolutionary theory of Lamarck. So I’m inviting you to open your minds today and think of a different way of looking at evolution.Then I broadcasted a second podcast the very next week on October 28th of 2023 called Evolution and Conscious Design. And again, you can find that at GnosticInsights.com.First off, let me repeat something out of one of those original broadcasts.There are just a couple of basic ways you can think about evolution. As commonly taught in school, “scientific” evolution explains the tremendous diversity of life on Earth as lucky mutations that add up to great results. Darwinism promotes the idea that mutations and mechanisms morph into increasingly sophisticated life forms, because genetic goof-ups allow the ones who change to better survive and dominate those who stayed true to form. These lucky mutations keep going in the same lucky direction until there are so many of them that they add up to a new and improved creature. And now they are “evolved.”Boy, that article I posted in October 21st of 2023, and the transcript to that podcast has lots of illustrations and lots of embedded videos. It’s an excellent discussion of a criticism of Darwinian evolution, and I highly recommend that you go to it.And now on to this week’s discussion of why birds don’t buy Bentleys. Let me begin by reading some excerpts from the Aeon article so you can hear Dr. Truswell’s thesis.Culture and its transmission from generation to generation is the defining feature of humanity. It is perhaps the best candidate for the thing that separates us from other beasts. Though there are other species that have been shown to hand down accumulated knowledge, including chimps, who show some evidence for cultural transmission of tool use, no other animal approaches our ability to layer breakthrough upon breakthrough in such a way. And certainly no other animal does it with the conscious intent to lift future communities beyond the achievements that came before. That is a human distinction, if ever there were one.Why has no other animal evolved this demonstrably useful ability? There are lots of intelligent animal candidates, but most have some straightforward biological reality holding them back. Take the octopodes, famously intelligent and with a rich visual communication system in their incredible instantaneous color changes, but their very short lifespans, coupled with rapid senescence and death after a single mating and clutch of eggs, leaves little time for a parent to hand on knowledge to offspring.Most fish and reptiles face a similar challenge, though they do not die after reproducing like octopodes, they do tend to produce large clutches of eggs that hatch and mature without much, if any, parental input, relying on these statistics of a very large clutch size to ensure a few offspring reach adulthood. Birds are the real quandary. The philosopher and biologist Peter Godfrey Smith points to birds as the expected place to find another species treading the same path that we humans have, not least because they already come with several of the important adaptations that made cultural sharing possible for us.Complex brains, long lives, strong parental care of offspring in most species, and robust communication.With all of those advantages, why don’t birds have complex culture like we do? Why do they not write technical manuals and make art and argue over economic policy? Why do they not have a market economy with not only goods for trade, but luxury goods whose value relies on concepts rather than raw usefulness? Why don’t birds drive Bentleys?So that’s his setup for this essay. He goes on to say,Natural selection and by extension evolution, is a force with no foresight. It responds to the challenges that a species is currently facing. It does not and cannot see broad sunlit uplands on the horizon and move toward them. This is because selection is a game of elimination. It happens when individuals die without reproducing or having reproduced less than their neighbors. In each generation, that which is unsuccessful is culled by natural selection and that which is successful endures. Occasionally, a random mutation or fortuitous combination of genes produces a family offshoot that is even more successful than its ancestors and cousins, resulting in higher rates of reproduction or longer lives, which allow more reproduction or higher offspring survival, who in turn reproduce more. The consequences of this is that most evolutionary change must happen as a result of a push rather than a pull. A species’ traits change because they are currently inadequate and being eliminated by selection rather than being pulled toward a better alternative.So already my Gnostic alarm bells are going off full blast. And then there’s many pages about the evolutionary push and pull and what causes some species to be caught in troughs of non-evolutionary change. Then he begins speaking about birds and that birds is an incredible adaptation.It opens an entire third dimension of free movement to species capable of flying. First and foremost, this is game changing for a prey animal. Being able to escape a predator by traveling in a direction the predator is incapable of going, namely up, is a huge selection advantage. A flying animal is at risk of consistent predation only from other flying animals, which are fundamentally rare.Then he goes down another couple of pages and he says that,Flight is an evolutionary black hole. It is a gravitational well with no bottom, a trait so powerfully effective at improving survival and reproduction that it plunges the species into a well of easy life and high fitness from which there is no escape. Or to return to more conventional evolutionary language, it relieves an incomparable amount of selection pressure that might drive a species to alternative traits.So basically, he’s saying that once birds evolved flight, they stopped evolving traits that would cause them to adapt better or to form culture. Quoting again,Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. Bipedalism that frees up hands to make machines and to write comes at the cost of evolving odd long feet and an upright posture that causes back pain and makes childbirth dangerous. And of course, four limbs hosting handy hands become unsuitable for evolving into wings for flight. Intelligence, sociability, and many of the other traits we rely on for our cultural abilities are expensive in energy and survival terms. In evolutionary terms, that means they need to be providing a lot of benefit to be worth that cost. In order for that to be the case, there has to be a lot of room for improvement. There has to be a lot of evolutionary pressure. Down at the bottom of the black hole of flight, the pressure is just too low for the trade-offs to be worthwhile.Humans being slow, flightless, hairless, clawless apes had a huge amount to gain by evolving the tools of cultural transmission. Birds flying, living long lives of relative ease do not feel the same pressure. It is probably the case that our cultural abilities are also a black hole in evolution.Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. We have also fallen down into an impossibly steep slope of selection to arrive at the incredible complexity of human life today. [Then he says,] I cannot fathom what set of circumstances would cause us to evolve away from this complexity.Okay. Well I can. So that is the end of quoting from his article, which if you want to read in its fullness, you can find at aeon.co/essays/why birds don’t buy Bentleys and we humans will never fly. The link’s in the transcript to this episode here.So this article prompted a long discussion between my brother and myself that again I happen to be capturing to share with you today. So let’s get to it.[Cyd] Okay, now we’re recording. Well, hello, Billy.[Bill] Hi, Cyd. I want to talk with you about that bird article– Why birds don’t buy Bentleys.Yes. And I thought you did a great job of introducing your criticism of that particular article. So I’m thinking, go ahead and go ahead and review your criticism and all that, you know, and then I’ll, we’ll interact. I have some ideas, obviously.[Cyd] Well, I tell you, before I review my criticisms, would you like to give the Reader’s Digest version of what the article was proposing?[Bill] Okay. Well, yeah, Reader’s Digest, yes. The article is a hardcore evolutionary article, so all organisms have evolved to the point they evolved to, and for many of them, they’ve evolved into a corner. And if they’re in a corner, they can’t get out of it.[Cyd] Oh, right. And the article says, they call it a valley, a gravitational well.[Bill] Right. So birds have gotten to the point, you know, where they can fly. Okay. And here we are, we won’t be able to fly as human beings. So we’re down in those arenas there. And it was trying to describe from an evolution perspective, why they can’t get out.[Cyd] Oh, because it had to do with culture. The question was, why do birds not drive Bentleys? In other words, human beings seem to be the only creatures on the planet that have evolved a culture, where they have social order, and they invent things, and they do things like agriculture and manufacturing and things like that. And birds don’t need to do that because they can fly. So what needs do they have? I guess, mainly it was suggesting that humans evolved culture and whatnot in order to escape predators, in order to be able to breed and pass on their genes. And birds didn’t have to do that because they could just fly away from predators.