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Gnostic Insights
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Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained
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Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi
1w ago00:23:17Tap to summarizeEvery once in a while I like to go back and share with you the original scriptures out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi from which I derive these teachings. So this week will be scripture-heavy. Don’t worry if the language is unwieldy or unfamiliar. You’ll get the hang of it. The original economy was that of the hierarchy of the Fullness, wherein every Aeon knew its place, position, and duties for cooperative overall functioning. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. Each of the Fullnesses lived in a state of joy, benevolence, and harmonious agreement, giving glory to the Father and never to each other or to themselves, according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, verse 86. The Second Order of Powers was created to establish a new economy to replace the deficiency that had arisen as a result of the Fall of Logos. Logos and the Fullness brought forth these little ones of the Second Order so they could receive the life-giving light born from the thought of brotherly love of the preexistent Fullnesses, in contrast to the phantoms that had arisen from the Fall. These powers of remembrance resembled the Aeons whose likenesses they were, and they were in harmony with themselves and with others of their kind. And as you know by now, the Second Order of Powers is every living thing that is on this planet Earth, and indeed, the entire cosmos—all of creation, all of the flora and fauna, all of the living things, including us humans. The restored pleroma of Logos and the Hierarchy of the Fullness conceive a new fruit called 2nd Order Powers. The Fullness is the 1st Order. The Second Order of Powers resembled their parents in the Fullness, each one of them being a small impress of one of the figures. These were no larger than those of the imitation, but they came into the world with a better disposition, reflecting the qualities and powers of the Fullnesses. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 83] The new economy of the Second Order of Powers reflected a different method of doing business from their parents in the Fullness. In the new economy, our cosmos, the powers vied for position and authority within a limited space known as the boundary. Here, those of the imitation who continued to wholeheartedly embrace the shadows left over from the Fall actively fought against those of the remembrance. Never-ending War For their part, those of the remembrance forgot all about the values of the Fullness, due to the law of mutual combat they were enacting. The new powers acquired the same lust for domination and all of the other passions of this sort, and wound up acting against itself on account of its rage. It was during this endless war that a myriad of various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers were mixed with one another, and in great number. [Tripartite Tractate, verses 84 and 85] Clearly another solution was required if peace were to enter the deficiency. Remember that none of this was due to an error of planning, rather these steps were all necessary to bring about an economy still to come. The new solution was the Christ. For this reason, then, it is wrong to condemn the movement of the Word as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass. The Aeons of the Fullness took upon themselves the Fall that had happened as if it were their own, with concern, goodness, and great kindness, for the one who had become deficient could be made perfect in no other way except by the Fullness of the Father. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 86] And so, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one individually and all of them collectively gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for help for the deficiency. They brought forth one that combined every attribute of the All manifested in the image of the Father of whom they had been thinking when they gave glory and prayed for help. This one was called the Son of His Will and of the Good Pleasure of the All. It is the knowledge of the Father who wished to become known. It is also described as holding authority vested in Him from the beginning and the power needed to execute it. [Tripartite Tractate, verses 87 and 88] 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. [verse 87] Those redeemed by the light were made whole and complete. Those who were now enlightened felt the power of the Redeemer inside themselves, being together with Him, sharing His suffering, relieving Him little by little, making Him grow, raising Him up. [verse 90] [The Redeemed] were produced as an ar...
