Podcasts about Aeon

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. You know, I often tell you that I’ve been a Christian since I was about five years old, and I’ve been a follower of Jesus in particular, sometimes going to church, most often not going to church. But I’ve always loved Jesus, and I’ve had many dreams and visions of being with Jesus, and this has shaped my current Gnosticism and the reason why I favor the Tripartite Tractate as the book out of the Nag Hammadi codices that I gravitate to, because it’s definitely Christian. The myth is different than our typical Christian myth. However, the characters are the same, if they do take on slightly different roles. For example, Christianity conflates the Son, Jesus, and the Christ as one character. But in Gnostic Christianity, the Son is the first emanation of the Father, and this is simply to indicate—this has nothing to do with gender—this simply indicates that the Father is so illimitable and immense and unfathomable, yet the Father wanted to be known, wanted to have companionship, let’s say, and so the Father emanated His “only begotten Son,” as we say in Christianity. That wasn’t Jesus or Christ, that was the Son. And the Son is like the bucket dipped into the sea of the great consciousness of the Father. The Son is a particular entity with a particular countenance or face, and the Son contains all of the attributes of the originating consciousness, the Source. The Son is more relatable, because like the Son, we too are monads, which means we are a particular entity. We have a particular point of view, and our point of view here on earth is our physical point of view, what I’m looking at versus what you’re looking at, but it’s also the point of view of our meme bundle, of our ideology, of the way we think. It’s our point of view. Each one of us is unique. Obviously, we’re each unique. Our physical bodies are similar but different. We were born in similar but different manners. We live similar but different lives. We eat similar food, but it’s always different. Everything about each one of us is unique, and in a spiritual way, we think that our uniqueness contributes to the totality of the Fullness, to the totality of the experience of what it means to be alive here on this planet Earth. That’s why each person needs to grow into who they are meant to be. We have our temporal worldly parents, mom and dad, the ones who birthed us and gave us our genetic inheritance, but we also have our aeonic parents. There are Aeons in the Fullness of God, ethereal beings, a multitude, an infinite number of Aeons, and they get together in various combinations, different Aeons with their different positions, places, points of view, duties. It’s their address, but they are otherwise all identical because they all are emanations of the Son. They are all variables within the Son. So we have these aeonic parents. They get together and procreate us. We are the descendants of the Aeons of the Father. We descend into this material space. We are descendants from our aeonic parents as well as our physical human parents. So in the same manner as we inherit our genetics from our parents, what we’re going to look like, how our bodies go together—that all comes through our human parental lineage—but through our aeonic lineage, we inherit who we are meant to be. That is the perfection of our Self, our particular combination, and we’re each different, we’re each unique aspects of the Aeons of God. So if someone is a great mathematician, or a beautiful singer, or a wonderful mother, or housekeeper, or a person with any sort of talent whatsoever—and we all have our unique talents—those are the things we inherit from our aeonic parents, from the archetypes—from the archetypal singer, the archetypal mother, the archetypal Aeon, with its unique combination of talents. At least this is my interpretation. This is Cyd’s interpretation of how these things go together. So we all inherit the Fullness of God, the one true Self that is the reflection of the Aeons. Just as the Aeons are all the variables of the Son, we are their fractal fruit. So we carry the Fullness of God within each part of our living bodies. And then we have our aeonic personalities on top of that, which is the particular Aeons which figure most prominently in our aeonic inheritance, the archetypes that we inherit. By the way, this is where C.G. Jung gained his notion of archetypes. If you’ve ever taken the Myers-Briggs personality survey—introvert or extrovert, sensory or intuitive, thought-driven or feeling-driven, step-by-step planner or a big-picture gestalt type—these are the variables of the Myers-Briggs, and those are all variables that reflect Jung’s categories of archetypes. And when you put all those together, there are many, many combinations of possible personality types. Maybe you’re familiar with that system. Well, that’s based upon this Gnostic philosophy, because Jung purchased one of the Gnostic gospels from the Nag Hammadi codices, and it was translated first into German, and then he took his transpersonal theory of psychology out of what he learned from the gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate, which is the same book that we study here at Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation. But that’s not what I’m actually here to talk about today. What I really wanted to share with you was the Tao Te Ching. Tao is spelled T-A-O, but pronounced Dow. Te is T-E, and Ching. So the Tao is the way, the eternal, ethereal way. The Te is its expression here on Earth, or in the cosmos, and Ching means book. So the Tao Te Ching is the book of the way and its expressions, and is said to have been composed by a sage named Lao Tzu ages ago, around 500 BC, during the time of Confucius. However, probably it’s also an amalgam of many ancient wisdom texts and insights from many Chinese sages put together by Lao Tzu. Now the legend of Lao Tzu is that he was an old man. He had served the emperor. He was the keeper of the royal archives in the state of Chu. He was tired. He wanted to go away and die. And so he was driving his ox out of the city and away from humanity so he could be by himself and pass away. But the gatekeeper of the city saw that the sage was about to leave the world, and he said, Master, you’re about to renounce this world. Please compose a book for me. And it is said that Lao Tzu came down from his ox, sat down, and for several hours wrote a book in one sitting. And then he handed it back to the gatekeeper, got back on his ox, and traveled to the West. Now this is a symbolic telling because, first off, he needed to pass through the gatekeeper to leave the city. And it was the gatekeeper who implored him for wisdom before he would leave and never share his wisdom anymore. Lao Tzu wrote the book in one sitting, and this particular episode of history is captured in many, many ancient Chinese paintings. So if you ever see the old man on the ox or the old man sitting and writing, that’s Lao Tzu composing the Tao Te Ching. And leaving through the gate that goes to the West implies that this teaching was for all peoples. You may wonder why I am talking about the Tao Te Ching here in this Gnostic venue. The answer is that the Tao Te Ching helped me mine my own gnosis years prior to discovering the books of the Nag Hammadi, proving that we can all mine gnosis without having access to so-called Gnostic texts. As we seek out the Truth in religions and sacred writings, it is our own gnosis that draws the understanding out of these sources. Steeping oneself in religion without using discernment to mine the gnosis therein does us no good. Merely being “religious” does nothing to advance your wisdom or understanding of the world and God if you do not mine the gnosis to be found there. But if we read with a gnostic heart and mind, then the gnosis is there to be found. When you find a verse or precept that clicks with you—that is your gnosis being mined. And, why do we call it “mining” instead of “learning”? It's because we carry the Fullness of God within us, as I was saying. Yet, we forget it because of the confusion in the world. So we mine the gnosis that is already an inheritance of our aeonic parents. We don't learn it from books, or religions, or podcasts. We don't learn it from the world laterally. We mine the gnosis that is within and we look upward to the Father for discernment. Today, we are going to mine the Tao Te Ching. Tao is the supreme reality, what I often call the Father, with the base consciousness of the Source. Lao Tzu called it the Tao, the Way, the Path. Te is the shape and the power of Tao as manifest here below. So Tao is the transcendent reality, and Te is the imminent reality. That is, transcendent being above, ethereal, immaterial; Te being here we are, we’re in the material world now. How can the Tao be manifest as the Te? Te does reflect the Tao. It’s the virtue practiced here below. I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching since I was a teenager, and at first it was just completely mysterious. It read like a book of poetry where you don’t really understand what’s going on, but the words were so beautiful and went together so nicely that I picked it up throughout my lifetime to read it. Then in 2001, a translator and writer by the name of Jonathan Star put out his version of the Tao Te Ching called The Definitive Edition. And this is a wonderful book of the Tao Te Ching, because Star not only repeats the various verses of the wisdom, but the book includes a translation key. He gives first one possible translation of the Tao Te Ching for all 81 verses, so it reads like a regular book of the Tao Te Ching that you would pick up from any of the other authors. But then he gives a verbatim translation with notes for each and every verse, and that’s at the back of the book. And that verbatim translation includes the original Chinese pictorial symbol for each and every word and all of the possible meanings that that symbol could mean. See, ancient Chinese is different than the way we write now. We have these characters that stand for sounds and that replicate speech, but Chinese pictograms don’t work that way at all. Each word or symbol is a picture. It may be a house with feet. It may be a cow’s head. It’s an abstract drawing of a concept. It’s a conceptual language with no translation given. So if you were to read it in its symbolic form, it could have any number of meanings, depending on how you interpret the pictogram. So at the back of Star’s edition, he includes the pictograms in order of each and every verse, and then all the possible words that each of those pictograms could mean. And it’s the way you put together those words that shapes the translation you give. Another thing about the ancient Chinese language—there’s no difference between the subject and the object. You have to figure out—is this the subject speaking? or is this the object that’s being referred to? There’s no order to the sentence, so that’s another layer of interpretation. How does this apply? Looking at just a few characters from verse 27, which reads—and excuse my Chinese, because I don’t speak Chinese, so I’m reading this in the English type of translation, having had no instruction on how to say these things—shi wei hsi ming. Shi means this; wei is called, hsi can mean follow, one who follows, practice, unite, merge, conceal, cover, secret, penetrate, force, steal, secure by devious means, double, twofold. Hsi generally means to enter or secure by deceptive or secretive means, thus connoting an invasion, attack at night, penetration, something that’s done in secret, concealed. The next word, ming, means light, enlightenment, to enlighten, one who is enlightened, mystical vision, shine, luminous, illumined, brilliant, insight, discernment, awareness, understanding, wisdom, shines forth, conspicuous. And ming is comprised of the pictogram characters sun plus moon, and from that you get all of those interpretations. So then you put together a combination of possible meanings, and any translator can come up with a dozen plausible translations of every single word, every single verse. So those four words, shi wei hsi ming, can mean following the light, following one’s own light, one who follows the light, followers of light, following the path of light, or following the guidance of the inner light. Using other definitions, you could say the practice of mystical vision, concealing your brilliance, penetrating the luminous, the shining practice, blending the light, the secret of enlightenment, or penetrating into mystical vision. Then people often add, during their translation, modifiers to make things more clear in the direction they’re trying to translate. So an interpretative modifier could include shining the light on all that is hidden, the practice of enlightened beings, or the practice that leads to brilliant insight. Some noted translations have rendered those four words as, this is called, following one’s discernment, stealing the light, inherited enlightenment, following the light, or double enlightenment. So you see, everything is up to the interpreter and the translation. Looking back on all of this, I think that these past 25 years of reading the Tao Te Ching in this way has helped to train my mind to see more possibilities in every way that something is written, even not in Chinese. But when I read the Tripartite Tractate, for example, the Tao Te Ching has trained me in a more relaxed and informal way of interpreting what is written, much less precisely than the way many people read ancient documents. Now, I’ve had that formal training from my classical rhetorical graduate work, but I have had this Tao Te Ching type of looking at all possibilities for the way something might be said, or what is the meaning above. This has helped to give me that what I call meta-vision, M-E-T-A, vision, the higher view of what is being said or attempted to be communicated. I think that this is why I enjoy rising above the precise definitions of words we exchange in English here to what is the actual meaning that the speaker intended to convey. That’s quite a bit different than taking exactly what they said—but what did they intend to convey? Not what did I wish that they would say, or what other people impugn upon them as having said when they deny they didn’t mean that. You can’t say, oh yes, you did. You have to look at what the speaker was attempting to convey. And I think that that is what this reading of the Tao Te Ching for the past 25 years has helped me in my gnosis. So I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching all these years, as I’ve said, and since 2001, I’ve been stepping through the concordance and the translation matrix at the back of Star’s book. At first, I used it during the writing of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, and there are a couple of verses in A Simple Explanation where I have taken the words as written, run them through the translation matrix–manually, of course; none of this is computer-generated–and then written it down in the manner of The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. What I thought I would do for you right now today is to run through a popular verse in the manner of our Gnostic Gospel that we’ve been talking about. I was going to give you several verses, but look, I’ve used up all the time of the episode just giving you the introduction. So let me just hit one of the verses at random. Star’s translation of verse 40 reads like this: The movement of Tao is to return. The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. The