I occasionally get comments from people that the Gnosticism I’m sharing with you here at Gnostic Insights is different than the Gnosticism they’re accustomed to or the Gnosticism they see elsewhere on the internet. And that is very true, and that is why the Substack is called the Gnostic Reformation.

This Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you—yes, it comes out of my own personal gnosis. It is a compilation of both Valentinian Gnosticism, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, but also I’ve combined it with my own Theory of Everything called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, the blog which has been up there at Blogspot for over 15 years by now. It is a true Theory of Everything that lets you examine any philosophical model or any social model or scientific model.

It’s a way of examining model structures and how they fit together, particularly our universe and particularly psychology, sociology, and theology. So when I ran across the Nag Hammadi and began to study it many years later, I was able to interpret it through this lens of A Simple Explanation that I had already developed. For example, the Simple Golden Rule comes directly out of my model, and that is a reformulation of what all religions around the world talk about as an ethical model of behavior.

And it’s this: It begins with the concept of units of consciousness—and I use the term units of consciousness because this applies not only to human beings, but to plants and animals and bacteria, cells in your body; in a way, it applies to the atoms and molecules and the elements as well–and in the Simple Explanation, I used to give them consciousness. But since coming to my gnosis, I believe that what the physical parts—the elemental parts—of our universe actually are, is the imitation of the way things go together in the Fullness. And it’s an imitation because it’s down here in this so-called material world. It’s the Demiurge’s best effort to reconstruct Paradise.

So now I don’t think that the molecules and atoms and subatomic particles are actually conscious the way I used to. The consciousness resides in the Demiurge, and the Demiurge is controlling them because the Demiurge is the god of this universe, and he can control down to the smallest subatomic particle, all of the elemental parts of our universe. But when it comes up to the living parts of our universe, that is where the life, consciousness, love, wisdom, all of that comes in through the Father, through the Son, through the Aeons, through Logos, into our otherwise fallen and amnesiac universe.

So the actual consciousness of the Aeons, and upstream from that, of course, the Son and the Father, that is where the consciousness comes into the living things in our universe. That’s what makes the difference between the hard and rocky places and the wet and meaty places, because there’s definitely a difference.

Anyway, I was talking about the Simple Golden Rule, and that is where units of consciousness, so that could be anything from a cell in your body all the way up through all creatures, although, not the viruses—the viruses are not alive, they are molecular machines controlled by the Demiurge—but up through the bacteria, which are different than viruses, bacteria are little living creatures—on up through all the plants and the animals, and then into us. Those are the units of consciousness.

I am a unit of consciousness. You are a unit of consciousness. We say units because consciousness actually is the ground state of our matrix. Consciousness is the mind of God, and we are units of that. So my Simple Golden Rule has always said, even before I came to the gnosis, the Simple Golden Rule says,

Units of consciousness reach out to others like themselves at their own level of complexity. So cells reach out to other cells, people reach out to other people, etc. Units of consciousness reach out to others and hold hands to join together to build the next level up. They join on a project. So like your family, let’s say, the people in your family hold hands with one another and level up to the family structure. Each thing that is at the same level reaches up to the next level to build something together that none of them could do on their own.

So if we take the cells in your body, your skin cells reach out to other skin cells and level up to the organ called skin. The other organs reach out in the same way. The heart cells reach out to other heart cells, make the heart. Lung cells reach out to other lung cells, make lungs, etc. And all of the organs reach out to each other to create an organism.

Everything builds up in the same way at the molecular level. The Demiurge’s copy of this process is subatomic particles reaching out to other subatomic particles to make particles. Particles reach out to make atoms. Atoms reach out to make molecules. Molecules reach out to make elements. Elements reach out to make minerals. Minerals become the rocks and stones and the hard rocky places that we see. But it is not conscious, and that’s the difference, other than the nature of the consciousness of the Demiurge that controls it.

Whereas each of the living parts of our universe, from the cells on up, is conscious, does have thoughts, is a direct part of the consciousness of God.

That is different. You don’t see that in the Nag Hammadi. That’s because I have brought that part of it in from the Simple Explanation.

I admit that my reading of the Nag Hammadi is filtered through my personal interpretive system, but that’s what we’re all called to do. You have your own personal interpretive systems, or it’s fine with me if you adapt mine. But you have to come to this understanding, this gnosis yourself. The bottom line of the gnosis, by the way, is this. It all boils down to one sentence:

We come from above and we will return to above.

That is the nugget of Gnosticism. All of the rest of it is explanations that people have offered of the system of how it goes together. How is it that we come from above? How is it that we return to above? And how do we interact with the above space, that is the pleroma of the Fullness of God, when we’re down here trapped in this material world?

That was the query that actually kicked off most of my own personal gnosis, even before I read any of the Gnostic books. I used to wonder, as I played with my dogs down by the river and I stood barefoot in the mud of the river, how does the consciousness of God flow through me and the mud surrounding the river make up my body and how do they connect? That’s the beginning of the Simple Explanation.

So I’ve been doing some research in this time off I’ve had and I can answer exactly now in a philosophical way how it is that this Gnosticism that I am sharing with you differs from what people who consider themselves to be Gnostic teachers generally teach.

Most Gnostics, by the way, are thinking of themselves as what are called Sethians. They believe that they are offspring from the prototypical human Seth and there’s a lot of mythology built around that system. The Nag Hammadi books are mostly Sethian. That’s why you have so much mythology in there. That’s why you have the names of angels and the counting of positions. You have the laying out of the hierarchy and all of these elect systems within it and how they have to be.

But keep in mind, the people that wrote those books are really no different than I am or than you are. They’re people writing their interpretations of the system of how God can inhabit matter and where we are in that process and do we belong here or do we belong somewhere else. And if we belong somewhere else, how do we get out of here? That’s where such words as the trap come from—that this material world is a trap. Some Sethians go so far as to believe that the way teachers have shared with us to escape the trap is itself a trap. Have you heard this? “Don’t go into the light. The tunnel and the light, they’re just the trap.”

That is someone’s interpretation of the system. That’s all that it is. You need to commune in silence with the Father yourself to discover what is true and what is not true. You can’t believe teachers, even Gnostic teachers, especially out there on the internet, who claim to have the truth and want to share it with you as if they were prophets. They are not prophets any more than I am a prophet. Everyone filters truth and reality through their own lens of discrimination. And your background, including your past lives and the memes that you bring forward into this life, all influence what you interpret of what you see going on around you, the words you use, the structu...

This Gnostic Reformation