Transcribe →Gnostic Christianity
2w ago00:19:16Tap to summarizeHello and welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Yesterday, my Hindi tech services guy asked me whether or not Gnosis is Christian. It seems like it should be a simple question. Is Gnosticism Christian? I explained to him that I certainly think that Christian Gnosticism is Christian, fully. And in fact, I believe it’s true Christianity—that Jesus was Gnostic, that John the Baptist was Gnostic. But what does that mean? Most of the Christians, pretty much all of the Christians, completely reject Gnosticism as evil, as misleading, as demonic. So that would put me in the camp of being a false teacher or a false witness, which saddens me greatly because I love Jesus. I’ve been a follower of Jesus for 70 years. And I believe that when Jesus said, I and my Father are one, if you have seen me, you have seen my Father, that Jesus was speaking about what we call the Gnostic God, the God Above All Gods, the Father in heaven, the preexistent primordial form, the one consciousness that did beget the only begotten Son. I explained to my Hindi friend that in Hinduism, many gods are accepted. In India, people pray and follow many different gods, and yet they are all considered Hindu because they are honoring and treasuring the Godhead. I don’t pray to many gods. I pray to the Father above, the God Above All Gods, the Father to whom Jesus prayed in the garden. I do not believe in a variety of saviors. I believe in the Christ as the Savior, and that Jesus of Nazareth embodied the Christ. I explained to my Hindi friend that although Christians reject us as being evil, we accept them as being seekers after truth and lovers of God, those who are not hypocritical, that is. Many people sit in Christian churches, and they’re what we would call bench warmers or pew warmers. The point being, you must truly believe in the Father. Jesus believed in the Father. He wanted his followers to believe, to have true knowledge and faith that we come from above, and we are children of the Father, of the one primordial consciousness. Jesus came to remind us of that. He came in human form to speak to us humans, but the Christ is a much greater and larger entity than Jesus alone. The Christ is an ethereal being. The Father is ethereal. The only begotten Son is ethereal. The Aeons of the Fullness of God are all ethereal entities that live above. Jesus was fully human as well as fully God. Just as we are fully human, and we have the potential of fully God inside of us. We’re all born with the life, consciousness, love, remembrance of the Father above and our aeonic parents in the Fullness of God. But we forget once we are sent down here. We were sent down here, according to Christian Gnosticism, for the purpose of reminding the Demiurge, of reminding the Fallen world, this cosmos, this material cosmos, that it didn’t arise from nothing. The Demiurge didn’t spring out of nothing. The Demiurge has forgotten. The Demiurge is known as the amnesiac God, but he is indeed the God of this material world because he put it in order. He took the chaos of the Fall and made it orderly, put the laws of chemistry and the laws of physics, the laws of astronomy, mathematics and the mathematical constants upon this otherwise chaotic material universe that was blasted out of the Fall. In physics, we call it the Big Bang or the origin. The Demiurge is the architect of this cosmos, of this material plane, of this apparently material world that we live in. And do you know what it is, this material world? It’s a copy. It’s an imitation. It’s a deficient imitation of Paradise. The Aeons of the Fullness of God, up above, sit and dream together of this beautiful paradisical world, this Eden. This beautiful, beautiful creation is the dream of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. It comes from upstream from them. It comes from the Totalities of the ALL. It comes from the Son, the only begotten Son, who was the Monad, the One, that represents an otherwise illimitable and unimaginably huge and great and powerful consciousness. We are their derivative. We are fractals of that consciousness. We’re downstream from the Father. We’re downstream from the Son, who is the face of the Father, the presenting face, the bucket dipped into the sea, containing all of its attributes, all of its knowledge and life and free will and creativity and plans. And the Son broke out all of his variables. He indexed every thought that the Father had. And this became the hierarchical structure that is called the Fullness of God, the Hierarchy of the Fullness, the pleroma of the Fullness of God. That is the everything of the Fullness of God—everything broken out and itemized. And then it was one particular Aeon that decided to launch itself back up and reunite with the Father. But it couldn’t, because the Father is far too great and powerful for one single derivative to be able to fully embrace it. And had it actually come into full contact with the Father, it would have been annihilated. In Gnostic Christianity, derived from the book called the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi books, this Aeon that launched itself out is known as Logos. In other forms of Gnosticism, the Aeon that launched itself is known as Sophia. It really doesn’t matter. Sophia means wisdom. Sophia represented the highest wisdom of the Fullness of God. Logos means knowledge, reason. Logos represented the highest knowledge and the highest reasoning of the Fullness of God. In