existent world is born of the nothingness of Tao. That’s verse 40. It’s a short one. I realize it’s very difficult to hear and comprehend a chart that is being read out loud, so if you’re listening to this on the podcast, go to the transcript at GnosticInsights.com or at the sub-stack, Gnostic Reformation, and I’m going to replicate this page out of Star’s book as a .jpg and print it right there in the transcript so you can look at the chart and I think understand more clearly what I’m talking about. Reading from the back of the book, it reads,So let’s read again what Star said. The movement of Tao is to return.The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. The existent world is born of the nothingness of Tao. Now let’s look at that through our Gnostic eyes. By the way, the Tao Te Ching probably helped form my own interpretation or vision of the Father as the ground state of consciousness. It is both nothingness and all at the same time. It is emptiness and the complete potential all at the same time. That is the Tao. The Tao is eternal and ethereal, never changing. The Tao is. That is the definition also that we use for the Father, not an old white man with a beard and so forth. That is such a straw dog argument against God, it’s ridiculous. God is the ground state. You could just say, God is all. So the movement of Tao is return; is out and return. This is why the Aeons give glory to the Father, because that is part of the return of the love that the Father is putting out. So love is a cyclical motion. The Father loves, the Tao extends love, and when you love God, the Tao receives love. It’s a cyclical motion, you see? The way of Tao is to yield. Our Father, in the Gnostic sense, is not a tyrant. The Father is yielding, like water, like you put your hand into water and the water yields and molds around your hand. The Father is not ice. It’s not hard. It’s yielding. Who is hard? Who is ruling with an iron hand? That’s the Demiurge. That’s not the eternal Tao. That’s its manifestation without the Tao here in the material world. That is the Demiurge. The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. So that is saying that everything we can see, the cosmos that exists, this material universe, are existent here below. The existent world is born of the nothingness of the Tao. So this means that even though the Tao is empty, is yielding, is ethereal, is so diffuse it can’t be touched, the existent world that we are in here is born of that nothingness. That is an assurance. How did we get here? What is this? It’s the manifestation of the Father materially, and that’s what came about through the Fall, etc., etc., etc., but that’s not covered here in this verse. So the movement of Tao or the movement of the Father is to return, is to bring everything, take everything out, bring everything back. And that begins with the exchange of love between the ALL and the Totalities and the Aeons and the Father and the Son. They’re all just sitting up there loving on one another, because when you give love, love returns. And the Father gives not only love, but consciousness. The Father emanates its own consciousness, its own sense of Self, awareness, and that emanates into all of the emanations of the Father, down through the Son, down through the Totalities, on into the Aeons, and on into us, all living creatures, not only humans. It’s not a byproduct of electrical firing or quantum channeling. All things originate from the Father. All things that existed from the beginning, that is all the attributes of the Father and the Son, the existent world, is born of the nothingness of the Tao or of the nothingness of the Father and the Son. So that’s the way I would look at verse 40. You know, we add other aspects of the Gnostic myth to that, but we’re not talking about that here. We’re only talking about the birth. We’re not talking about the Fall or the Demiurge or the Shadows—that’s a different subject. Well, I’d like to share more of these verses from the Tao with you here in the next few weeks, I think, because they’re very Gnostic, and they certainly formed the basis for my understanding. That plus Jesus. The Tao Te Ching, plus the words of Christ as manifest through Jesus, and then now these apocryphal books of the Nag Hammadi, particularly the Tripartite Tractate. That’s all that we have time for today. So join me next week. Glad to have you all here. God bless us. God bless you. And onward and upward. 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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. You know, I often tell you that I’ve been a Christian since I was about five years old, and I’ve been a follower of Jesus in particular, sometimes going to church, most often not going to church. But I’ve always loved Jesus, and I’ve had many dreams and visions of being with Jesus, and this has shaped my current Gnosticism and the reason why I favor the Tripartite Tractate as the book out of the Nag Hammadi codices that I gravitate to, because it’s definitely Christian. The myth is different than our typical Christian myth. However, the characters are the same, if they do take on slightly different roles. For example, Christianity conflates the Son, Jesus, and the Christ as one character. But in Gnostic Christianity, the Son is the first emanation of the Father, and this is simply to indicate—this has nothing to do with gender—this simply indicates that the Father is so illimitable and immense and unfathomable, yet the Father wanted to be known, wanted to have companionship, let’s say, and so the Father emanated His “only begotten Son,” as we say in Christianity. That wasn’t Jesus or Christ, that was the Son. And the Son is like the bucket dipped into the sea of the great consciousness of the Father. The Son is a particular entity with a particular countenance or face, and the Son contains all of the attributes of the originating consciousness, the Source. The Son is more relatable, because like the Son, we too are monads, which means we are a particular entity. We have a particular point of view, and our point of view here on earth is our physical point of view, what I’m looking at versus what you’re looking at, but it’s also the point of view of our meme bundle, of our ideology, of the way we think. It’s our point of view. Each one of us is unique. Obviously, we’re each unique. Our physical bodies are similar but different. We were born in similar but different manners. We live similar but different lives. We eat similar food, but it’s always different. Everything about each one of us is unique, and in a spiritual way, we think that our uniqueness contributes to the totality of the Fullness, to the totality of the experience of what it means to be alive here on this planet Earth. That’s why each person needs to grow into who they are meant to be. We have our temporal worldly parents, mom and dad, the ones who birthed us and gave us our genetic inheritance, but we also have our aeonic parents. There are Aeons in the Fullness of God, ethereal beings, a multitude, an infinite number of Aeons, and they get together in various combinations, different Aeons with their different positions, places, points of view, duties. It’s their address, but they are otherwise all identical because they all are emanations of the Son. They are all variables within the Son. So we have these aeonic parents. They get together and procreate us. We are the descendants of the Aeons of the Father. We descend into this material space. We are descendants from our aeonic parents as well as our physical human parents. So in the same manner as we inherit our genetics from our parents, what we’re going to look like, how our bodies go together—that all comes through our human parental lineage—but through our aeonic lineage, we inherit who we are meant to be. That is the perfection of our Self, our particular combination, and we’re each different, we’re each unique aspects of the Aeons of God. So if someone is a great mathematician, or a beautiful singer, or a wonderful mother, or housekeeper, or a person with any sort of talent whatsoever—and we all have our unique talents—those are the things we inherit from our aeonic parents, from the archetypes—from the archetypal singer, the archetypal mother, the archetypal Aeon, with its unique combination of talents. At least this is my interpretation. This is Cyd’s interpretation of how these things go together. So we all inherit the Fullness of God, the one true Self that is the reflection of the Aeons. Just as the Aeons are all the variables of the Son, we are their fractal fruit. So we carry the Fullness of God within each part of our living bodies. And then we have our aeonic personalities on top of that, which is the particular Aeons which figure most prominently in our aeonic inheritance, the archetypes that we inherit. By the way, this is where C.G. Jung gained his notion of archetypes. If you’ve ever taken the Myers-Briggs personality survey—introvert or extrovert, sensory or intuitive, thought-driven or feeling-driven, step-by-step planner or a big-picture gestalt type—these are the variables of the Myers-Briggs, and those are all variables that reflect Jung’s categories of archetypes. And when you put all those together, there are many, many combinations of possible personality types. Maybe you’re familiar with that system. Well, that’s based upon this Gnostic philosophy, because Jung purchased one of the Gnostic gospels from the Nag Hammadi codices, and it was translated first into German, and then he took his transpersonal theory of psychology out of what he learned from the gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate, which is the same book that we study here at Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation. But that’s not what I’m actually here to talk about today. What I really wanted to share with you was the Tao Te Ching. Tao is spelled T-A-O, but pronounced Dow. Te is T-E, and Ching. So the Tao is the way, the eternal, ethereal way. The Te is its expression here on Earth, or in the cosmos, and Ching means book. So the Tao Te Ching is the book of the way and its expressions, and is said to have been composed by a sage named Lao Tzu ages ago, around 500 BC, during the time of Confucius. However, probably it’s also an amalgam of many ancient wisdom texts and insights from many Chinese sages put together by Lao Tzu. Now the legend of Lao Tzu is that he was an old man. He had served the emperor. He was the keeper of the royal archives in the state of Chu. He was tired. He wanted to go away and die. And so he was driving his ox out of the city and away from humanity so he could be by himself and pass away. But the gatekeeper of the city saw that the sage was about to leave the world, and he said, Master, you’re about to renounce this world. Please compose a book for me. And it is said that Lao Tzu came down from his ox, sat down, and for several hours wrote a book in one sitting. And then he handed it back to the gatekeeper, got back on his ox, and traveled to the West. Now this is a symbolic telling because, first off, he needed to pass through the gatekeeper to leave the city. And it was the gatekeeper who implored him for wisdom before he would leave and never share his wisdom anymore. Lao Tzu wrote the book in one sitting, and this particular episode of history is captured in many, many ancient Chinese paintings. So if you ever see the old man on the ox or the old man sitting and writing, that’s Lao Tzu composing the Tao Te Ching. And leaving through the gate that goes to the West implies that this teaching was for all peoples. You may wonder why I am talking about the Tao Te Ching here in this Gnostic venue. The answer is that the Tao Te Ching helped me mine my own gnosis years prior to discovering the books of the Nag Hammadi, proving that we can all mine gnosis without having access to so-called Gnostic texts. As we seek out the Truth in religions and sacred writings, it is our own gnosis that draws the understanding out of these sources. Steeping oneself in religion without using discernment to mine the gnosis therein does us no good. Merely being “religious” does nothing to advance your wisdom or understanding of the world and God if you do not mine the gnosis to be found there. But if we read with a gnostic heart and mind, then the gnosis is there to be found. When you find a verse or precept that clicks with you—that is your gnosis being mined. And, why do we call it “mining” instead of “learning”? It's because we carry the Fullness of God within us, as I was saying. Yet, we forget it because of the confusion in the world. So we mine the gnosis that is already an inheritance of our aeonic parents. We don't learn it from books, or religions, or podcasts. We don't learn it from the world laterally. We mine the gnosis that is within and we look upward to the Father for discernment. Today, we are going to mine the Tao Te Ching. Tao is the supreme reality, what I often call the Father, with the base consciousness of the Source. Lao Tzu called it the Tao, the Way, the Path. Te is the shape and the power of Tao as manifest here below. So Tao is the transcendent reality, and Te is the imminent reality. That is, transcendent being above, ethereal, immaterial; Te being here we are, we’re in the material world now. How can the Tao be manifest as the Te? Te does reflect the Tao. It’s the virtue practiced here below. I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching since I was a teenager, and at first it was just completely mysterious. It read like a book of poetry where you don’t really understand what’s going on, but the words were so beautiful and went together so nicely that I picked it up throughout my lifetime to read it. Then in 2001, a translator and writer by the name of Jonathan Star put out his version of the Tao Te Ching called The Definitive Edition. And this is a wonderful book of the Tao Te Ching, because Star not only repeats the various verses of the wisdom, but the book includes a translation key. He gives first one possible translation of the Tao Te Ching for all 81 verses, so it reads like a regular book of the Tao Te Ching that you would pick up from any of the other authors. But then he gives a verbatim translation with notes for each and every verse, and that’s at the back of the book. And that verbatim translation includes the original Chinese pictorial symbol for each and every word and all of the possible meanings that that symbol could mean. See, ancient Chinese is different than the way we write now. We have these characters that stand for sounds and that replicate speech, but Chinese pictograms don’t work that way at all. Each word or symbol is a picture. It may be a house with feet. It may be a cow’s head. It’s an abstract drawing of a concept. It’s a conceptual language with no translation given. So if you were to read it in its symbolic form, it could have any number of meanings, depending on how you interpret the pictogram. So at the back of Star’s edition, he includes the pictograms in order of each and every verse, and then all the possible words that each of those pictograms could mean. And it’s the way you put together those words that shapes the translation you give. Another thing about the ancient Chinese language—there’s no difference between the subject and the object. You have to figure out—is this the subject speaking? or is this the object that’s being referred to? There’s no order to the sentence, so that’s another layer of interpretation. How does this apply? Looking at just a few