[Bill] Wasn’t that his basic idea?[Cyd] That’s the basic idea. Right.[Bill] And how you respond, you made the point, well, he’s mistaken about organisms, they do have culture. And then you went on to describe, four examples.[Cyd] Oh, go ahead.[Bill] No, no, go ahead.[Cyd] Okay. So for example, his basic premise that only humans have culture isn’t true. Because for example, insects have a lot of culture, I would say, ants, bees, and termites, especially, they communicate obviously, in great detail. They farm–ants actually farm aphids to eat them. And they breed them. So they farm and eat them.Obviously, ants, bees, and termites build great structures, huge cities that they live in. And, and of course, they have the culture of warfare, they build armies, and they go to war for whatever purpose they have with others of their kind.And tools, I would say that they do use tools. They said humans were the only ones that use tools. But that’s clearly not true. Because, for example, birds—crows use tools. Crows can use sticks, shapes sticks into probes to go down into termite hills and anthills in order to fish for ants and termites. So they are able to construct tools for those kinds of purposes. And birds, all birds, construct—they make their nests, they choose just the right kind of straw and just the right kind of sticks, and they decide where it’s going to be a safe place to hang it. So they do a lot of, I would say, construction with tools.And so that was the easiest one. But I also would refute the notion that animals don’t have culture, because I would say that domesticated animals, of course, I’m particular to cats and dogs, but dogs are extremely successful in the, even in the manner, evolutionary manner that the author talked about where he defined success as the ability to thrive and proliferate with good adaptations. And dogs have done that tremendously well. Yes, with some help from the humans, pushing this and that with their breeding, but still the animals have adapted to our culture. And I would say they have human culture. They understand us, they can understand our words. They’re not just trainable and to order them about. I know that my dogs think and evaluate any command I give them. They certainly think and evaluate whether that’s a good idea or not. And I’d call that culture. I’d say they plugged into human culture rather than merely extending the wolf culture. But of course, wolves have culture too. It’s crazy to say that wolves don’t have a society. Okay.[Bill] That’s right. No, that’s great. That’s right on the point.And, what you’ve been describing, the hens and the dogs and the birds and what have you, is that these are describable, but I will bet that a huge number of beings, organisms, so forth, have their respective cultures that we haven’t defined out. We haven’t clicked in. We’re trying to put it in human terms, right?[Cyd] Right.[Bill] Well, they have their own shtick. They know what they’re doing.[Cyd] Right. And we just can’t recognize it.Oh! And what about schools of fish and flocks of birds? The way they move all together and whatnot is incredible. We can’t do that. So, they’re more evolved in that sense.[Bill] I’d even pick out one of your favorites—slime molds. Talk about cooperation. Oh yeah! So his basic point, you know, again—he’s a hardcore evolutionist. He has to explain it, but he can’t give the movements his meaning. They didn’t become this because they needed to be that. He’s trying to describe it as survivability. More of that kind, and so forth. From his point of view, that’s where it’s coming from.So, let me take another tact here. Well, not another tact—what we call the Gnostic position. Okay. I mean, Gnosticism technically doesn’t talk about evolution per se, not that kind. What we call the Second Order, of course, all Second Order, they’re from the Aeonic—their Aeonic inheritance.So it’s all there. In fact, we talk about evolution as a time issue going over it. Well, there’s no time. It’s all done. It’s already done. So, we use the notion of time because that’s the way we relate in this world. But, so evolution requires time.[Cyd] Oh! I see. Evolution requires time. That’s a good point because you’re saying it’s all there. There is no time. So you can’t have evolution based upon time. Oh, wow. That’s profound. That’s basic, isn’t it? Yes.[Bill] So, so yeah, so back to, so what we have is intelligent design. Yes. That’s the Aeonic and it’s right from the beginning.[Cyd] Right, right, right, right. And the Tripartite Tractate, the way it describes the Second Order Powers coming to Earth, it’s very cool because it said that we were sent down from the smallest to the largest, each with our own jobs to do. And so it’s not that things are evolving from bacteria and then becoming more and more complex and larger and larger aggregates. It’s just the tiny guys come in first to make the base. It’s the hierarchical concept, not that the little guys are less evolved or less important, but you know, you can’t have the fish until the plankton come in. So the plankton have to come before the fish, so to speak, as far as being, as far as appearing.[Bill] With our understanding of time, yes. Yes. So we’re describing it that way. Yeah.[Cyd] Okay, but listen. Your understanding of no such thing as time—that everything is already there… You’re believing in that static jello universe I talk about basically. So, well, then how does that appear? How does it appear that the small things come first and then the larger and larger things appear the way they seem to in our earthly “evolution”? How is that if it’s a static universe?Picture these cherries as completely filling the universal space with all possible worlds, already existing.[Bill] Well, because that’s the “second economy” in this Fallen existence and we’re connected to the “material.” And so we’ve working within this arena, which is a time arena as far as our feeling of it.[Cyd] Okay. So that’s the second economy—it appears to have time.[Bill] That’s right. And it’s organized by the Demiurge. We’re connected into the, again, that connection is, we’re experiencing “time” that way when in fact the first economy is timeless and the third economy will be no time. Right. So it’s just the second economy that appears the way it does.[Cyd] Right. Okay. Oh, okay.[Let me drop in this quick explanation that the first economy is what the Tripartite Tractate calls the original Fullness of God hierarchy. Then our apparently material cosmos is called the second economy. And the third economy is where we all wind up after the second economy passes away.]So that’s from the big bang, so to speak, up until the Second Coming [of Christ] in the collapse or after the Second Coming in the collapse, that is, that’s the second economy that we live in. That’s our apparent universe that we live in. And it does seem to have time, although you and I were discussing the other day, the difference between time and sequence.[Bill] Yes. Yes. We would already say sequence is understood in time, you know, that that’s the way we make sense of it in this fallen existence here. But it’s only sequence. Right. Again, the consciousness goes through the jello universe.[Cyd] Okay. Right. It’s swimming through that already existent universe. That’s right. Going from choice point to choice point using free will, but it’s all there. It’s all laid out in advance.[Bill] Yes.[Cyd] Yeah. And in the first economy, everything that comes to appear to us in the second economy is already preexistent. That’s what the Fullness of God is—it’s all of the preexisting forms that will ever come to be… You and I, we, I keep getting hung up on that.[Bill] It doesn’t have consciousness in life.[Cyd] But it is somehow preexistent in the first order because it’s part of this creation. And everything that’s part of this creation was imagined, obviously, in the Fullness of God. Was it not? Well, it’s all, it’s conceptual. We’ve talked about that before.[Bill] Alright.[Cyd] It’s conceptual. Right. Okay.[Bill] So let me go to your point. Fullness is fullness.[Cyd] Which means it’s everything.[Bill] It’s everything. And it’s done. In the third economy, we’re back to fullness.[Cyd] Right. We’re back to fullness, but we’re the third economy and we’re not back to the first economy, which was before we all came around and had our second economy experiences. We get to take those memories and associations with us into the third economy.[Bill] Right.[Cyd] Nice.[Bill] So that’s the basic point, Cyd, you know—my basic response to that article. On one level, you’ve explained even in an evolutionary sense how he’s wrong.[Cyd] Yeah.[Bill] Okay. So that, you know, we’re taking his assumptions there, and then we take the next step to the Gnostic position.[Cyd] That’s great, Bill. In fact, you’re pulling it together in that more profound sense, I believe. Seems to make my little quibbles with the article irrelevant, basically.[Bill] No, it’s not irrelevant. You’re responding as if he’s sitting there. You’re responding to him. He’s not going to the Gnostic side. You’re responding to him. How would he respond, now that you’re at that particular technical level. Okay. I’m at your level now. How do you explain that?Cyd: Right.