truth, they basically represent the same concept. And this singleton wanted to reunite with the Father all on its own, but it couldn’t. And so it fell. And this is the Fall. In Christianity, the Fall has been pushed way downstream onto the human level. It is said that the humans ruined Paradise. We ruined Eden–one decision of the woman tempting the man to eat of the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil caused the Fall. But no, in Gnosticism, we say that the Fall happened upstream from us; ruining Paradise is way above our pay grade. It’s not humanly possible. We’re victims of the Fall. We’re not the creators of the Fall. We are not born as evil. We are born as fruit of the Fullness of God. We are the Second Order Powers fruited down here into this material creation. We’re melded onto this material creation, because the very molecules and atoms and particles that make up our physical body—and it’s not just us humans, it’s everything that’s live from the cellular level on up and all creatures, whether they be bacteria, plants, birds, mammals, humans, we’re all fruit of the Fullness of God, meaning we were dreamed up above—we’re part of the dream of Paradise. The dream of Paradise is fully populated. All of the plants and animals and creatures and everything up there pre-exists. That is what would be called intelligent design. So when we are fruited down here, and we begin this life as an organism here in this material world, we are welded onto the material, the particles, the atoms, the molecules. And so we grow up with the perfection of the remembrance of Paradise and the remembrance of the Aeons above and the Fullness of God. But the Fall represents ignorance. The chaos of the Fall—the Demiurge, which is the God of the Fall, doesn’t remember the world above, doesn’t remember the ethereal plane. The Demiurge thinks that when it woke up, it must have created everything. And so it went about ordering the chaos into its recollection of Paradise. But it doesn’t realize it’s a recollection. It thinks it’s creating. It thinks that it’s the creator, the inventor of this world. But really, it’s just a vague recollection of Paradise. And the god of this world—and here’s a heresy, by the way—whom the Bible acknowledges to be Jehovah, or Yahweh, the God of the Jews, the God of the Christians—that is the Demiurge. But Jesus did not acknowledge Jehovah as the Father. When Jesus spoke of the Father, he was talking about the God Above All Gods—God way upstream there before the Fall. The god down here is the god of this world. The god of this world is not Satan. The god of this world is the Fallen god, the Demiurge, that doesn’t realize that it’s from the Fall, doesn’t realize where it came from. That’s the simplest rendition of this Gnostic Christianity. It’s the same Christ that is then sent down into this material cosmos, in the body of the Jesus of Nazareth, who came down with the full knowledge of the Father in the Fullness of God, came down with full memory, free will, consciousness, love, unlimited love. And Jesus loves us all. Christ loves all living things. Christ came to redeem us all, to remind us that we come from above. That’s what Christ came to do, to remind of the love of the Father above, that we are not born of the god of this world. We are born of the God Above ...
Transcribe →Army of the Christ
3w ago00:24:33Tap to summarizeIt 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.
Transcribe →Another strange tale from White City
4w ago00:04:11Tap to summarizeAnother funny story from my visit to the White City Veterans Hospital yesterday. Surely you remember the post, Lost in the Hallways – Gnostic Insights, from February? And then the follow-up to the story posted in Reforming the Demiurge – Gnostic Insights ? Well, here’s some more weirdness associated with the White City facility. First, the hallways remain a mystery to me, no matter how often I visit. I’ve returned there at least 10 times by now for various health related matters, and each time I venture back into the labyrinth, I am lost and need help to find my destination. Okay, that could be me. But here’s something so odd that I had to pull out my phone and snap a couple of pictures. As I was leaving a very relaxing acupuncture session from my wonderful therapist, I happened to glance out a window along one of the second-story hallways and spied this curious oddity. What? You can’t see it? I never saw it before yesterday, either. Here’s a close-up: I ask you–what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks is this? A manhole cover labelled “666“? If I believed in Hell, which I don’t, I would wonder if this were a portal. Just strikes me as weird, that’s all.
Transcribe →Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge
May 900:24:05Tap to summarizeIn 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.
Transcribe →Understanding Pleromas: The Gnostic Journey of Consciousness
May 200:25:26Tap to summarizeLet’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, <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.  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 Totalities of the ALL 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.” The Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, Home of the Aeons 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.” Logos crowns the Fullness with fractal copies of all the other Aeons 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 <been> 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 divi...