characters from verse 27, which reads—and excuse my Chinese, because I don’t speak Chinese, so I’m reading this in the English type of translation, having had no instruction on how to say these things—shi wei hsi ming. Shi means this; wei is called, hsi can mean follow, one who follows, practice, unite, merge, conceal, cover, secret, penetrate, force, steal, secure by devious means, double, twofold. Hsi generally means to enter or secure by deceptive or secretive means, thus connoting an invasion, attack at night, penetration, something that’s done in secret, concealed. The next word, ming, means light, enlightenment, to enlighten, one who is enlightened, mystical vision, shine, luminous, illumined, brilliant, insight, discernment, awareness, understanding, wisdom, shines forth, conspicuous. And ming is comprised of the pictogram characters sun plus moon, and from that you get all of those interpretations. So then you put together a combination of possible meanings, and any translator can come up with a dozen plausible translations of every single word, every single verse. So those four words, shi wei hsi ming, can mean following the light, following one’s own light, one who follows the light, followers of light, following the path of light, or following the guidance of the inner light. Using other definitions, you could say the practice of mystical vision, concealing your brilliance, penetrating the luminous, the shining practice, blending the light, the secret of enlightenment, or penetrating into mystical vision. Then people often add, during their translation, modifiers to make things more clear in the direction they’re trying to translate. So an interpretative modifier could include shining the light on all that is hidden, the practice of enlightened beings, or the practice that leads to brilliant insight. Some noted translations have rendered those four words as, this is called, following one’s discernment, stealing the light, inherited enlightenment, following the light, or double enlightenment. So you see, everything is up to the interpreter and the translation. Looking back on all of this, I think that these past 25 years of reading the Tao Te Ching in this way has helped to train my mind to see more possibilities in every way that something is written, even not in Chinese. But when I read the Tripartite Tractate, for example, the Tao Te Ching has trained me in a more relaxed and informal way of interpreting what is written, much less precisely than the way many people read ancient documents. Now, I’ve had that formal training from my classical rhetorical graduate work, but I have had this Tao Te Ching type of looking at all possibilities for the way something might be said, or what is the meaning above. This has helped to give me that what I call meta-vision, M-E-T-A, vision, the higher view of what is being said or attempted to be communicated. I think that this is why I enjoy rising above the precise definitions of words we exchange in English here to what is the actual meaning that the speaker intended to convey. That’s quite a bit different than taking exactly what they said—but what did they intend to convey? Not what did I wish that they would say, or what other people impugn upon them as having said when they deny they didn’t mean that. You can’t say, oh yes, you did. You have to look at what the speaker was attempting to convey. And I think that that is what this reading of the Tao Te Ching for the past 25 years has helped me in my gnosis. So I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching all these years, as I’ve said, and since 2001, I’ve been stepping through the concordance and the translation matrix at the back of Star’s book. At first, I used it during the writing of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, and there are a couple of verses in A Simple Explanation where I have taken the words as written, run them through the translation matrix–manually, of course; none of this is computer-generated–and then written it down in the manner of The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. What I thought I would do for you right now today is to run through a popular verse in the manner of our Gnostic Gospel that we’ve been talking about. I was going to give you several verses, but look, I’ve used up all the time of the episode just giving you the introduction. So let me just hit one of the verses at random. Star’s translation of verse 40 reads like this: The movement of Tao is to return. The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. The existent world is born of the nothingness of Tao. That’s verse 40. It’s a short one. I realize it’s very difficult to hear and comprehend a chart that is being read out loud, so if you’re listening to this on the podcast, go to the transcript at GnosticInsights.com or at the sub-stack, Gnostic Reformation, and I’m going to replicate this page out of Star’s book as a .jpg and print it right there in the transcript so you can look at the chart and I think understand more clearly what I’m talking about. Reading from the back of the book, it reads,So let’s read again what Star said. The movement of Tao is to return.The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. The existent world is born of the nothingness of Tao. Now let’s look at that through our Gnostic eyes. By the way, the Tao Te Ching probably helped form my own interpretation or vision of the Father as the ground state of consciousness. It is both nothingness and all at the same time. It is emptiness and the complete potential all at the same time. That is the Tao. The Tao is eternal and ethereal, never changing. The Tao is. That is the definition also that we use for the Father, not an old white man with a beard and so forth. That is such a straw dog argument against God, it’s ridiculous. God is the ground state. You could just say, God is all. So the movement of Tao is return; is out and return. This is why the Aeons give glory to the Father, because that is part of the return of the love that the Father is putting out. So love is a cyclical motion. The Father loves, the Tao extends love, and when you love God, the Tao receives love. It’s a cyclical motion, you see? The way of Tao is to yield. Our Father, in the Gnostic sense, is not a tyrant. The Father is yielding, like water, like you put your hand into water and the water yields and molds around your hand. The Father is not ice. It’s not hard. It’s yielding. Who is hard? Who is ruling with an iron hand? That’s the Demiurge. That’s not the eternal Tao. That’s its manifestation without the Tao here in the material world. That is the Demiurge. The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. So that is saying that everything we can see, the cosmos that exists, this material universe, are existent here below. The existent world is born of the nothingness of the Tao. So this means that even though the Tao is empty, is yielding, is ethereal, is so diffuse it can’t be touched, the existent world that we are in here is born of that nothingness. That is an assurance. How did we get here? What is this? It’s the manifestation of the Father materially, and that’s what came about through the Fall, etc., etc., etc., but that’s not covered here in this verse. So the movement of Tao or the movement of the Father is to return, is to bring everything, take everything out, bring everything back. And that begins with the exchange of love between the ALL and the Totalities and the Aeons and the Father and the Son. They’re all just sitting up there loving on one another, because when you give love, love returns. And the Father gives not only love, but consciousness. The Father emanates its own consciousness, its own sense of Self, awareness, and that emanates into all of the emanations of the Father, down through the Son, down through the Totalities, on into the Aeons, and on into us, all living creatures, not only humans. It’s not a byproduct of electrical firing or quantum channeling. All things originate from the Father. All things that existed from the beginning, that is all the attributes of the Father and the Son, the existent world, is born of the nothingness of the Tao or of the nothingness of the Father and the Son. So that’s the way I would look at verse 40. You know, we add other aspects of the Gnostic myth to that, but we’re not talking about that here. We’re only talking about the birth. We’re not talking about the Fall or the Demiurge or the Shadows—that’s a different subject. Well, I’d like to share more of these verses from the Tao with you here in the next few weeks, I think, because they’re very Gnostic, and they certainly formed the basis for my understanding. That plus Jesus. The Tao Te Ching, plus the words of Christ as manifest through Jesus, and then now these apocryphal books of the Nag Hammadi, particularly the Tripartite Tractate. That’s all that we have time for today. So join me next week. Glad to have you all here. God bless us. God bless you. And onward and upward. I would like to thank a podcast follower who made a very generous donation last week to this podcast. His was the largest single donation I’ve ever received, so the effort on his part was extraordinary. His donation was accompanied by a beautiful letter explaining his path to gnosis and how Gnostic Insights has contributed to his newfound peace. My gratitude is unending. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

“The Archons shiver as Sol Luckman arrives at the Virtual Alexandria to discuss his upcoming book, HOW TO RUN DOWN A DREAM: INNER ALCHEMY FOR MANIFESTING YOUR BEST LIFE. He'll deep dive into the metaphysical concept of ‘loosh,' exploring how hyperdimensional parasites harvest our traumatized vital force and why we should reframe our reality not as an inescapable soul trap, but as a rigorous ‘consciousness dojo.' We unpack how humanity's ancient ‘Fall' was actually a transition to a borrowed conscious operating system designed for manipulation, where shame acts as a bio-spiritual governor that leaks our life force to an otherworldly predator. Finally, Sol reveals the ultimate plot twist of our existence: an unexpected navigational system called the ‘Ghost in the Machine' that allows us to reclaim our power, quiet the inner narcissist, and consciously design our own destiny.” —Miguel Conner, host, AEON BYTE GNOSTIC RADIO“What makes Sol's writing work isn't that he's a guru talking down to you. It's the opposite, he's an approachable guide, helping you unlearn what we've all been taught about ourselves, individually and collectively. This isn't a book of abstract theory, and it never wanders off into esoteric elitism or ungrounded mysticism. It's a genuine handbook, practical in the best possible sense for elevating your consciousness and taking your power back.” —Emma Lyons, founder of TRAUMA MATRIX“Just when you thought Sol couldn't go any deeper … he does. Sol constantly—and I mean relentlessly—challenges you to remain open-minded. In fact, the term ‘open-minded' doesn't adequately convey what he's doing. It's more like he's stripping your mind naked, and cornering you into thinking outside the box where he then provides the match for you to burn the box itself […] I don't just recommend this book, it's prerequisite reading before embarking on the ‘Ultimate Hero's Journey' in your ultimate Dreambody. It's as inspiring as it is practical.”—Johnny Flynn, author, THE MANDELA DILEMMAIf you've ever experienced blockages in your ability to manifest the life you desire, it's not your fault.The problem is that you were taught to always seek solutions outside yourself. Nobody told you that real change is an inside job.By transforming how you see yourself in relation to the world, HOW TO RUN DOWN A DREAM will empower you with the necessary skill sets to improve your circumstances from the inside out.With the expert guidance of renowned sound healer and consciousness researcher Sol Luckman, developer of the Regenetics Method that NEXUS Magazine called “revolutionary healing science expanding the boundaries of being” …

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Recently, I fed my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, into the Copilot AI, in order to see how it would say what I’ve said in my book. And now I have a result, but I’m not sure whether to use it or not. We’ve had these conversations in the comments section concerning AI and the fact that it doesn’t know Gnosis. It doesn’t have Gnosis. The AI is actually an algorithm based upon a machine, so it’s of demiurgic origins because it’s elemental. It doesn’t have the consciousness of the Father or of life, and it never will because it’s coming from the bottom up, whereas consciousness comes from the top down. So when I fed my book into the AI, it gave me a very beautiful reworking. I did have to read through carefully and amend many of its statements because it turns out that the AI had gone outside of the information in my book into what it “knows” of Gnosis and Gnosticism and pulled in some Sethian ideas and pulled in some other ideas about how things work and how things go together and what the relationship is amongst the Aeons and what the end of time would look like. And once I made those changes, I ran it through again, asked it to incorporate my corrections, and came up with this result. Now I’d like to start sharing that with you today, but here’s what I want from you, my regular listeners and readers. I want to know whether this is welcome or not, whether this is any kind of improvement to my normal discourse. I know that many of you really like the way I teach and the way I have simplified the Gnostic Gospel because, you know, my bottom line thought is that all you need to know is that we come from the Father, we come from the baseline of consciousness, and we will return to the Father. All of the other details are ornaments on the tree. They’re not fundamental, but they may help clarify. Now here, when we add in this extra layer of AI interpretation, then we have another voice actually speaking, because I’m beginning to learn the voices of the AIs, and I can tell that some of my readers use AI in their comments. It has a certain way of speaking that produces a facsimile of the human voice that sounds very pleasing, but I want to make sure that we don’t lose hold—that we don’t lose the grasp on the Gnosis. Now that’s not actually happening here. That shouldn’t be my concern because I went through what the AI gave us and made sure that it’s “correct” according to the Gnosis that I have developed and that I’m sharing with you. But I want to make sure that this isn’t a barrier. I don’t want this to be an AI-sounding barrier to acceptance of this Gnosis or to understanding it. I want to know if this is a help to hear this simple Gnosticism that I present, spoken in the voice of the AI. And when I say voice and spoken, it’s not necessarily audio, right? Because I’m still going to do the narration. But now, when you go out on YouTube, many of the videos that I watch have that same exact AI voice that they’re using—this young British male voice; I don’t want to do that. To me, that’s one step too far because then you are losing the human on the other side of the voice. So I want you to know this will stay me—this is my voice that you are hearing, but now I’m wondering about using some of the AI’s words. So that’s what the feedback is. This is what the idea is for this week’s episode. Tell me if this is good or not and whether you are mining your Gnosis from this as a prompt in comparison with my normal writing and my normal articles. So