[Bill] Yes. I thought that was very good.[Cyd] Here’s something else to say about the article. In the article, the author said that it’s unfathomable—he used the term unfathomable—to imagine human culture de-evolving, because we’ve gone down into this evolutionary well of perfection, basically. And I also quibbled with that, so I wasn’t just quibbling about the insects and the dogs and cats and the birds.It’s not true. I can fathom society de-evolving in that if we lose our technical aspect, which has become so huge since the industrial revolution, if we go back to pre-industrial revolution, our current culture will de-evolve back to prior to the industrial revolution.And how does that happen? Well, that’s very easy. An electromagnetic pulse, plasma ejection from the sun, wiping out all of our satellites or blowing up our electrical substations, even beyond people with malfeasance in their hearts, let’s say, guerrilla warfare against the electrical grid to plunge us all into darkness. That could be on someone’s mind. And that’s all it’s going to take. We’re just going to come back. We’re just going to go back down to pre-electricity and our culture will de-evolve to the dark ages immediately.[Bill] Right. Well, again, you’re responding at his level. That’s right. At his level. Right.[Cyd] No long range communication, roving bands of marauders, and so on.[Bill] That’s dystopic history. That’s science fiction, right?[Cyd] That’s exactly right. Right. Right. It’s the dystopian end. But the good side of that will be AI will die as well.[Bill] Yes. Well, we’ve said before in the past, you know, I think small community—tribal communities—interrelate with each other. That’s a greater future than huge nation states or globalism, and all the rest of that.[Cyd] Right. I once read somewhere that really any person can only keep track of 200 people. And so 200 is actually the biggest size a village should be if you want to know everyone—if you want to know and love your neighbor.[Bill] Well, that’s the point. You can hold hands easier and be with others in that larger sense. (referring to the Simple Golden Rule) So that may be a healthier direction. Now, of course, you might respond and say, “well, we evolved to this state we’re in because…” but he can’t say because it benefits humanity. That’s not evolutionary talk. Evolution doesn’t take place because it needs to go somewhere.The Simple Golden Rule is the Aeonic pattern of cooperation[Cyd] Right. Because it’s already there.[Bill] Well, not even that in his evolutionary sense. He’s not Lamarckian. Lamarck said that giraffes grew long necks because they needed to get the food in the trees. Right. You know—they grew like that. But Darwinian evolutionary theory is that some were born with long neck and they survive better.[Cyd] Yes. Yeah. Well, so actually, then, you know, when we’re talking about guerillas crashing the electrical systems of the Earth… those could be Luddites. It might be Luddite-type guerillas purposely plunging the Earth into a dark age in order to restore humanity to its…[Bill] Well, that’s a, you see, that’s a conscious attempt by a Second Order.[Cyd] Right. That would be a non-Christian, non-Gnostic way of returning. But it’s not just necessarily through malfeasance and guerilla action of hating countries in order to plunge them into the dark ages. It could actually have a noble aspiration to bring us back to a Luddite age of true pre-industrial revolution.[Bill] Well, again, a general point—isn’t the mistake of socialism? You can have people directing they want socialism in order to bring about equanimity and equality for all people as a beneficial end.[Cyd] Right. So they have good notions. I mean, their heart may be pure. Well, as if!… except for the big cats at the top that are going to reap it all, right? Yah. So, well, it’s an interesting discussion, Bill.[Bill] (laughing) Well, it was a joy. I love going places with you. That’s the thing. You start out with something and then we evolve out.[Cyd] (laughing) Oh no, wrong word. No, no. And then we swim to another cherry.[Bill] Thank you for having me. I look forward to doing more of these.[Cyd] Love it! I’m all for it. Let’s do it!Well I hope you found this discussion of evolution stimulating and I hope that you are prompted to reconsider the efficacy of the entire concept of Darwinian evolution from a Gnostic point of view.And again I repeat in order to do that the best you really should return to my prior two broadcasts about evolution. I’ll put the links in the transcript to this episode. Thank you for spending this time with me.God bless us all and onward and upward.Have you left a review for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel?Buy the book! Available in all formats and prices… 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

Ten years ago, back in July 22nd of 2015, I wrote one of my first articles about Gnosticism on my Simple Explanation blog, and I'm going to read from that for you today. This was very soon after I began to realize that the Orthodox Christianity that I had been strongly embracing for all of my life could be enhanced by this knowledge of Gnosticism.I had been trained up to believe that Gnosticism was a heresy, and it takes many years for a very strong believer in Christianity to even be willing to consider Gnosticism as another sect of Christianity. So while not being willing to give up my belief in the Christ as our salvation, and not being willing to demote my relationship with Jesus, because I can't deny that since I personally know it to be true, I was at last able to begin reading the Nag Hammadi texts. I was particularly taken by the text called the Tripartite Tractate, which is the one that I share with you mostly on this Gnostic Insights podcast.So let me share with you now this first article that I wrote in 2015 called Yearning for the Pleroma, which is still posted on my long-running Simple Explanation blog. This was originally broadcasted as an episode in August of 2021, which was before I started posting episodes to Substack, so my Substack readers have never seen or heard this episode. Also, for those of you who have been following Gnostic Insights from the beginning, you haven’t ever had a chance to read the transcript, so here it is. As I said, this article is ten years old. I hadn’t yet developed the illustrations that have become so familiar by now, which you can see throughout the Gnostic Insights transcripts and in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book from 2019. This episode features my first attempt at diagramming the gnostic cosmology. The concepts still hold up, although the artwork is more colorful and polished today.This is called Yearning for the Pleroma.Other words for the Gnostic word "pleroma" include the "Fullness," the "All," the "Totalities," and "the circle of divine attributes," which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism. Wikipedia cites 17 uses of the Greek word kenoma that is usually translated as “fullness,” with only one usage of pleroma as we Gnostics would define it.Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma--a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as "the fullness.""For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Col. 2:9).The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ... This contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).While I do agree with the opening premise that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of ... beings," there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.First, the idea that the fullness can't be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, "In contrast," since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let's imagine how that would work.Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I've represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son's cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid to the right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son's will into hierarchies of traits and powers.We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One who never changes and without whom nothing would exist. The indisputable buck-stops-here God. This being is pure consciousness, without form or distinctions, all quiet, eternally undivided. This is the One Who Is; the Great I Am. In my drawings, the Father is represented as the paper that makes up the poster--all other manifestations arise as images upon the paper and are fully contained by the paper.The Son is represented by the starburst cloud at the upper left, although the starburst is not really light energy, since this is before the creation of Light. This entity is also called the First Aeon, the Root, the Single Name, and The Form of the Formless. The Son contains all of the qualities of the Father, but in a circumscribed form. In today's lingo we would call the Son a holographic representation of the Father, where a small fragment perfectly emulates the larger image. You could think of the Father as the ocean, and the Son as a big bucket of ocean water. It's the same fluid. And if the bucket remains immersed in the ocean, then not only is the water within and without the bucket identical, the ocean continues to fully contain the bucket of water.The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Son is part of the Father, and then goes on in the same verse to declare the Son as the cause of the Pleroma:"He exists by the Father having him as a thought--that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and of his eternal being... He possesses power, which is his will. For the moment, however, he holds himself back in silence, he who is the greatest, being the cause of the generation of the members of the All into eternal existence" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 56).By this one verse we can see that the Son is within the Father and he also contains the Fullness, in full agreement with Colossians 2:9.My second problem with the Nelson notes is their description of aeons. Aeons are not the same as angels--they're more like features or capabilities. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as "the properties and qualities in which the Father and the Son exist" and equates them with the pre-existent Church (Tripartite Tractate, verse 58). "His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father... The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist... Therefore it subsists in the procreations of innumerable aeons" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 59).While some Aeons are beings with their own self-aware personalities, other aeons are best described as traits and capabilities of the Father and Son."...they were unable to know the depth in which they were; nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father; they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed... like a fetus... not yet come into being" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 60).Third, the Nelson Study Bible footnote confuses Jesus, the physical incarnation of Christ on Earth, with the eternal spirit of Christ, the first Son of the Father, whose image and dwelling predates the Earthly appearance of Jesus. "Now the Savior in fact was a bodily image of something unitary, namely the Fullness" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 116).The Gnostic gospel I've been studying has no quibble with naming the physical person of Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of the entire Creation. Lest the wary Christian doubt the Gnostic's gospel, the Tripartite Tractate ends with this eulogy for Jesus Christ:"...the praise, the power, and the glory, through Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer of all those who are embraced by the mercy of love, and through his Holy Spirit, from now throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 138).And finally, the Nelson editor contends "the fullness of God [that] exists in Christ" ... "contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies." The editor apparently reasons that if Gnostics claim physical bodies are evil, and Jesus incarnated as a physical body, then Gnosticism would imply that Jesus Christ was evil.There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, my reading of Gnostic writing reveals that while material reality may have started out as "evil," the situation was quickly rectified when the Son and the Pleroma intervened to establish an "economy" that regulated good and evil inclinations through "repentance." Keep in mind that material reality can be considered demiurgic, but not “evil” per se. Nothing is “evil,” only misguided by egoic striving. Here's a brief description of that process:"After conversion followed the remembrance of those who exist and the prayer on behalf of the one who had returned to himself by means of what is good" (81).... "This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the Fullness, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the preexistent ones, and this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 82)."To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought ... with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 98, 99)."The first human, then, is a mixed molding and a mixed creation, and a depository of those on the left and those on the right, as well as of a spiritual Word, and his sentiments are divided between each of the two substances to which he owes his existence" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 106)."What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die... For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul" (Tripartite Tractate, verse 114, 115).Secondly, the very fact that Jesus did incarnate as a mortal man is what made salvation through Christ possible, for it was by the Savior's perfect "error correcting algorithm," superimposed upon an otherwise error-filled humanity, that salvation entered the world. I'll end this article with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be saved. "... there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining in an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith" (Tripartite Tractate, verse, 127, 128).That seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed; no gnosis other than believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Fullness) existed before you. Other ancient gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached. Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945. The cat is definitely out of the bag now.Okay, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven't guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, everyone's souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma will have returned home to the fold, to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives inside the Father."Once the redemption had been proclaimed, the perfect human [the Savior] immediately received knowledge so as to return swiftly to his unity, to the place from which he came. Joyfully he returned back to the place from which he had originated, the place from which he had flowed forth. His limbs, however, needed a school... until all the limbs of the body of the Church would be united in one place and would attain the restoration together... so that the Fullness obtains its redemption" (Tripartite Tractate, verses 123, 124).So, that is the end of this article that I wrote several years ago, and ever since writing this article, I have been more fully developing this Gnostic Gospel until it emerged as my own book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is, in my own words, meant to be simple and understandable. No quotes, it's not academic, it's the straightforward Gnostic Gospel, and it's fully illustrated so that each illustration shows you what, in my mind, these things look like. But they're metaphors, they're only visual metaphors, but they should help you to grasp this information. Sometimes the words are difficult, but I find it much easier to grasp the information when it is presented in a visual form. So please go ahead and visit my GnosticInsights.com website, where you can click on and purchase The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book. I've printed it as a larger picture kind of book, in that 6x9 format, glossy pictures and all. Very pretty. But I've also printed it as a small pocket edition that you could actually put in your back pocket of your jeans, which harkens back to my old days as a young Christian, as a one-way Christian in the late 1960s, when I used to carry my little pocket edition of the Good News Bible in my back pocket. So I encourage you to get that book and read it, and read it several times, many times, until it soaks in, until you get how easy redemption is.And this Gnostic Gospel does not attempt to dethrone Jesus Christ. It dethrones a false god called the Demiurge, which does appear here and there throughout the Bible, but it does not dethrone the Father of the Christ, which is the God Above all gods.Well, thank you for joining me this week. I hope you've enjoyed this review of Yearning for the Pleroma, and that you've gained some clarity concerning what the Pleroma, or the fullness of God, means. Remember, our Father is a God of clarity, and knowledge, and thinking. You should never come away from Gnostic studies lost in confusion. Many of the podcasts I hear that call themselves Gnostic are being narrated by people who are themselves confused about the nature of the Father and gnosis, in my opinion. If you come away feeling confused, then it's not the clarity that we try to achieve here at Gnostic Insights and in the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Our God is not the God of confusion. That would be the job of the Demiurge. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. 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