Transcribe →The Case Against Darwinian Evolution
Apr 2500:19:27Tap to summarizeThe absurdity of random evolution 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. Mama giraffe and baby giraffe 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 frac...
Transcribe →Generation of the Aeons
Apr 1800:22:59Tap to summarizeWelcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I’m currently teaching my second round of Gnostic Insights to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, also known as OLLI, at Southern Oregon University, and we’re going through step by step this concept of Gnosticism that I share with you here at Gnostic Insights and on the Gnostic Reformation. So I’m going to back up with you and take a deep dive into the scriptures of the Tripartite Tractate that we use as the basis here for the Gnosticism that I share with you. 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. The Aeons sorted themselves into the Hierarchy of God “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 i...
Transcribe →Understanding Fractal Stories and Archetypes
Apr 1100:18:10Tap to summarizeOn 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. We play our parts in complex fractal stories 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. <p class="has-medium-font-size wp-bloc...
Transcribe →Easter Blessings from the Gnostic Christ
Apr 300:21:43Tap to summarizeWelcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. And Happy Easter, everybody! This is the time of year when Christians all over the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. Holy Week leading up to the resurrection is a rough one because it’s the passion of the Christ where the scriptures talk about and people reenact the trial of Christ, his walk with the cross to the hill of Calvary, and then his agony on the cross. We all know that story. But what does it mean? Why is there such a story? Many people who doubt the veracity of the early Christian histories think it’s all made up, think it’s a fairy tale. But I’ve got a couple of ways to talk about that. One way is this. If the story of Jesus is nothing but a made-up story, who made it up? And how did they know exactly how to make up the story to create this gigantic movement that is called Christianity? You can’t accidentally bumble into the salvation story. People aren’t that clever. And if someone was that clever to write a believable salvation story that wasn’t true, to what end? Why would they want to do that—making up a gigantic lie that is going to hoodwink millions and millions of people, do such a thing and get away with it and be so successful at it? And why would they do that? Because the salvation story I’m telling you does save people, does pull people out of their traps and their desperation and their addictions. You may be saying to yourself, hey, wait a minute, I thought this was a Gnostic podcast. What’s all this talk about Christ and Easter? Well, there is a branch of Gnosticism that’s referred to as Christian Gnosticism or Valentinian Gnosticism, and that happens to be what I believe in. And Christ is a central salvific figure in that form of Gnosticism. The conventional Christian church desperately needs Gnostics. They need us to bring them the depth of understanding of the Gospels, the depth of understanding of the writings that have been admitted into the New Testament, as well as the writings that were excluded from the New Testament, such as those found in the Nag Hammadi books and the Tripartite Tractate in particular. These are as Christian as Christian can be, more so than most conventional Christians’ understanding of their role and the role of Jesus and the role of Christ and the nature of the Father, the understanding of virtue and vice. We Gnostics carry that knowledge with us. We remember. That’s the process of Gnosticism, is remembering. That’s called anamnesis. You might have run across that word before. You know, amnesia means don’t remember, anamnesia means I remember. Just like agnostic means I don’t know, but gnostic means I know. Now, why do I say that the Christian church needs Gnostics? You know, they don’t want us there. They think we’re misleading people, taking them away from the cross, taking them away from heaven and salvation. But it couldn’t be more incorrect. Gnostic Christians are true Christians, because in order to consider yourself a Gnostic, you need to be in touch with the Holy Spirit. You need to have a relationship and an understanding of the Father and the Son and the Fullness of God. Almost by definition, if you are Gnostic, you carry the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Now, these things are very important to Christians, but they have excluded the means to get there. They have excluded the books from the same period as the books of the New Testament. They’ve excluded the ones that speak of Gnosis and speak of the way things are and who the nature of the Father is and how the Christ came about and who is the Son. Is the Son the same as Christ? Not exactly. The Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. And by the way, the Holy Spirit, that’s what we Gnostics call the Fullness of God. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God as an aggregate, as a place, as an entity, is what is called the Holy Spirit in conventional Christianity. You have the Father, the original, illimitable, omnipotent, omniscient consciousness that predates everything. And the Father conceives in his own mind or in its own mind, because obviously the Father is not an old man with a beard, even though we tend to represent him that way. That’s more of a metaphorical expression. Even in my children’s book, Children of the Fullness, I picture the Father as the old man in the beard and the Son as his small child being held in his arms. But it’s not really that. That’s a metaphor. The Father is consciousness, pure consciousness, without form. The Son is all of the Father’s consciousness and omniscience and omnipotence, but in a place, in a form. He’s a monad, or it’s a monad, because again, there’s no sex, there’s no gender, there’s no DNA. So, we shouldn’t be getting all hung up with the pronouns for the entities of the ethereal plane. Now, in the other form of Gnosticism, the Phoenician, Egyptian-derived mythologies that make up Sethian Gnosticism, they do have genders, but I think that’s because they are adopting the gendered pantheon of ancient gods that were written about. But in the purest philosophical form, there is no gender, because the Aeons do not procreate through sex, the way second-order powers do down here on earth. You know the way the Aeons procreate? By giving glory together to the Father, by singing. It’s vibrational. And in various combinations, the Aeons sing together, like a choir here and a choir there and a choir over there. And those various combinations of giving glory give birth to more and more Aeons. That’s the way Aeons multiply. Where conventional Christianity differs from Gnostic Christianity is that we have a different Genesis story. We have a different backstory to how we all came to be here. Now, it doesn’t seem to me that that should be enough to separate us as brothers and sisters in Christ, because we all agree on the importance of the Christ. The Christ, the Christ as we Gnostics say, Christ as conventional Christians say, and it irritates them to hear the in front of the word Christ. The Christ was conceived by all of the Aeons praying as one for salvation to come to the cosmos and all of the second-order powers that populate the cosmos. The Aeons are the first order of powers. Everyone that was conceived by the Aeons and sent out of the ethereal plane into this material plane are the second order of powers. That’s all of us. It’s the humans, but it’s everything that’s alive on the planet. The Christ is the third order of powers. The Aeons were the first order of powers. We living creatures here in the cosmos are the second order of powers. And Christ is the third order of powers. And it comes with the entirety of the Fullness and the blessings of the Son and the Father. The backstory where we disagree is the idea of who the fallen angel is, because the Christians also believe in fallen angels, and they often say that Lucifer was the most beautiful and highest of the angels who fell to Earth and became Satan. Well, it’s a version of the Gnostic tale. In the Gnostic mythology, the highest Aeon wanted to go out and create paradise on its own, and in the Sethian Gnosticism, that’s Sophia. In the Valentinian or Christian Gnosticism, that character is known as Logos. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I study, the name of that Aeon is Logos. And this Aeon overreaches, takes more upon itself than it was assigned. It wasn’t supposed to go out and build paradise on its own, and so when that Aeon, Sophia or Logos, attempted to do that, it fell from the ethereal plane, and it is the brokenness of that attempt that is our material plane. That’s what materiality is. It’s the shadows of the effort of the fallen Aeon. That’s why our material existence is solid, dark, heavy, full of confusion and forgetfulness, full of ego overreaching—because ego is what characterizes that Aeon who fell. And the character who stays down here and becomes the god of this world and puts it all back together is the shadow of that fallen Aeon. Sethians call it Yaldabaoth. We Gnostic Christians call it the Demiurge, as did Plato. Plato used this word Demiurge as architect–what it means. So the Aeon who overreached had all the plans in mind, knew all the blueprints. The Aeon who overreached, Logos, carried within itself a little copy of all the knowledge of all the other Aeons. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="859" src="https://gnosticinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/nested-pleromas-of-Logos-1024x859.jpg" alt="We second order powers are fractals of the pleroma of Logos. Logos contains fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness. The Aeons are the First Order of Power, also called the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of the Fullness and, in Christianity, the Holy ...
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