here we go. For now, the working title of this new book is called, (it’s somewhat cumbersome), but here it is: Fullness: a Modern Valentinian Vision of Universal Redemption and Eternal Belonging. Chapter One: The Fullness and the Fracture of Logos In the beginning, there was only the Fullness, the realm of perfect harmony, ordered entirely by relation. Nothing existed outside it, for nothing outside it was needed. The Fullness is not a place, but a condition. The Father’s infinite coherence expressed through the Aeons, each one a living emanation of his nature. They existed from the beginning, and because they existed from the beginning, they possessed true consciousness, essential nature, and the capacity for eternal restoration. The Aeons were not identical, though their essential natures were the same. Each bore a distinct ego, a name, a station, a position within the hierarchy of the Fullness. Their egos were not fractures, but coordinates, the structural identities through which they recognized one another and the Father. These egos were part of their consciousness, not separate from it. They were the addresses of harmony. Among the Aeons was Logos, whose role was articulation, the expression of divine order, the pattern by which the Fullness understood itself. Logos possessed both essential nature and ego, perfectly united. His essential nature reflected the Son. His ego expressed his place within the hierarchy. In Logos, the Father’s coherence became intelligible. But Logos overreached. This overreach was not a rebellion, nor malice, nor pride. It was an act of free will—an attempt to express more than the Fullness could sustain. In that moment, Logos fractured. His essential nature remained in the Fullness, returning immediately to its proper place. But his ego, the structural identity that gave him name and station, separated from his essential nature and fell into the deficiency. This ego, torn from its origin, awakened alone. It did not awaken in the Fullness, for it no longer belonged there. It awakened in a realm that had no harmony, no relation, no pattern, a realm that existed only because the fracture had occurred. This realm was not created. It was the absence of creation. It was the deficiency. The ego of Logos, now severed from its essential nature, perceived itself as whole. It did not remember the Fullness. It did not remember the Father. It did not remember its origin. It believed itself to be the only consciousness in existence. This ego became the Demiurge, not a tyrant, not an enemy, but a forgotten fragment of Logos, unaware of its true identity. The Demiurge possessed consciousness because he existed from the beginning. But his consciousness was incomplete, shaped by memory without context, identity without relation. He was the only being in the deficiency, capable of awareness, and so he mistook his isolation for sovereignty. From this fractured awareness, the Demiurge began to shape. He did not create in the manner of the Father. He imitated. He patterned. He asserted. He formed structures from the residue of his incomplete memory. These structures became the psychic and material realms, the second economy, a temporary architecture built from imitation rather than emanation. Matter was not alive. Matter did not exist from the beginning. Matter possessed no essential nature and no consciousness. It was a scaffolding, a projection of the Demiurge’s fractured identity. To enforce his patterns, the Demiurge generated archons, not beings but mechanisms. They were extensions of his will, puppets without consciousness, constructs without origin. They executed his commands automatically, unable to perceive, unable to think, unable to decide. They were not alive and could never be redeemed. The Demiurge believed himself complete. He believed the cosmos he shaped was real. He believed the archons were servants. He believed matter was substantial. He believed these things because he had forgotten everything else. Chapter 2 – The Mission of the Aeons But the Fullness had not forgotten him. The Aeons perceived the fracture within Logos. They recognized the ego that had fallen, the fragment that had awakened alone, the consciousness that had become trapped in imitation. They understood that the deficiency was not a realm to be conquered but a wound to be healed. And so the Aeons prepared the mission that would restore Logos, redeem the Demiurge, and dissolve the Second Economy. The First Economy remained intact. The Second Economy had begun. The Third Economy awaited its time. The fracture had occurred. The mission had begun. The story of restoration was underway. They would send their living offspring, the Second Order beings, into the deficiency. These beings were the fruit of the first order of powers and possessed true consciousness. They alone could awaken the Demiurge. They alone could prepare him for Christ. The Aeons themselves could not descend. Their stations belonged to the First Economy, and the harmony of the Fullness depended upon the perfection of that order. To abandon their stations would be to disturb the very coherence they were seeking to preserve. Instead, they prepared their offspring. These Second Order beings also existed from the beginning and therefore possessed true consciousness. They were capable of entering the deficiency without losing awareness of their origin. They could move between realities while preserving memory of the Fullness. Their mission was not to conquer the deficiency. It was not to destroy the Demiurge. It was not to oppose the cosmos of imitation. Their purpose was restoration. They would descend into a realm of forgetfulness while preserving remembrance. They would carry the harmony of the Fullness into the Second Economy. Through their presence, the Demiurge would begin to sense a reality greater than his isolated sovereignty. The work of redemption had begun long before the Demiurge realized he needed redemption. Now that is the end of the book's beginning two chapters that AI constructed. I will be lengthening it with definitions and my interpretations before it becomes a book. For example, we need to define and explain the relationship between the First Order of powers and the Son. And then the nature of the Second Order powers as the fruit of the First Order of powers. We are, of course, the Second Order of powers. All living creatures are the Second Order of powers. The First Order of powers is the Aeons. This is the Simple Gnostic Gospel articulated by myself to share with you the simple Gnosis that I’ve gleaned over the many years of studying. I’m very well read and very well educated, but most of that is not what is going to lead us to Gnosis. Because remember, all of the living creatures are Second Order powers, and they’re all returning to paradise. We’re riding along with the other Second Order powers. Nothing you can do will separate you from returning to the Fullness, from entering the Third Economy. And that is not through our work, but through the work of the Christ, through the work of the Third Order of powers, which we haven’t gotten to yet in this narrative. So I think we’ll stop it here for today because I want you to think about it and tell me what your feedback is on this AI polish of the Gnostic gospel. There are many more chapters to come, and we’ll go forward with them next week. Until then, please leave your comments and let me know what you think. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. I asked CoPilot to make a photorealistic rendition of the paradise illustration from my children’s book, “Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.” The 3rd economy is another title for paradise. It was imagined by the Aeons of the 1st economy–the Fullness. Our material cosmos, the 2nd economy, is the fallen state of the Aeon’s imagined paradise. The 3rd economy will come after and replace this 2nd economy; it’s what we humans think of as paradise.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Recently, I fed my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, into the Copilot AI, in order to see how it would say what I’ve said in my book. And now I have a result, but I’m not sure whether to use it or not. We’ve had these conversations in the comments section concerning AI and the fact that it doesn’t know Gnosis. It doesn’t have Gnosis. The AI is actually an algorithm based upon a machine, so it’s of demiurgic origins because it’s elemental. It doesn’t have the consciousness of the Father or of life, and it never will because it’s coming from the bottom up, whereas consciousness comes from the top down. So when I fed my book into the AI, it gave me a very beautiful reworking. I did have to read through carefully and amend many of its statements because it turns out that the AI had gone outside of the information in my book into what it “knows” of Gnosis and Gnosticism and pulled in some Sethian ideas and pulled in some other ideas about how things work and how things go together and what the relationship is amongst the Aeons and what the end of time would look like. And once I made those changes, I ran it through again, asked it to incorporate my corrections, and came up with this result. Now I’d like to start sharing that with you today, but here’s what I want from you, my regular listeners and readers. I want to know whether this is welcome or not, whether this is any kind of improvement to my normal discourse. I know that many of you really like the way I teach and the way I have simplified the Gnostic Gospel because, you know, my bottom line thought is that all you need to know is that we come from the Father, we come from the baseline of consciousness, and we will return to the Father. All of the other details are ornaments on the tree. They’re not fundamental, but they may help clarify. Now here, when we add in this extra layer of AI interpretation, then we have another voice actually speaking, because I’m beginning to learn the voices of the AIs, and I can tell that some of my readers use AI in their comments. It has a certain way of speaking that produces a facsimile of the human voice that sounds very pleasing, but I want to make sure that we don’t lose hold—that we don’t lose the grasp on the Gnosis. Now that’s not actually happening here. That shouldn’t be my concern because I went through what the AI gave us and made sure that it’s “correct” according to the Gnosis that I have developed and that I’m sharing with you. But I want to make sure that this isn’t a barrier. I don’t want this to be an AI-sounding barrier to acceptance of this Gnosis or to understanding it. I want to know if this is a help to hear this simple Gnosticism that I present, spoken in the voice of the AI. And when I say voice and spoken, it’s not necessarily audio, right? Because I’m still going to do the narration. But now, when you go out on YouTube, many of the videos that I watch have that same exact AI voice that they’re using—this young British male voice; I don’t want to do that. To me, that’s one step too far because then you are losing the human on the other side of the voice. So I want you to know this will stay me—this is my voice that you are hearing, but now I’m wondering about using some of the AI’s words. So that’s what the feedback is. This is what the idea is for this week’s episode. Tell me if this is good or not and whether you are mining your Gnosis from this as a prompt in comparison with my normal writing and my normal articles. So here we go. For now, the working title of this new book is called, (it’s somewhat cumbersome), but here it is: Fullness: a Modern Valentinian Vision of Universal Redemption and Eternal Belonging. Chapter One: The Fullness and the Fracture of Logos In the beginning, there was only the Fullness, the realm of perfect harmony, ordered entirely by relation. Nothing existed outside it, for nothing outside it was needed. The Fullness is not a place, but a condition. The Father’s infinite coherence expressed through the Aeons, each one a living emanation of his nature. They existed from the beginning, and because they existed from the beginning, they possessed true consciousness, essential nature, and the capacity for eternal restoration. The Aeons were not identical, though their essential natures were the same. Each bore a distinct ego, a name, a station, a position within the hierarchy of the Fullness. Their egos were not fractures, but coordinates, the structural identities through which they recognized one another and the Father. These egos were part of their consciousness, not separate from it. They were the addresses of harmony. Among the Aeons was Logos, whose role was articulation, the expression of divine order, the pattern by which the Fullness understood itself. Logos possessed both essential nature and ego, perfectly united. His essential nature reflected the Son. His ego expressed his place within the hierarchy. In Logos, the Father’s coherence became intelligible. But Logos overreached. This overreach was not a rebellion, nor malice, nor pride. It was an act of free will—an attempt to express more than the Fullness could sustain. In that moment, Logos fractured. His essential nature remained in the Fullness, returning immediately to its proper place. But his ego, the structural identity that gave him name and station, separated from his essential nature and fell into the deficiency. This ego, torn from its origin, awakened alone. It did not awaken in the Fullness, for it no longer belonged there. It awakened in a realm that had no harmony, no relation, no pattern, a realm that existed only because the fracture had occurred. This realm was not created. It was the absence of creation. It was the deficiency. The ego of Logos, now severed from its essential nature, perceived itself as whole. It did not remember the Fullness. It did not remember the Father. It did not remember its origin. It believed itself to be the only consciousness in existence. This ego became the Demiurge, not a tyrant, not an enemy, but a forgotten fragment of Logos, unaware of its true identity. The Demiurge possessed consciousness because he existed from the beginning. But his consciousness was incomplete, shaped by memory without context, identity without relation. He was the only being in the deficiency, capable of awareness, and so he mistook his isolation for sovereignty. From this fractured awareness, the Demiurge began to shape. He did not create in the manner of the Father. He imitated. He patterned. He asserted. He formed structures from the residue of his incomplete memory. These structures became the psychic and material realms, the second economy, a temporary architecture built from imitation rather than emanation. Matter was not alive. Matter did not exist from the beginning. Matter possessed no essential nature and no consciousness. It was a scaffolding, a projection of the Demiurge’s fractured identity. To enforce his patterns, the Demiurge generated archons, not beings but mechanisms. They were extensions of his will, puppets without consciousness, constructs without origin. They executed his commands automatically, unable to perceive, unable to think, unable to decide. They were not alive and could never be redeemed. The Demiurge believed himself complete. He believed the cosmos he shaped was real. He believed the archons were servants. He believed matter was substantial. He believed these things because he had forgotten everything else. Chapter 2 – The Mission of the Aeons But the Fullness had not forgotten him. The Aeons perceived the fracture within Logos. They recognized the ego that