For regular Gnostics Insights, subscribe here. Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSA recent article called “All Is One” in the online magazine “aeon” presents an excellent overview of the scientific and philosophical schism between what is called “monism” and its dialectical opposite “dualism.” If you are interested in the nature of reality and the history of the argument over whether or not there is a single, unifying reality behind all of the apparent differences we see around us, you should check out that article. I have included the link here in this podcast transcript that you can find either at Gnostic Insights dot com or the transcript on Substack.As so often happens, my brother read the article first and forwarded it to me. After I read it, we had a good conversation about certain concepts in the article. By good fortune, we had the zoom app running during our conversation and I was able to preserve our discussion to play for you today.There are two reasons why I want to share the audio of that conversation with you. One reason is the content—Bill had a good gnostic insight he wanted to get across to me, and that is presented to you here. The second reason is that I want to share with you the process by which my brother and I discuss these deep thoughts. I consider our discussion process an ideal model for how philosophical discussions should take place, although they rarely do because of ego.I think of our philosophical discussions as an example of the Simple Golden Rule. We are both arguing not from a position of ego, but from a shared exploration of truth, and gnosis is the object in the middle we are both working on to level up. The discussion isn’t polite in the sense that there are plenty of interruptions and disputes, yet no negative or egoic emotions, only love and laughter. Keep in mind that Bill is a professor emeritus of Philosophy, and I am a Ph.D. rhetorician and university lecturer, so you can imagine we have both seen our share of unpleasant and offensive philosophical disputes in the halls of academia. Our conversation is how I imagine such talks should proceed for the benefit of all.Let’s begin with the beginning of the aeon article by Heinrich Paes, a professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He says,‘From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolized by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as ‘all that has been and is and shall be’ and the ‘mother and father of all things’.Let me jump in here to say that we Valentinian Gnostics would identify this One as the Father rather than Isis. Back to the article:This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: ‘entanglement’, nature’s way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and ‘decoherence’, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives.Again, let me interject by suggesting you read my article “Quantum Entanglement and Karma” on my Simple Explanation blog, originally posted May 13, 2011. The link is in this transcript.Now, back to the aeon article.Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea.The article then goes on to describe the long and torturous history of the clash between monists and dualists in both philosophy and religion. Quote,Even then, Christianity adopted Platonic ideas by identifying the monistic ‘One’ with God. But Christianity drew also on dualistic philosophies such as Manichaeism, which advocated a world caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. This is how concepts such as God and devil, heaven and hell, or angels and demons received their prominent role among Christian beliefs. At the same time, the monistic influences were pushed into an otherworldly beyond. The Christian God was understood as different from the natural world that he governs from outside.With the Christian Church rising to political power and the fall of the Roman Empire, much of antiquity’s culture and philosophy got lost, and monism got suppressed as a heresy. If ‘all is One’, God gets conflated with the world, and medieval theology understood that as atheism or a devaluation of God.Here I can tell you that Gnosticism was one of those heresies that could get a philosopher burned at the stake with its insistence that the Father is the One Source of All that is, and that the emanation of the God Above All Gods is here in the world and in each of us. However, a “soft monism” began to arise in the realm of science, with forces such as gravity and electro-magnetism and, later, Quantum Mechanics, being proven to exist universally within our cosmos. You can read the details in the “All Is One” article. The article concludes by saying,The 3,000-year-old concept of monism may actually help modern physicists in their struggle to find a theory of quantum gravity and make sense out of black holes, the Higgs boson, and the early Universe. Chances are high that we witness the beginning of a new era where science is informed by monism and the Universe is perceived as a unified whole.Now, here’s Bill and myself talking this over. Before I share that with you, there will be references to the “Cherry Jello Block Universe” that is fully described in the episode called “Consciousness and Time—Our Cherry-Jello Universe and Free Will”—link included in this transcript. My Cherry-Jello theory is a kind of “many worlds in One world” idea that proposes the cosmos is already fully formed, with all, nearly infinite, possible choices and outcomes already present in the form of “cherries” floating in an almost limitless sea of static jello where nothing really happens; it is only our consciousness that moves through it from cherry to cherry. We could say the giant jello bowl is the mind of the Father and Son present in the cosmos. There is no time, only the motion of consciousness swimming from cherry to cherry using free will. This is how it is that all of creation is entangled in the manner that Quantum Mechanics claims.We also move into a brief off-topic discussion of what the Tripartite Tractate calls “The Third Economy,” which is our final destination that replaces this apparently “material” cosmos. That leads to my brief interpretation of the Tribulation and 1,000 year reign of Christ as described in the Bible’s book of Revelations.Cyd: Hey Bill, good to talk to you. What are we going to talk about here, Bill?Bill: Hi, Cyd. Well, that particular article that you sent me, what was the titling there?Cyd: We shared an article that was published in aeon.Bill: Oh, it’s called, yeah, it’s called All is One.Cyd: Oh, yeah, All is One. And it’s about monism. It was an excellent article about monism. I never really understood the difference between monism and dualism until I read this guy’s article.Bill: You mean you haven’t been listening to me?Cyd: (Cyd laughs loudly) So monism is what we say all the time. In the beginning, there was only the Father.Bill: That’s right.Cyd: And it really… dualism doesn’t occur, I don’t think, in Gnosticism until… Does it occur when the Son is born, because now there’s two monads? Or does it occur after the Fall, and now we have a material universe with all of its negativity?Bill: Well, my response to that, I mean, first of all, historically, it was a great article. It shows you how it all developed out. It shows you the biases and the nastiness of it, even being killed because they were monists, and so forth. I won’t go into all of that…Cyd: Terribly killed—tortured and killed.Bill: But what we’ve talked about before, I made the point when we were talking about entanglement, is that the reason there’s entanglement is because there’s no space and time. I’ve told you that. That’s how it works.Cyd: Right. It’s the jello universe. It’s all there.Bill: Right. Now, the question of dualism you brought up—there technically is no dualism. The material world, I’m going to make a comment about that—no space and time. In other words, we’re talking the ethereal—consciousness and purity, and so forth—and then out of that comes the Gnostic development, the pleroma, et cetera—all that going out. Yet at all points in there, it’s still no space and time. There’s no creation of…Cyd: Of actuality. It’s all thought. It’s all consciousness.Bill: Yeah, it’s all thought. And the Fall itself, it takes place where the Demiurge then takes the chaos of the Fall and makes all these things, “material” so to speak… It’s still not… He’s not created anything new. He’s organized and we call it material. There’s never been dualism. That’s my point. What is called the material that physicists work with and others now in the world and so forth, in reality, it’s not.Cyd: It’s still the consciousness of God just expressed in smaller and smaller fractal ways.Bill: Yes. Back to your…Cyd: But, but…Bill: But the organ…Cyd: Well, hold on. Isn’t there a duality between virtue and vice?Bill: Well, yes, but that’s not… We’re not talking- Yeah, but…Cyd: I mean, that’s somehow compartmentalized away from the One because there’s no room in heaven, so to speak, for vice.Bill: Well, the compartmentalizing doesn’t make it real. It doesn’t make it material, doesn’t make it– You can compartmentalize, yes, but it’s still the ethereal.Cyd: But, I mean, it seems to be different in kind. Sin is different categorically than God’s consciousness, is it not? Because we don’t want to say that God embraces sin. It’s not a yin-yang type of God.Bill: No, but that’s the imitation. Talking imitation…Cyd: So what I’m saying, isn’t the dualism between then the imitation and that which was from the beginning. Isn’t that the dualism split? Not from material to ethereal, but that which was from the beginning and then the imitation, which will return to nothingness.Bill: Well, see… I’m going to come at it another way. All of this is a theory.Cyd: Right. I agree with you. I got you. There’s no material. I get that part. But yet there is…Bill: There are concepts, but there are concepts. That’s part of the thoughts. That’s thoughts.Cyd: But it’s not God’s thoughts. It’s fallen thoughts. It’s our thoughts