Gnostic Reformation, Clear and Simple

Understanding Pleromas

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...

Transcribe →

The Case Against Darwinian Evolution

3w ago00:19:27Tap to summarize

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...

Transcribe →

Generation of the Aeons

4w ago00:22:59Tap to summarize

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.”</stron...

Transcribe →

Understanding Complex Archetypes as Fractals

Apr 1100:18:10Tap to summarize

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 c...

Transcribe →

Easter Blessings from the Gnostic Christ

Apr 300:21:43Tap to summarize

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

Transcribe →

The Myth of Psychopathy

Mar 2800:20:09Tap to summarize

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...

Transcribe →

Peace, Love, and Happiness

Mar 2100:24:25Tap to summarize

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

Transcribe →

Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth

Mar 1400:16:02Tap to summarize

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

Transcribe →

Reforming the Demiurge

Mar 700:21:06Tap to summarize

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 ...

Transcribe →

Reforming Gnosticism

Feb 2800:23:59Tap to summarize

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 me...

Transcribe →

Gnostic Reformation, Clear and Simple

All episodes

Understanding Pleromas

The Case Against Darwinian Evolution

Generation of the Aeons

Understanding Complex Archetypes as Fractals

Easter Blessings from the Gnostic Christ

The Myth of Psychopathy

Peace, Love, and Happiness

Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth

Reforming the Demiurge

Reforming Gnosticism