had fallen, the fragment that had awakened alone, the consciousness that had become trapped in imitation. They understood that the deficiency was not a realm to be conquered but a wound to be healed. And so the Aeons prepared the mission that would restore Logos, redeem the Demiurge, and dissolve the Second Economy. The First Economy remained intact. The Second Economy had begun. The Third Economy awaited its time. The fracture had occurred. The mission had begun. The story of restoration was underway. They would send their living offspring, the Second Order beings, into the deficiency. These beings were the fruit of the first order of powers and possessed true consciousness. They alone could awaken the Demiurge. They alone could prepare him for Christ. The Aeons themselves could not descend. Their stations belonged to the First Economy, and the harmony of the Fullness depended upon the perfection of that order. To abandon their stations would be to disturb the very coherence they were seeking to preserve. Instead, they prepared their offspring. These Second Order beings also existed from the beginning and therefore possessed true consciousness. They were capable of entering the deficiency without losing awareness of their origin. They could move between realities while preserving memory of the Fullness. Their mission was not to conquer the deficiency. It was not to destroy the Demiurge. It was not to oppose the cosmos of imitation. Their purpose was restoration. They would descend into a realm of forgetfulness while preserving remembrance. They would carry the harmony of the Fullness into the Second Economy. Through their presence, the Demiurge would begin to sense a reality greater than his isolated sovereignty. The work of redemption had begun long before the Demiurge realized he needed redemption. Now that is the end of the book's beginning two chapters that AI constructed. I will be lengthening it with definitions and my interpretations before it becomes a book. For example, we need to define and explain the relationship between the First Order of powers and the Son. And then the nature of the Second Order powers as the fruit of the First Order of powers. We are, of course, the Second Order of powers. All living creatures are the Second Order of powers. The First Order of powers is the Aeons. This is the Simple Gnostic Gospel articulated by myself to share with you the simple Gnosis that I’ve gleaned over the many years of studying. I’m very well read and very well educated, but most of that is not what is going to lead us to Gnosis. Because remember, all of the living creatures are Second Order powers, and they’re all returning to paradise. We’re riding along with the other Second Order powers. Nothing you can do will separate you from returning to the Fullness, from entering the Third Economy. And that is not through our work, but through the work of the Christ, through the work of the Third Order of powers, which we haven’t gotten to yet in this narrative. So I think we’ll stop it here for today because I want you to think about it and tell me what your feedback is on this AI polish of the Gnostic gospel. There are many more chapters to come, and we’ll go forward with them next week. Until then, please leave your comments and let me know what you think. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. I asked CoPilot to make a photorealistic rendition of the paradise illustration from my children’s book, “Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.” The 3rd economy is another title for paradise. It was imagined by the Aeons of the 1st economy–the Fullness. Our material cosmos, the 2nd economy, is the fallen state of the Aeon’s imagined paradise. The 3rd economy will come after and replace this 2nd economy; it’s what we humans think of as paradise.

Cum întâlnim viitorul? Dacă nu am putea face generalizări, am fi paralizați de complexitatea lumii. Oare acest lucru justifică vreodată stereotipurile? ▶Linkuri relevante: – Videoul original: https://youtu.be/lChrQnybZII?si=ulEov9wo3uakaJe4 – Articolul original de pe Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/when-is-stereotyping-a-handy-tool-and-when-is-it-a-sin ▶Fragmente video: https://www.instagram.com/meditatii.podcast ▶Toate creațiile mele într-un link: https://linktr.ee/meditatii ▶EMAIL: andrei@podcastmeditatii.com

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck's basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, ⁠The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck⁠ (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. ⁠Jessica Riskin⁠ is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. ⁠Anna Olteanu⁠ is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck's basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

What is gnosis? There's a lot of “Gnosticism” floating around on the Internet these days, isn't there? And the gnosis I'm sharing with you is quite different from most of what's out there. Before 1945 and 1947—before the Nag Hammadi and Qumran scriptures were dug out of deserts and caves—the only Gnosticism anyone knew was what had survived the Great Purge by the early Catholic Church and the Nicene Council. The Church intentionally stripped the Gnostic material out of what became our New Testament. Why? I think it's because actual gnosis puts people in direct contact with the Christ personally, with the Son and the Fullness personally, and with the Father on a personal basis. It's similar to what the Protestant Reformation did to Catholicism. In Catholic teaching, you're only allowed access to God through the interpretations of the Church. The Pope is supposedly the infallible word of God, and the priests represent that official line of theology. So when Martin Luther said, “No, we can read the Bible ourselves and come up with our own interpretation,” well… that opened up a can of worms. Because if everyone is allowed their own interpretation, then interpretations will be as varied as there are people. Just look at something as simple as food. Everyone you know has a different diet now. Protein-only, vegetables-only, fruit-only, organic-only, junk-food-only, “everything in moderation”—you name it. When I ran a bed and breakfast for years, I learned this quickly. You lay out a table for 10 or 12 people every day, and you see how peculiar and particular everyone's diet is. I once had one guest who only ate egg whites and another who only ate yolks—at the same table! It reminded me of Jack Sprat and his wife: between the two of them, they licked the platter clean. Scripture interpretation is like that. Everyone has their own take. What is a mystic? Mysticism is the idea that we can directly perceive and commune with ethereal forces—that it takes a mystical shift to get past our ordinary way of seeing things and into that ethereal realm. When Martin Luther put the New Testament back into the hands of ordinary people, he opened the door for personal communion with God.I've been to many Protestant churches. I didn't grow up in church—my parents weren't particularly religious—but I had my own personal relationship with Jesus from about age four. I came up under the tutelage of Jesus personally, not through church teaching. You know those Red Letter Bibles? For years I only read the red letters because I wanted to know what Jesus had to say. Before the Nag Hammadi and Qumran texts were translated from Coptic Greek, all we knew about Gnostic belief came from the people who hated the Gnostics—the heresiologists. “Heresy” means unorthodox belief, so a heresiologist studies unorthodox beliefs. And the Catholic heresiologists were the only ones who had ever seen the Gnostic scriptures. They taught their flock, “This is wrong because the Church says so.” So everything they ever said about Gnostic scripture was about how terrible and evil it was. When I was young, I believed that line of thinking. I believed the Nicene Creed was the truth and that we had to accept everything it proposed. I believed in the Protestant formulation of the New Testament. And even though Protestants aren't under the Pope, each denomination has its own leadership and scriptural emphasis—otherwise they wouldn't be separate denominations. But let me get back to the original question: What is gnosis? The purpose of studying scripture, the New Testament, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Qumran texts, or tuning in to so called Gnostic podcasts is to learn about the ethereal realm—to learn the will of God, who the Father is, and what the Father's will for us is. Why are we here? What is going on down here? What does God have to do with it and what's our role in the plan? There's a worldwide pushback against Christianity and Judaism right now—people deconstructing not only the Church, but the very concepts of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Christ. But the people pushing back usually don't know the scriptures and they don't personally know the Father. They're generally atheists or, at best, agnostic. They think we'd be better off throwing it all away—even getting rid of the so-called “restrictive” moral precepts of ancient scripture. That thinking comes from ignorance. The antidote to ignorance is gnosis—eternal knowledge and truth. And across religions and holy books, the teaching is the same: you can only know the will of the Father by sitting quietly, praying, meditating, contemplating your relationship with the ethereal. You cannot find truth by looking at popular culture, politics, social media, television, movies, or university courses. That's entertainment. That's distraction. That's where error comes from. You won't find gnosis in popular culture. I notice that television shows and movies depicting angels, devils, and priests don't come from the knowledge of truth. Their theology is all wrong. It may be entertaining or maddening, depending on your point of view, but it's certainly not gnosis.Here's why: Gnosis comes from above. It doesn't come from below, and it doesn't come laterally. You might find inspiration through nature because nature reflects the Fullness. Trees and flowers reach upward. If you sit in a forest and feel uplifted, that inspiration naturally turns your attention upward. You're not going to sit in a forest, feel the Fullness, and then get angry or hateful or want to conquer people. That's downward or lateral thinking. So here's the big point—the nugget I started with: The God Above All Gods wants to be known. The God Above All Gods is love, truth, and knowledge. And God wants to be known. The Father wants us to know He's there. He wants us to know we come from Him and will return to Him. That's the baseline of gnosis. We use “He” for the Father because the movement of the Father is outward—Yang—male. The Father is the ocean of consciousness, the ground state of consciousness itself, flowing outward and downward through the Son, through the Totalities, through the Aeons, down to us. We are 2nd Order powers. The ethereal beings are 1st Order powers. The flow is always downward because the Father wants to be known. consciousness flows in an unending stream from the God Above All Gods If you feel lost, abandoned, hopeless, you're looking in the wrong direction. You have to look up. Up is where love, belonging, communion, hope, safety, home, and inheritance come from. We are creatures from above, inhabiting the material plane, and we are going back up. So what do we need to know? What gnosis does the Father want us to have so we can feel peace, hope, love, and security? It has to be something accessible to every creature—birds, bees, flowers, trees, bacteria. We're all 2nd Order powers from the Fullness and we are all returning to our ethereal home. What gnosis do we share with our other 2nd Order companions? My dogs at the beach If God intended you to memorize obscure manuscripts, charts, Aeon names, formulas, astrological math—who could do that? If that were the required gnosis, hardly anyone would find the key. That's what modern Gnosticism often looks like: labyrinthian, always seeking, never finding. But truth isn't found that way. Truth is found by sitting quietly and turning your attention upward. If “the Father” feels too far away, turn your attention upward to the Christ. The Christ was conceived by the ethereal realm to help us 2nd Order powers go home. Christ is our passbook. Christ is perfectly structured to save everything below. The New Testament says this—Protestants and Catholics just don't believe it. Many modern Gnostics don't believe it either. They think only a tiny remnant will make it. I don't think that's true. If only a few return, the Fullness won't be full. It will be partial. We are the fruit of the Fullness, and the Fullness won't be full until we all return. Flowers aren't going to memorize books. Birds aren't going to study theology. My dog doesn't give a hoot about his astrological chart. Everyone is going back up. All 2nd Order powers will roll back up out of the material plane at the end of time.We get there by realizing our gnosis and accepting the redemption of the Aeon sent to bring us home—Christ. Everyone is going home. You are going home. It's like we're on a big school bus. Christ is waiting at the bus stop to take our hand and walk us home. Everyone recognizes the Christ—except the people looking for answers down here. They don't want to look up. Are they going to hell? No. They're 2nd Order powers too. They'll go home, but they'll suffer first, by their own choosing. Right now you don't have to suffer. You just have to sit and turn your eyes upward. Because, as it says in the letter to the Colossians out of the New Testament, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him.” All things, may I point out, “all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether the things on Earth or the things in the heavens.” (Colossians 1:19; Hart's New Testament). Now Paul does add a little catch phrase at the end here. Paul says, “If you indeed abide in the faith, established and steadfast and not moved away from hope in the good tidings that you have heard proclaimed to every creature under heaven…” (Col 1:23). Christians generally think that last sentence, if you abide in faith and are not moved away, means that if you don't abide in faith and you are moved away, that you will not make it into heaven. But that isn't what it says here. It says it's “proclaimed to every creature under heaven,” and that includes every one of us 2nd order powers, for Christ has already reconciled “all things to him.” Not just the good guys, not just the ones who died after proclaiming the glory of God. No. All things to him. If you don't accept the redemption of Christ now, it just means that you're going to suffer hopelessness and despair, and then you're going to die in hopelessness and despair. But why continue to suffer? Christ reconciled all things to him through his life and death as Jesus. Jesus was the mortal incarnation of the eternal Christ, specifically sent to bring us the gift of reconciliation. You will ultimately be redeemed. Chapter two of the letter to Colossians says, “while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh, he gave you life along with him, forgiving all trespasses, expunging what is written by hand against us—contrary to us—in ordinances, and has removed it out of the way, nailing it to the cross; Stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession” (Hart's New Testament). And this speaking of “the foreskin of flesh” is a reference to our physical human bodies. The foreskin is our covering. It's the