that are incorrect. I’m talking dialectics, you know?Bill: Well, the fact that we have free will, you see, we can make choices, right? Remember, we’ve said technically there’s no evil. God doesn’t create a universe where it’s possible to have evil. That’s not it. The actions that are taken, those are the memes, and so forth. We create this illusory stuff, but they’re wrong acts, but there’s not evil.Cyd: Okay. True.Bill: It’s not… Again, it’s not Manichaeism again, you know? There’s good and evil, bad, good and bad, right? It’s not the yin-yang, as you make the point. That’s not the universe. Yeah. We make it happen through our willful actions. And the Demiurge, because of demiurgic control, you know, makes the choices and how to disrupt us, right? Archonic disruptions and so forth?Cyd: Right, right. Okay. So—that which was not from the beginning and therefore will not return to the virtue in the roll-up… So what is the roll-up? What is humanity coming back into the Fullness? What is that? What would you call that? Because we’re going to shed the wrong beliefs. That’s what the redemption is.Bill: That’s right. That’s right. Those memes. Which again, your question might be, what are memes? How do they exist? In other words, do they have an existence?Cyd: Right. Right. I mean, are they…? Okay. If it’s a giant torus of jello with cherries floating in it—are those cherries… we’ve always expressed them as choices or choice points.Bill: Yes. Yes.Cyd: But are there memes out there? When we roll back in towards the Fullness, does the jello bowl get smaller?Bill: Yes. The jello bowl of the universe.Cyd: Okay.Bill: Of the universe. Right.Cyd: But God is illimitable. But God is illimitable.Bill: That’s right.Cyd: Hmmm. Well, then the jello bowl of this universe is just going to go all the way to and then it’s all going to be part of the illimitable God, but with identity. That whole… you know what I’m saying? Cherry jello universe swimming from choice point to choice point, that will not occur after redemption, the third economy.Bill: Yes. The third economy is not going to have that.Cyd: It’s not going to have the torus around us.Bill: It’s not going to have any jello-ness.Cyd: Or cherries, I guess.Bill: Now, in the ethereal, you know, in the wrap up there in the third economy, you still have free will. The Aeons always had free will. So, the ethereal, that notion of free will, but we’re acting out of free will without any memes that were the result of the Fall.Cyd: Right.Bill: Does that make sense?Cyd: Yeah! (she shouts out). So, it’s just, shall I do this good thing or that good thing?. Visit this wonderful person and love them or that wonderful person and love them?Bill: (laughing) Yeah.Cyd: I think I’ll just pet my dogs for a thousand years. How about that?Bill: Yeah. Or even longer.Cyd: Interesting. Okay. Yeah.Bill: We’ve got something going here. You know, I mean, we need to incubate and percolate a bit more because it’s evolving right now… or not evolving—it’s mining.Cyd: Right. It’s revealing itself to us.Bill: It’s revealing itself. Right. So, the essential point to start with is there never was a material world in fact. It’s funny. It’s a jungle out there.Cyd: (singing: It’s a jungle out there. Click this link to hear a funny song.) Exactly.Bill: Whether we’re talking food politics or anything else, it’s…Cyd: Well, skepticism is at an all-time high, as they say, you know.Bill: (laughing) Yeah, as it should be.Cyd: And this idea of AI taking over and the rise of the Demiurge, it seems as though we’re in the end times. You see, the people, they’re all for this kind of stuff, people like Musk—they think this is all going to turn out for the good. They are expecting what I call the Star Trek universe where it’s a very beautiful Federation of Planets and everything’s going well and you’ve got unlimited food and everybody works at jobs they love and everybody gets along, no more war. That’s what they think is going to be the outcome of progressivism and socialism and the rise of the AI and technocratic systems. I, however, think that just the opposite is going to come out, especially since it’s Demiurgic. It’s all going to turn into… I’m expecting more like the Terminator universe or Mad Max, you know? Dystopia. Dystopia versus Star Trek.Bill: Well, again, as you say a thousand times before, is the science fiction writers always have…Cyd: (interrupting) We’re the prophets! We’re the prophets.Bill: And you’re going to write this new book. Love it. Love it! Yeah, yeah. I can see playing that out, right?Cyd: Yeah. Well, obviously, the brain implants in the VR world must be AI. They’re probably very miniaturized AI bots. They’re nanobots run by AI, else they couldn’t do what they’re doing to your brain. (plot line of new sf book)Bill: So, yeah. See, I want to stay alive. I want to see the world play out a little bit longer. I want to see where it’s going.Cyd: Except it’s going to go down, man.Bill: The thing is, but see, everything gets sort of sad and tragic and everything, yet I know where I’m going, so what’s the… It’s not like, oh, I feel terrible. All of my life is done, and it was fine.Cyd: Okay, because it’s just temporary anyway.Bill: Yeah, it’s temporary.Cyd: There might be a period of time where it’s all internment camps, but we know we’re going to heaven.Bill: So what would be the AI analogy, in the thousand-year time of Christ?Cyd: What do you mean? What’s your question?Bill: In the Revelations, what would be the thousand-year reign? What would the equivalent be in the AI?Cyd: Of Christ? Okay, so the thousand-year reign isn’t the bad stuff. That’s called the Tribulation.Bill: I understand. So how would that play out?Cyd: Well, that tribulation period is going to be what’s going on now. The buildup of AI, the repression of actual humanity, and what’s that called? Antinatalism? That’s all going to go… That’s just going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. It’s just going to be more and more and more horrific, and people will become more and more evil, because I think the good folks are going to stick the landing up above, and not want to come back, not be made to come back into the Tribulation.Bill: Well, it would be kind of like I don’t want to be reincarnated.Cyd: Well, yeah, right, and not required to be. The only people that have to be reincarnated, that’s that 144,000 that are called the Remnant. So only at the end of times, there will only be 144,000 righteous people on the earth, period. And it’s not going to be easy on them, but that’s their job. So if you want to come back as one of the 144,000, be my guest.Bill: So there won’t be a time where AI purely and simply is all there is?Cyd: No, because then that would… It’s going to be like Terminator at the end, where the AI is trying to be all there is, but the humans are fighting back. There’s still that 144,000 underground. But then Christ actually comes back, and various Aeons incarnate, and people like you and me come back along with the Christ. And somehow, I don’t know what the mechanism is, but everyone is persuaded to redemption at that point. Maybe they realize it’s not so much fun living under this demiurgic AI horrid place. And then everybody truly wants to repent. And when that repentance comes back, everybody’s redeemed. The Demiurge is redeemed, and that’s when the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth happens. So there will be a “material” world for a thousand years after the return of Christ and all the good guys, and it’ll be pretty nice. But then after that is when everything rolls up.Bill: Okay. And when we say “material,” we put quotes around it.Cyd: Right. Right.Bill: Materialism as it’s been experienced.Cyd: Right. So there’s going to be like a transition period, I would guess, for the second order powers to transition between… It’s all the love of God now, the Demiurge is not messing with us anymore. Eden. Eden. The Garden of Eden returns worldwide, and we’re all living in a happy, happy place. But then after that thousand years, everything is going to roll back up into the ethereal space and we’ll be part of the completely non-material or completely ethereal. That’s when the cherry will… The bowl of jello shrinks back into only the Fullness of God.Bill: That’s a good description! That’s a podcast!Cyd: Well, here we are. We’re recording it. So I think it will be.Bill: That’s a good podcast right there. Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Very good.Cyd: We’ve been taping. So let’s say…Well, Billy, thanks for joining me on one of these rare audio podcasts, and it’s always nice to talk to you. And I hope we can do this more often.Bill: Me too. Thanks for inviting me and inviting me even more often. Well, you’ve done that more than once. I just haven’t come in, right?Cyd: Right, right. But I think now maybe we… If this recording works out well, then maybe we have a system finally where you and I can have these recordings and make more episodes. For example, we know we want to talk about the difference between science and…Bill: Religion.Cyd: The true difference. Or the difference between theories and knowledge, which is a… That’s another discussion. We have to have these discussions.Bill: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which by is relevant to this point about religion, physics, anyway.Cyd: Yeah, yeah. So if this all works out, we’ll talk again very soon and we’ll have another podcast to put out. How’s that?Bill: I would love that. Thank you.Cyd: Well, onward and upward, Billy.Bill: Onward and upward, Cyd. Love you.Cyd: Love you, too. Bye-bye. Hanging up now. Bye-bye. sweetie.Bill: Bye-bye.I hope you have enjoyed this unusual episode. It’s an episode that probably requires more than one listening. And, if you really want to understand it, I recommend you follow the links to the aeon article by Paes and the links to my articles referred to here and there.Onward and upward! God bless us all! 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

These new creatures that were devised are better than the Deficiency because they come from the union of the entire Fullness, whereas the Deficiency came out of a mistaken solo effort by Logos alone. Out of this union of the Fullness and Logos came what are called the Second Order Powers, and these powers are better and greater than those of the imitation because they did not come into being out of ego and out of lack of thought. This new fruit of the Fullness and Logos was fitted purposely into the boundary that surrounded the Fall, and so because they were fitted to live within this boundary, they were able to have a cooperative structure the way the Fullness had a cooperative structure. In other words, the newly produced offspring of the Fullness and Logos were patterned after the originals and the Fullness, so they are patterns of Aeons, which is what the entities that live in the Fullness are called, but they are formed to fit within the boundary rather than the Hierarchy. Now these new Powers, it was put into them to be able to think about the Fullness and the Father, and it was given to them the ability to think logically and to reason. And this is why in my Gnostic Insights podcast I describe things to you and I give you the reason behind it, because you and I are reasonable beings. We don't only have to seek out exactly what is written. We can use logic and deduction and infer the truth of these things. It isn't magic, it's logic. The Aeons and the Fullness are called the First Order of Powers, the Aeons of the Hierarchy, and they gave birth to a Second Order of Powers—that's the fruit—and it's called the emissions of the remembrance.And emissions refers to units of consciousness. They are embodying the originating consciousness, which is called the Father, and the Father begat a Son, which is the perfect and full sampling of the Father. And then the Son begat the Fullness of God, which is all of the Son's characteristics broken out into those individual variables, or those individual characteristics. 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

Welcome back to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I thought I would share with you a column from Substack by a friend of mine, Tessa Lena. Her Substack is called Tessa Fights Robots. This column by Tessa is called “Letter to Future Dissidents, subtitled Don’t Become a Dissident Before Reading This.” Tessa’s article is about the interpersonal challenges of being a dissident, whether we are talking about spiritual disagreements, such as we Gnostics may encounter with other spiritual seekers, or political and cultural disagreements we run into with others. What Bill asked me to say here at the beginning is that the negative spiritual encounters we may have with other people is really the Demiurge and its archons messing with us Second Order Powers. We need to remember that we are not enemies with any person, but rather we are fellow Second Order Powers defending ourselves against the Demiurge.Bill also shared an article called “The Science of Spiritual Narcissism” by Scott Barry Kaufman that was posted this week on the GetPocket app. I’ve put the link into the transcript here. That article is relevant to today’s podcast, so let me start by reading you a couple of paragraphs from that Pocket article to prepare you for Tessa’s essay. Kaufman says,Self-enhancement through spiritual practices can fool us into thinking we are evolving and growing, when in fact all we are growing is our ego.And by the way, we’ll drop in that we’re not really growing our ego, but we’re growing our memes. Our memes are stuck onto our egos. Our egos come along with us. They are our personality. They are our self-identity. They’re part of our aeonic inheritance. So we’re not really growing our egos with wrong beliefs. We’re simply growing the beliefs—the memes—that are stuck onto us and overshadowing our God-given egos and pure selves.So back to Kaufman’s article.Some psychologists have pointed out that the self-enhancement that occurs through spiritual practices can lead to the “I’m enlightened and you’re not” syndrome and spiritual bypass by which people seek to use their spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences to avoid genuine contact with their psychological unfinished business. In Kaufman’s recent book, Transcend, he calls it pseudo-transcendence—transcendence built on a very shaky foundation.Kaufman goes on to say,One serious obstacle to healthy transcendence is how spiritual practices are sold to the masses. Yoga and mindfulness are big business in America. The purported benefits of mindfulness meditation have generated a billion dollar industry. Yoga is the most popular mind-body practice in Western societies. Many of these programs offer a long list of promises, including the reduction of stress and anxiety, along with greater confidence, creativity, focus, achievement, success, eating habits, sleep, and even happiness. But here’s the thing, healthy transcendence doesn’t stem from an attempt at distracting oneself from displeasure with reality. Healthy transcendence involves confronting reality as it truly is, head-on, with equanimity and loving kindness.So going forward in this podcast, remember the key words, equanimity and loving kindness.So without further ado, here is Tessa Lena’s letter to future dissidents.So how are you doing today? Have a couple of minutes to talk about dissident life? Have you been trying to just go about your business? But strangely, life has been taking you places where you saw cracks in the matrix that others refused to see? The facade is cracked. You’ve seen it with your own eyes, and things don’t feel quite right.You feel different than others. You must definitely smell a rat, and you cannot cover your nose hard enough to make the smell of rat disappear. But how come you are so alone in this? How come other people are just fussing around like busy bees? Isn’t there a giant rat sitting and smelling right here in broad daylight and in plain sight? Isn’t there an elephant in the room too for all eyes to see? You feel very strange.It’s not great to feel different from other people like this, and you honestly just want to fit in with your friends and not stick out like a sore thumb all the time. And you try to blend in. Oh, you try.You work hard to be normal. You try telling yourself that you are probably crazy. You deny the evidence of your lying eyes.It turns out that a life of compliance is not enough for you, though. Other people seem to be getting away with living shallow in a man-made matrix world, but not you. Your denial of the evidence of your lying eyes doesn’t go over well for you.Something happens. Things get crazy. The carefully stitched together comfy blanket over your lying eyes gets destroyed, and you find yourself totally naked, still alone, despite your attempts to bond with others by betraying yourself, humble tears pouring out of your human eyes.It’s just you. No one else. Just you between the earth and the sky. No one else. Just you and your heart and your unfitting thoughts. And the world? The world doesn’t really care about the fact that you’ve just seen the face of the machine. It’s spinning in a shallow and glittery make-believe way like before, pretending there is no machine. Things keep happening, and at some point you can no longer hold your tongue back, and you open your heart and your mouth. You act brave. You act bold. You start singing your truth in a louder voice. But nope, no change as far as being alone. You are still alone.Okay, Cyd here, popping in to say that we are not alone. Remember, we are embodying all of the Second Order of Powers of the Fullness of God. And if you have invited the Christ in, you are embodying the Third Order of Powers of the Christ as well. So we are not alone in this struggle, even though it may appear to be so. Okay, back to Tessa’s article.You discover that people often want their opinions coming out of your mouth, not yours. If your message fits into pre-existing talking points, into pre-existing emotional interfaces often formed by centuries of psyops, you may get somewhere. If you share original insights that explain the world, then nope, no fireworks and no orchestra that you’ve read about in a book about the hero journey. You are still alone.Then, unexpectedly, your time comes. All of a sudden, the world is bleeding in a new way and wants to hear what you have to say. You are almost surprised because for such a long time, nobody cared at all about the things that now the world suddenly wants to hear. As surprised as you are, you spread your wings and start singing your song, the song that you’ve spent your entire life