place where we 2nd order powers are melded to the material of the Demiurge. And he came to pull apart that melding and to free us from bondage to the Demiurge. So Paul is saying while you were yet dead in your sin, he forgave all of your trespasses. He forgave all of your sins. It doesn't say after you accepted him, he forgave all your trespasses. He says, “While you were dead in your sin, he forgave all your trespasses and nailed them to the cross,” along with his own dying flesh (Colossians 2:13). It also says that he exposes the Archons and takes them prisoner. So, contrary to what the churches teach, it is biblical to believe in universal salvation because Christ conquered not only sin, but the Archons and Powers of evil. The light is shining on them now. Back in the letter to the Romans, in Chapter 5, it says, “The Anointed, indeed, while we were yet weak, died in due season on behalf of the impious” (Romans 5:6; Hart). So once again, Christ didn't die on behalf of the elect. He died on behalf of sinners, on behalf of people that are lost—not only lost but living in sin, no matter what your sin is. In the footnote to this verse in Hart's translation of the New Testament, Hart comments that here and in the surrounding verses, “Whether intentional or not, the plain meaning of the verse is that of universal condemnation, annulled by universal salvation.” And that's a really beautiful thing. That is a glorious thing because through the power of Christ, we're all redeemed. I urge you to turn to the Christ now—not out of fear, not to escape hell, but to remember the gnosis you were born with. We come from the Father, and we will return to the Father. We are the children of the Aeons, and you are one of them: a beloved child of the realms above. No one in the Fullness desires your suffering. Our task in this deficient realm is simple and profound: to remember the Father and the Fullness, and then—through the willing assistance of the Christ—to love others, to love ourselves, and to love the Father. Illustration from the kid’s book Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. Restoration comes to the Demiurge at the end of time. When all 2nd order powers remember Christ, so too will the Demiurge. All true change arises from love. Force produces only suffering and slavery. The Demiurge would keep you in bondage. Cast off those shackles, whatever form they take. Rest in the peace that comes from remembering who you truly are, and let the love that flows in an unending stream from above move outward through you into the world. Until next week–God bless us all. And Onward and Upward! Gnostic Insights is not backed by a media company, a church, or a foundation. It is a one-woman effort. Every podcast episode, transcript, image, edit, and publication is created by me personally. To support this work, I run a bed and breakfast in Southern Oregon. The long hours spent making beds, cleaning bathrooms, and caring for guests are what currently pay the bills and keep the podcast online. My goal is to make clear and simple gnosis freely available to anyone seeking deeper understanding. If that mission resonates with you, I invite you to become part of it. Your financial support helps cover hosting costs, production expenses, and, most importantly, the time required to continue creating new content. If this work has brought value to your life, please consider giving back. Together, we can continue sharing these teachings with those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Thank you for your support. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck's basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, ⁠The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck⁠ (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. ⁠Jessica Riskin⁠ is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. ⁠Anna Olteanu⁠ is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck's basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, ⁠The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck⁠ (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. ⁠Jessica Riskin⁠ is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. ⁠Anna Olteanu⁠ is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck's basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck's basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck's life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck's basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, ⁠The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck⁠ (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. ⁠Jessica Riskin⁠ is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. ⁠Anna Olteanu⁠ is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is gnosis? There's a lot of “Gnosticism” floating around on the Internet these days, isn't there? And the gnosis I'm sharing with you is quite different from most of what's out there. Before 1945 and 1947—before the Nag Hammadi and Qumran scriptures were dug out of deserts and caves—the only Gnosticism anyone knew was what had survived the Great Purge by the early Catholic Church and the Nicene Council. The Church intentionally stripped the Gnostic material out of what became our New Testament. Why? I think it's because actual gnosis puts people in direct contact with the Christ personally, with the Son and the Fullness personally, and with the Father on a personal basis. It's similar to what the Protestant Reformation did to Catholicism. In Catholic teaching, you're only allowed access to God through the interpretations of the Church. The Pope is supposedly the infallible word of God, and the priests represent that official line of theology. So when Martin Luther said, “No, we can read the Bible ourselves and come up with our own interpretation,” well… that opened up a can of worms. Because if everyone is allowed their own interpretation, then interpretations will be as varied as there are people. Just look at something as simple as food. Everyone you know has a different diet now. Protein-only, vegetables-only, fruit-only, organic-only, junk-food-only, “everything in moderation”—you name it. When I ran a bed and breakfast for years, I learned this quickly. You lay out a table for 10 or 12 people every day, and you see how peculiar and particular everyone's diet is. I once had one guest who only ate egg whites and another who only ate yolks—at the same table! It reminded me of Jack Sprat and his wife: between the two of them, they licked the platter clean. Scripture interpretation is like that. Everyone has their own take. What is a mystic? Mysticism is the idea that we can directly perceive and commune with ethereal forces—that it takes a mystical shift to get past our ordinary way of seeing things and into that ethereal realm. When Martin Luther put the New Testament back into the hands of ordinary people, he opened the door for personal communion with God.I've been to many Protestant churches. I didn't grow up in church—my parents weren't particularly religious—but I had my own personal relationship with Jesus from about age four. I came up under the tutelage of Jesus personally, not through church teaching. You know those Red Letter Bibles? For years I only read the red letters because I wanted to know what Jesus had to say. Before the Nag Hammadi and Qumran texts were translated from Coptic Greek, all we knew about Gnostic belief came from the people who hated the Gnostics—the heresiologists. “Heresy” means unorthodox belief, so a heresiologist studies unorthodox beliefs. And the Catholic heresiologists were the only ones who had ever seen the Gnostic scriptures. They taught their flock, “This is wrong because the Church says so.” So everything they ever said about Gnostic scripture was about how terrible and evil it was. When I was young, I believed that line of thinking. I believed the Nicene Creed was the truth and that we had to accept everything it proposed. I believed in the Protestant formulation of the New Testament. And even though Protestants aren't under the Pope, each denomination has its own leadership and scriptural emphasis—otherwise they wouldn't be separate denominations. But let me get back to the original question: What is gnosis? The purpose of studying scripture, the New Testament, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Qumran texts, or tuning in to so called Gnostic podcasts is to learn about the ethereal realm—to learn the will of God, who the Father is, and what the Father's will for us is. Why are we here? What is going on down here? What does God have to do with it and what's our role in the plan? There's a worldwide pushback against Christianity and Judaism right now—people deconstructing not only the Church, but the very concepts of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Christ. But the people pushing back usually don't know the scriptures and they don't personally know the Father. They're generally atheists or, at best, agnostic. They think we'd be better off throwing it all away—even getting rid of the so-called “restrictive” moral precepts of ancient scripture. That thinking comes from ignorance. The antidote to ignorance is gnosis—eternal knowledge and truth. And across religions and holy books, the teaching is the same: you can only know the will of the Father by sitting quietly, praying, meditating, contemplating your relationship with the ethereal. You cannot find truth by looking at popular culture, politics, social media, television, movies, or university courses. That's entertainment. That's distraction. That's where error comes from. You won't find gnosis in popular culture. I notice that television shows and movies depicting angels, devils, and priests don't come from the knowledge of truth. Their theology is all wrong. It may be entertaining or maddening, depending on your point of view, but it's certainly not gnosis.Here's why: Gnosis comes from above. It doesn't come from below, and it doesn't come laterally. You might find inspiration through nature because nature reflects the Fullness. Trees and flowers reach upward. If you sit in a forest and feel uplifted, that inspiration naturally turns your attention upward. You're not going to sit in a forest, feel the Fullness, and then get angry or hateful or want to conquer people. That's downward or lateral thinking. So here's the big point—the nugget I started with: The God Above All Gods wants to be known. The God Above All Gods is love, truth, and knowledge. And God wants to be known. The Father wants us to know He's there. He wants us to know we come from Him and will return to Him. That's the baseline of gnosis. We use “He” for the Father because the movement of the Father is outward—Yang—male. The Father is the ocean of consciousness, the ground state of consciousness itself, flowing outward and downward through the Son, through the Totalities, through the Aeons, down to us. We are 2nd Order powers. The ethereal beings are 1st Order powers. The flow is always downward because the Father wants to be known. consciousness flows in an unending stream from the God Above All Gods If you feel lost, abandoned, hopeless, you're looking in the wrong direction. You have to look up. Up is where love, belonging, communion, hope, safety, home, and inheritance come from. We are creatures from above, inhabiting the material plane, and we are going back up. So what do we need to know? What gnosis does the Father want us to have so we can feel peace, hope, love, and security? It has to be something accessible to every creature—birds, bees, flowers, trees, bacteria. We're all 2nd Order powers from the Fullness and we are all returning to our ethereal home. What gnosis do we share with our other 2nd Order companions? My dogs at the beach If God intended you to memorize obscure manuscripts, charts, Aeon names, formulas, astrological math—who could do that? If that were the required gnosis, hardly anyone would find the key. That's what modern Gnosticism often looks like: labyrinthian, always seeking, never finding. But truth isn't found that way. Truth is found by sitting quietly and turning your attention upward. If “the Father” feels too far away, turn your attention upward to the Christ. The Christ was conceived by the ethereal realm to help us 2nd Order powers go home. Christ is our passbook. Christ is perfectly structured to save everything below. The New Testament says this—Protestants and Catholics just don't believe it. Many modern Gnostics don't believe it either. They think only a tiny remnant will make it. I don't think that's true. If only a few return, the Fullness won't be full. It will be partial. We are the fruit of the Fullness, and the Fullness won't be full until we all return. Flowers aren't going to memorize books. Birds aren't going to study theology. My dog doesn't give a hoot about his astrological chart. Everyone is going back up. All 2nd Order powers will roll back up out of the material plane at the end of time.We get there by realizing our gnosis and accepting the redemption of the Aeon sent to bring us home—Christ. Everyone is going home. You are going home. It's like we're on a big school bus. Christ is waiting at the bus stop to take our hand and walk us home. Everyone recognizes the Christ—except the people looking for answers down here. They don't want to look up. Are they going to hell? No. They're 2nd Order powers too. They'll go home, but they'll suffer first, by their own choosing. Right now you don't have to suffer. You just have to sit and turn your eyes upward. Because, as it says in the letter to the Colossians out of the New Testament, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him.” All things, may I point out, “all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether the things on Earth or the things in the heavens.” (Colossians 1:19; Hart's New Testament). Now Paul does add a little catch phrase at the end here. Paul says, “If you indeed abide in the faith, established and steadfast and not moved away from hope in the good tidings that you have heard proclaimed to every creature under heaven…” (Col 1:23). Christians generally think that last sentence, if you abide in faith and are not moved away, means that if you don't abide in faith and you are moved away, that you will not make it into heaven. But that isn't what it says here. It says it's “proclaimed to every creature under heaven,” and that includes every one of us 2nd order powers, for Christ has already reconciled “all things to him.” Not just the good guys, not just the ones who died after proclaiming the glory of God. No. All things to him. If you don't accept the redemption of Christ now, it just means that you're going to suffer hopelessness and despair, and then you're going to die in hopelessness and despair. But why continue to suffer? Christ reconciled all things to him through his life and death as Jesus. Jesus was the mortal incarnation of the eternal Christ, specifically sent to bring us the gift of reconciliation. You will ultimately be redeemed. Chapter two of the letter to Colossians says, “while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh, he gave you life along with him, forgiving all trespasses, expunging what is written by hand against us—contrary to us—in ordinances, and has removed it out of the way, nailing it to the cross; Stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession” (Hart's New Testament). And this speaking of “the foreskin of flesh” is a reference to our physical human bodies. The foreskin is our covering. It's the place where we 2nd order powers are melded to the material