composing, the song that is sacred to you, and you are oh so happy that other people find it useful to them too. You rejoice. You relax a little. You pour your heart into your noble fight. You do your absolute best. You make new friends. You think that this is your new life.And then you learn, in a hard way perhaps, that your movement, your dissident tribe, is not real. You learn that the purity of your heart is actually rare, and it’s true even for the self-proclaimed freedom warrior folk. You learn to walk with a few real friends who are strong enough to withstand enemy mind tricks, but the movement, the movement, you watch it collapse. Or rather, you watch it being hijacked by the predators in freedom warrior suits right before your eyes.You try to salvage the unity of good people, but barely anyone wants to hear because the proverbial negative witches are waving their proverbial magic wands, and people go crazy. Not to mention the fact that even without them, many are simply busy building their freedom brand. That is the moment when your rosy glasses get smashed, and your delusions go the way of the dinosaurs. It sure shocks you. It shocks you to see how good people lament about the normies going for dirty tricks, and then go for similar dirty tricks designed for them.Okay, Cyd here popping in again. This is discussed in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel in the chapter called The Never-Ending War. Listen to what the Tripartite Tractate has to say on this.If both orders, those on the right and those on the left, are brought together with one another by the thought which is set between them which gives them their organization with each other, it happens that they both act with the same emulation of their deeds, with those of the right resembling those of the left, and those of the left resembling those of the right. And if at times the evil order begins to do evil in a foolish way, the wise order emulates in the form of a man of violence also doing what is evil, as if it were a power of a man of violence. At other times the foolish order attempts to do good, making itself like it, since the hidden order too is zealous to do it. [verse 108 of the Tripartite Tractate]Now back to Tessa Lena’s article.You also see how folks who know a lot less than you self-promote quite aggressively, and sometimes in dirty ways, and become industry experts on the subjects you’ve been looking into forever, and they, well, they haven’t.Oh well, you say. You are here to help the world after all. It’s about the world, not about you, and so you tell yourself, it’s okay, carry on.Meanwhile, the massive snake pit keeps giving. In disbelief, you learn that some of your dissident colleagues go to great lengths trying to push you aside. You learn that the competition for the best freedom brand is real, and so is the quest to dominate the direction of the freedom buck. You also find that some of the people whom you have held in extremely high regard choose to invest in their envious side. You find how by day those envious souls tout themselves as lovable, brave, pet-friendly, freedom warriors of light, while by night they try efforts to make you invisible and alone. They envy you. Oh, how they envy you. And even though you never tried to cause them harm, they still hate your light.You feel appalled. You didn’t expect this kind of behavior coming from folks whose brands are about healing trauma and resisting mind control. Snake pit or not, though, you carry on.Then there are agents. You discover that the agents are a piece of art. Shameless, hurting, wounded, cruel, lying, really strange people. Over time, you realize that they are so deprived of love that they take to desperate measures trying to yank a presentation of love, aka gullibility and submission, out of anyone who allows them to do that. Very strange people, those agents. Very wounded souls.Okay, I have to pop in here once again, Cyd speaking now.Those very wounded agents that Tessa refers to, I would think of as people who are not merely confused or deluded by the archons, but have actually, well, what in the old days people would say, sell their soul to the devil. They are people who are actively conspiring with the Demiurge and the archons. They are not archons, they are Second Order Powers, but they have given themselves over consciously to the Demiurge. And so they are working for the Demiurge and not for the God Above All Gods. They are, as Tessa Lena is pointing out, bereft of love. That is why they appear so strange and archonic. But even they, at the very end of time, will see the light. And when the Demiurge is redeemed, these people will be redeemed along with the Demiurge. Okay, back to Tessa’s article.When you figure out who is really trying to do what and how different it is from what people in your circles talk about, aka controlled opposition talk, you may find yourself disappointed again when you learn that enchantment and mind control in the dissident circles work exactly the way they work in the mainstream. Every weakness, every pain point, every wound gets exploited and milked, and the stakes are high.You discover that the predators try to flatter you and to harm you and to scare you and isolate you from your friends. You discover how they do tricks designed to transform your beautiful, well-intended allies into bleeding, wounded traitors of you who would rather side with the tricksters based on mind control than believe you. When you follow your natural human instinct of love and make a step forward to protect your friends, you occasionally find that some of the folks whom you have treated well, whom you have gone out of your way to protect and promote, who are brilliant and sincere, they may forget about the good things you have done for them and still betray you, turn on you, and side with the predators in sheep’s (make that) freedom warrior’s clothes.As your friends betray you, they feel very superior, like they won a game of 5D chess and have figured out mind control. As you look at it with sadness, you feel disappointed. You feel disappointed and hurt. You pull your hair in frustration over how such smart and sincere human beings chose to betray you and themselves. You feel very disappointed. You ask the spirit why you lost them, why this is happening to you. You just want to explode because you see what is going on, and you care, and you want to help, and your allies act lost. But then you stop crying, say a prayer, and tell yourself that they will wake up when it’s due. In the meanwhile, you have to keep going because you are here with a job to do.Then you see how predators in freedom warrior clothes volunteer their lying selves to save the movement, and at that point you start laughing, first bitterly, then wholeheartedly, because there is grand comedy in all this. What a circus! Traitor witches with magical wands, wounded agents pretending to be fearless freedom fighters, intrigue, confrontations over the freedom buck, and you and your ethical standards, and your friends who are also honest and pure, and your truth. As you are dealing with all this, you keep asking the spirit, why is all this showing up in your life? Why? You say, oh my god, this is just incredible. How can they? But they can, and they are. And you are here, and you need to live, and in order to live, you need to fight better. And in order to fight better, you need to understand the nature of reality better.And at some point, you see that the predators are an excuse for you to get in touch with yourself. They’re not important. You realize that all this is the spirit teaching you about your being, leaving breadcrumbs for you to pay attention to. And your task is to understand the nature of reality and to learn how to live well. They are experiencing their journey. They will pay their price. It is their choice. You are living your life, your way. You are practicing your faith and your ethics, and frankly, you feel sorry for them.As you pray, you are reminded again that all good things come on God’s will, and they come on God’s time. At the end of the day, you are doing this because this is what you were born to do. You are here and now, but you are also eternal, and the world is worth saving, and your fellow travelers are worth loving, and you are not weird for practicing your good ethics.It’s the good way. You are good. You are love.They can’t kill love. It’s impossible to kill love. Love always wins.Love always wins. Love always wins. You know this.If you didn’t know this, you wouldn’t have chosen to fight the good fight. Keep fighting the good fight. It’s your fight.It’s your way.I’m all choked up. I think it’s so touching. Of course, it means a lot to me because I fight the good fight, and I know that my faithful listeners and readers also have been fighting the same good fight as Tessa and myself.Please go to Tessa Fights Robots on Substack. It’s tessa.substack.com. I’ll put a link in this episode transcript also. Subscribe to Tessa. All of her articles for years now have been along these lines, and she’s a beautiful woman. She’s a singer. She’s a performance artist in New York, and she’s a beautiful writer as well.God bless Tessa. God bless all of us. Remember, love always wins. Keep fighting the good fight, and onward and upward. 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