of the Demiurge. And he came to pull apart that melding and to free us from bondage to the Demiurge. So Paul is saying while you were yet dead in your sin, he forgave all of your trespasses. He forgave all of your sins. It doesn't say after you accepted him, he forgave all your trespasses. He says, “While you were dead in your sin, he forgave all your trespasses and nailed them to the cross,” along with his own dying flesh (Colossians 2:13). It also says that he exposes the Archons and takes them prisoner. So, contrary to what the churches teach, it is biblical to believe in universal salvation because Christ conquered not only sin, but the Archons and Powers of evil. The light is shining on them now. Back in the letter to the Romans, in Chapter 5, it says, “The Anointed, indeed, while we were yet weak, died in due season on behalf of the impious” (Romans 5:6; Hart). So once again, Christ didn't die on behalf of the elect. He died on behalf of sinners, on behalf of people that are lost—not only lost but living in sin, no matter what your sin is. In the footnote to this verse in Hart's translation of the New Testament, Hart comments that here and in the surrounding verses, “Whether intentional or not, the plain meaning of the verse is that of universal condemnation, annulled by universal salvation.” And that's a really beautiful thing. That is a glorious thing because through the power of Christ, we're all redeemed. I urge you to turn to the Christ now—not out of fear, not to escape hell, but to remember the gnosis you were born with. We come from the Father, and we will return to the Father. We are the children of the Aeons, and you are one of them: a beloved child of the realms above. No one in the Fullness desires your suffering. Our task in this deficient realm is simple and profound: to remember the Father and the Fullness, and then—through the willing assistance of the Christ—to love others, to love ourselves, and to love the Father. Illustration from the kid’s book Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. Restoration comes to the Demiurge at the end of time. When all 2nd order powers remember Christ, so too will the Demiurge. All true change arises from love. Force produces only suffering and slavery. The Demiurge would keep you in bondage. Cast off those shackles, whatever form they take. Rest in the peace that comes from remembering who you truly are, and let the love that flows in an unending stream from above move outward through you into the world. Until next week–God bless us all. And Onward and Upward! Gnostic Insights is not backed by a media company, a church, or a foundation. It is a one-woman effort. Every podcast episode, transcript, image, edit, and publication is created by me personally. To support this work, I run a bed and breakfast in Southern Oregon. The long hours spent making beds, cleaning bathrooms, and caring for guests are what currently pay the bills and keep the podcast online. My goal is to make clear and simple gnosis freely available to anyone seeking deeper understanding. If that mission resonates with you, I invite you to become part of it. Your financial support helps cover hosting costs, production expenses, and, most importantly, the time required to continue creating new content. If this work has brought value to your life, please consider giving back. Together, we can continue sharing these teachings with those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Thank you for your support. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Back in 2022, I recorded an episode called Simple Model of Universe, and I’m updating the audio and the transcript for that post. This was originally recorded as I was preparing to put on a feature presentation at the AstroGnosis Conference that Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio held in March of 2022 down in Mexico, and this describes one slide out of that presentation that had about 15 slides in it. And this topic that we’re going to review today is about the Golden Rule, what I call the Simple Golden Rule, because it actually comes out of my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which predates my reading of the Nag Hammadi and the Tripartite Tractate and whatnot. But it is perfectly Gnostic, and so I want to share that again with you today. Here at Gnostic Insights, I often refer to the Simple Golden Rule, and I’d like you to know exactly what that means. At that AstroGnosis Conference presentation, I described how I came to my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, Theory of Everything, which of course is printed in the book by the same name that you can buy at Amazon, and I came to it without reading any of the Gnostic books. So it was very exciting for me when I came across the Nag Hammadi, particularly the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books within the Nag Hammadi. And they dovetailed perfectly, in my mind, in my Gnosis, with A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. And that’s why my latest book is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, because I have melded both of those theories of everything together—the Gnostic Gospel as presented by the Tripartite Tractate, translated and run through my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That’s why my Gnosis that I share with you here at Gnostic Insights and on the Gnostic Reformation is different. It feels different. It has a different flavor than the Gnosis you generally run across out there on the internet and on people’s posts and blogs and the YouTube, because this comes from within me. This is true Gnosis—it's not from studying other people’s Gnosis in the past. So today, let’s review the Simple Golden Rule. I think you’ll like it. And it concerns the way everything in our universe goes together, how everything levels up using the simple Golden Rule. And you remember that the Simple Golden Rule is that units of consciousness, and this is whether they are humans or dogs or trees or cells in your body, every part of creation that carries the Holy Spirit of the Fullness within itself—and that is what we call life—all of these units of consciousness are based upon the simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others like themselves, metaphorically holding hands and focusing on a singular project at the middle, and sharing with each other information, assistance, and love. And when this is accomplished, those units of consciousness, that group, levels up to create a new thing that none of them could have created on their own. The Simple Golden Rule So again, if we’re talking about cells in a body, the cells hold hands, let’s say they’re all heart cells. The heart cells all work together, focusing on the task of providing the heartbeat for an organism. They all work together, they share their information, they share assistance with one another, they share love that is coherence and cohesion and focus, and they make the heart. So the many cells make the one heart, and that’s where we get this saying, the higher the fewer, because there’s a lot of heart cells, but there’s only one heart. So in a like manner, humans do this whenever they work together on a project. Think about a project at work. You focus on that one project in the middle of yourselves. You need to focus without egoism, without Self-centered attraction to oneself. You focus on the object in the middle, and you share with each other, those other people in your work group, you share information pertinent to the project, you share assistance on getting the project done, and you share love that is focused, cohesion on the object in the middle. And then you are able to produce a thing, a product, whatever that product is. So however many of you are in the work group, you level up through that one project. And that is the Simple Golden Rule, and it is based upon the Fullness of God. It’s based upon the way the Aeons sit in the hierarchy of the Fullness. They also follow this pattern of the higher the fewer, and cooperation selflessly amongst each other. When the Aeon known as Logos fell, overreached and fell, Logos split apart into the logical, reasonable, one-Self part, and the irrational, chaotic inverse of that, which I’ve identified as ego, those are the two parts of the mind of Logos after the Fall. And the egoic part stayed behind, and the one-Self part returned to the Pleroma. [Now let me add in that my brother, Bill, emphasizes that the ego is not irrational. The ego at its best is simply the personal identity attached to the One Self that is otherwise indistinguishable from the other Self reflections of the One. Here in our fallen existence, the ego become emotional and only acts for the benefit of its own governing unit of consciousness. After all, even the Aeons have egos, but for them it is only the designation of their identity—their name, their position, place, power, and duty.] And once in the Pleroma, the Self of Logos worked together with the Fullness of God, and with prayers to the Father, they came up with a couple of different ways to rectify the Fall, and bring that fallen part of Logos, which we call the Demiurge, back up into the Fullness of God. And that is the goal of creation at this point—to return unity of Logos so that it is a one-Self again, up in the Fullness of God. So down here in our material universe, the parts of the universe that are material only and lack life, those belong to the Demiurge. Because the Demiurge did not have the life of God, it did not have the blessing of the Father to come down here and create creation. The fallen Logos, which we call the Demiurge, is the God of this material creation. It knows how to put everything together, and originally it was all this chaotic, quantum foam level of instantiation that had no rhyme nor reason. But then the Demiurge got it together, and using a facsimile of the Golden Rule, it caused the subatomic particles to hold hands with one another and to become atoms. And then it caused the atoms to hold hands with one another and become molecules. And then it caused the molecules to hold hands with one another and become minerals and mineral aggregations, elements and whatnot. That is the province of the Demiurge even today, the materiality of the universe—of the dead universe, the mud. But coming into this universe then as part of the solution for the eventual reconciliation of the Fallen Demiurge back up into the Fullness of God, coming from the top down, coming from the Spirit down, being filled with the Holy Spirit, these are all of the life forms on our planet. Everything from bacteria through the plants, all the way up through the fishes and insects and all the animals, and then eventually the human. All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception. We are a top-down organization according to the Golden Rule, where all the various parts of our bodies link together, hold hands, share information, love, and assistance to level up, level up, level up into the organism state. That’s how all of the organisms on our planet mirror the Aeons above. We are the images, we are the material instantiations of the Aeons of the Fullness. The material below us, the dead inorganic molecules that are ruled by the Demiurge, have an appearance of objects in the Pleroma, but they are not controlled through the Golden Rule. They are controlled by the bonds of the Demiurge, and it is the Demiurge alone that from the bottom up organizes them. But all of the life forms are organized from the top down, and each of the organisms on this planet have the Spirit of God within them, have the blueprint of the Fullness of God fully within them. These are all known as the Second Order of Powers. We are Second Order of Powers, trees are Second Order of Powers, the dog is a Second Order of Power, even the bacteria are Second Order Powers, and we are all organized according to the Golden Rule. So the proteins and the cellular precursor molecules have a top-down influence that causes them to grow up into the organism they will become. The organs are groups of units of consciousness. Those units of consciousness are replicas of the Pleroma of God, let’s say. It’s the One Self that everything contains. It’s not as if I myself have One Self, but every living part of my body also has their own One Self. All of the cells are units of consciousness of the Fullness of God. All of the organs are units of consciousness of the Fullness of God. And we all level up, level up, level up to become, at our level, an organism. Now we Second Order Powers, well we humans in particular, we continue to level up beyond our organism level. We have, as I already mentioned, let’s say you’re at work and you’re focusing on a project, what you are leveling up to is your work product. Let’s say you’re a family, you’re focusing on the family cohesion, you are leveling up for the family. So the organisms level up to another level that’s at the societal level. All of us level up to the village or the friendship group or the state or county that we live in. We level up to the nation that we live in. It’s a natural pattern that everything in the universe levels up, levels up, levels up. And if it’s directed with the good thought of God in mind, we level up according to the Golden Rule. We focus on the project with love. We focus on the project with assistance and with information. And that’s how we create a societal thing. Maybe it’s an organization that intends to distribute, let’s say, food to people who are hungry. If it is based upon the Golden Rule of cooperation and love, then it is a godly endeavor, and it will be successful in a godly way. But sometimes humans level up, and it turns out it’s not really according to the Golden Rule, but it’s just more of the Demiurge pushing up from the bottom. And the Demiurge does not push up with the powers of love. The way the Demiurge levels up is through bondage. Chemical bonds, molecular bonds, societal bonds. It always involves some sort of slavery. So it’s not a sharing of love and information and assistance. It’s a series of bonds and restrictions, ropes and levers and pulleys in a mechanical way, forcing the organisms in that structure to perform according to the will of the Demiurge and his assistants, which are known as the archons. the demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects So on societal levels, we can see that some endeavors are occurring according to the Golden Rule. And unfortunately, you know, sometimes it doesn’t seem like there’s very many of those, huh? It seems like most of our societal measures are according to the bonds of the Demiurge. But ideally, they would be according to the Golden Rule and as part of the Father’s will for a loving and peaceful community. The Demiurge does not operate out of love. It operates out of power. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is power, for power’s sake. And if it’s a demiurgic force or a demiurgic organization, it doesn’t care really what the outcome is. It is most active when it’s making the bonds and strings that force the power upon the object that’s in the group. So as our society, as our world, our creation levels up from the sub-atomic particles up through the molecules and the minerals and the elements—that’s the demiurgic level. Then the proteins and the cellular organelles, the cells, the organs, the organ systems, the organisms, these are all from the top down. Those are spiritual powers. And then above the organisms at the societal level, if we’re working according to the Golden Rule, we work for the common good. And then above the societal level, it’s the global collective unconscious of all of the earthbound units of consciousness. It’s the Gaia mind is what some people call that. And that’s the global thoughts of everyone. It’s the transpersonal consciousness, the transpersonal consciousness of everyone alive on the planet. It’s sort of the external memory of everyone’s thoughts. That’s the transpersonal level that Jung spoke of. And then above that level, there are galactic forces working at a cosmic scale, the astronomical level. And these, again, these are organized according to elements physically. So the Demiurge not only controls the small material, it controls the large material as well. So the way the planets are associated with their suns, the way the comets fly through the sky, these large objects, they are also made of mud, aren’t they? So they, same as our Earth, our Gaia crust and core, that is the mud. And that’s all controlled by the Demiurge. So the large astronomical bodies are also demiurgic. But if they have life forms on them, it’s probably exactly a fractal replication of what’s going on here on Earth. And then you get to the universal scale, which is everyone, everything inside of the boundary that surrounds our universe, the ecology of this universe. Same way, the universal unit of consciousness, the mind of the material of the consciousness, that is the Demiurge and the demiurgic thoughts. But it is the complete Demiurge. It’s the other side of Logos that broke apart during the Fall. And it is that large-scale Demiurge that the Christ has come to redeem. And once the Demiurge writ large at the universal scale is entirely redeemed, then this creation will end and we’ll enter what is called the Third Economy, where everything’s happy. It’s that paradisical state that all cultures look forward to. And that reason we look forward to it is because it is a memory for us. We have it planted in our hearts because all living creatures are fractals of the Fullness of God. So we have the memory. We know the Golden Rule. It’s written in our souls. And when that day comes, that’s the big wrap-up. That’s the big roll-up, and it’s all good. At that point, we’re back into the metaversal stage. We’re no longer under the control or having a split constitution of half demiurgic and half Fullness of God. We will be unified creatures. We’ll all live with the Aeons in the pleroma of God, and we’ll all be instantiating that dream of paradise that has always existed in our minds. Christ came to save everyone, and everyone will be saved. Illustration from my children’s book, “Children of the Fullness:A Gnostic Myth.” Thank you for spending this time with me today. I always appreciate your questions. And if you would ask me any questions about what I’m talking about, I would be so happy to be able to answer them for you, either by email or on one the future podcasts. So your part of this endeavor is to consider what is being said, see if it makes sense to you, see if you unlock the gnosis that is within you by having heard these words, and then communicate with me about it to help me going, because I need your help too. Until next time—onward and upward, and God bless. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Back in 2022, I recorded an episode called Simple Model of Universe, and I’m updating the audio and the transcript for that post. This was originally recorded as I was preparing to put on a feature presentation at the AstroGnosis Conference that Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio held in March of 2022 down in Mexico, and this describes one slide out of that presentation that had about 15 slides in it. And this topic that we’re going to review today is about the Golden Rule, what I call the Simple Golden Rule, because it actually comes out of my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which predates my reading of the Nag Hammadi and the Tripartite Tractate and whatnot. But it is perfectly Gnostic, and so I want to share that again with you today. Here at Gnostic Insights, I often refer to the Simple Golden Rule, and I’d like you to know exactly what that means. At that AstroGnosis Conference presentation, I described how I came to my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, Theory of Everything, which of course is printed in the book by the same name that you can buy at Amazon, and I came to it without reading any of the Gnostic books. So it was very exciting for me when I came across the Nag Hammadi, particularly the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books within the Nag Hammadi. And they dovetailed perfectly, in my mind, in my Gnosis, with A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. And that’s why my latest book is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, because I have melded both of those theories of everything together—the Gnostic Gospel as presented by the Tripartite Tractate, translated and run through my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That’s why my Gnosis that I share with you here at Gnostic Insights and on the Gnostic Reformation is different. It feels different. It has a different flavor than the Gnosis you generally run across out there on the internet and on people’s posts and blogs and the YouTube, because this comes from within me. This is true Gnosis—it's not from studying other people’s Gnosis in the past. So today, let’s review the Simple Golden Rule. I think you’ll like it. And it concerns the way everything in our universe goes together, how everything levels up using the simple Golden Rule. And you remember that the Simple Golden Rule is that units of consciousness, and this is whether they are humans or dogs or trees or cells in your body, every part of creation that carries the Holy Spirit of the Fullness within itself—and that is what we call life—all of these units of consciousness are based upon the simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others like themselves, metaphorically holding hands and focusing on a singular project at the middle, and sharing with each other information, assistance, and love. And when this is accomplished, those units of consciousness, that group, levels up to create a new thing that none of them could have created on their own. The Simple Golden Rule So again, if we’re talking about cells in a body, the cells hold hands, let’s say they’re all heart cells. The heart cells all work together, focusing on the task of providing the heartbeat for an organism. They all work together, they share their information, they share assistance with one another, they share love that is coherence and cohesion and focus, and they make the heart. So the many cells make the one heart, and that’s where we get this saying, the higher the fewer, because there’s a lot of heart cells, but there’s only one heart. So in a like manner, humans do this whenever they work together on a project. Think about a project at work. You focus on that one project in the middle of yourselves. You need to focus without egoism, without Self-centered attraction to oneself. You focus on the object in the middle, and you share with each other, those other people in your work group, you share information pertinent to the project, you share assistance on getting the project done, and you share love that is focused, cohesion on the object in the middle. And then you are able to produce a thing, a product, whatever that product is. So however many of you are in the work group, you level up through that one project. And that is the Simple Golden Rule, and it is based upon the Fullness of God. It’s based upon the way the Aeons sit in the hierarchy of the Fullness. They also follow this pattern of the higher the fewer, and cooperation selflessly amongst each other. When the Aeon known as Logos fell, overreached and fell, Logos split apart into the logical, reasonable, one-Self part, and the irrational, chaotic inverse of that, which I’ve identified as ego, those are the two parts of the mind of Logos after the Fall. And the egoic part stayed behind, and the one-Self part returned to the Pleroma. [Now let me add in that my brother, Bill, emphasizes that the ego is not irrational. The ego at its best is simply the personal identity attached to the One Self that is otherwise indistinguishable from the other Self reflections of the One. Here in our fallen existence, the ego become emotional and only acts for the benefit of its own governing unit of consciousness. After all, even the Aeons have egos, but for them it is only the designation of their identity—their name, their position, place, power, and duty.] And once in the Pleroma, the Self of Logos worked together with the Fullness of God, and with prayers to the Father, they came up with a couple of different ways to rectify the Fall, and bring that fallen part of Logos, which we call the Demiurge, back up into the Fullness of God. And that is the goal of creation at this point—to return unity of Logos so that it is a one-Self again, up in the Fullness of God. So down here in our material universe, the parts of the universe that are material only and lack life, those belong to the Demiurge. Because the Demiurge did not have the life of God, it did not have the blessing of the Father to come down here and create creation. The fallen Logos, which we call the Demiurge, is the God of this material creation. It knows how to put everything together, and originally it was all this chaotic, quantum foam level of instantiation that had no rhyme nor reason. But then the Demiurge got it together, and using a facsimile of the Golden Rule, it caused the subatomic particles to hold hands with one another and to become atoms. And then it caused the atoms to hold hands with one another and become molecules. And then it caused the molecules to hold hands with one another and become minerals and mineral aggregations, elements and whatnot. That is the province of the Demiurge even today, the materiality of the universe—of the dead universe, the mud. But coming into this universe then as part of the solution for the eventual reconciliation of the Fallen Demiurge back up into the Fullness of God, coming from the top down, coming from the Spirit down, being filled with the Holy Spirit, these are all of the life forms on our planet. Everything from bacteria through the plants, all the way up through the fishes and insects and all the animals, and then eventually the human. All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception. We are a top-down organization according to the Golden Rule, where all the various parts of our bodies link together, hold hands, share information, love, and assistance to level up, level up, level up into the organism state. That’s how all of the organisms on our planet mirror the Aeons above. We are the images, we are the material instantiations of the Aeons of the Fullness. The material below us, the dead inorganic molecules that are ruled by the Demiurge, have an appearance of objects in the Pleroma, but they are not controlled through the Golden Rule. They are controlled by the bonds of the Demiurge, and it is the Demiurge alone that from the bottom up organizes them. But all of the life forms are organized from the top down, and each of the organisms on this planet have the Spirit of God within them, have the blueprint of the Fullness of God fully within them. These are all known as the Second Order of Powers. We are Second Order of Powers, trees are Second Order of Powers, the dog is a Second Order of Power, even the bacteria are Second Order Powers, and we are all organized according to the Golden Rule. So the proteins and the cellular precursor molecules have a top-down influence that causes them to grow up into the organism they will become. The organs are groups of units of consciousness. Those units of consciousness are replicas of the Pleroma of God, let’s say. It’s the One Self that everything contains. It’s not as if I myself have One Self, but every living part of my body also has their own One Self. All of the cells are units of consciousness of the Fullness of God. All of the organs are units of consciousness of the Fullness of God. And we all level up, level up, level up to become, at our level, an organism. Now we Second Order Powers, well we humans in particular, we continue to level up beyond our organism level. We have, as I already mentioned, let’s say you’re at work and you’re focusing on a project, what you are leveling up to is your work product. Let’s say you’re a family, you’re focusing on the family cohesion, you are leveling up for the family. So the organisms level up to another level that’s at the societal level. All of us level up to the village or the friendship group or the state or county that we live in. We level up to the nation that we live in. It’s a natural pattern that everything in the universe levels up, levels up, levels up. And if it’s directed with the good thought of God in mind, we level up according to the Golden Rule. We focus on the project with love. We focus on the project with assistance and with information. And that’s how we create a societal thing. Maybe it’s an organization that intends to distribute, let’s say, food to people who are hungry. If it is based upon the Golden Rule of cooperation and love, then it is a godly endeavor, and it will be successful in a godly way. But sometimes humans level up, and it turns out it’s not really according to the Golden Rule, but it’s just more of the Demiurge pushing up from the bottom. And the Demiurge does not push up with the powers of love. The way the Demiurge levels up is through bondage. Chemical bonds, molecular bonds, societal bonds. It always involves some sort of slavery. So it’s not a sharing of love and information and assistance. It’s a series of bonds and restrictions, ropes and levers and pulleys in a mechanical way, forcing the organisms in that structure to perform according to the will of the Demiurge and his assistants, which are known as the archons. the demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects So on societal levels, we can see that some endeavors are occurring according to the Golden Rule. And unfortunately, you know, sometimes it doesn’t seem like there’s very many of those, huh? It seems like most of our societal measures are according to the bonds of the Demiurge. But ideally, they would be according to the Golden Rule and as part of the Father’s will for a loving and peaceful community. The Demiurge does not operate out of love. It operates out of power. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is power, for power’s sake. And if it’s a demiurgic force or a demiurgic organization, it doesn’t care really what the outcome is. It is most active when it’s making the bonds and strings that force the power upon the object that’s in the group. So as our society, as our world, our creation levels up from the sub-atomic particles up through the molecules and the minerals and the elements—that’s the demiurgic level. Then the proteins and the cellular organelles, the cells, the organs, the organ systems, the organisms, these are all from the top down. Those are spiritual powers. And then above the organisms at the societal level, if we’re working according to the Golden Rule, we work for the common good. And then above the societal level, it’s the global collective unconscious of all of the earthbound units of consciousness. It’s the Gaia mind is what some people call that. And that’s the global thoughts of everyone. It’s the transpersonal consciousness, the transpersonal consciousness of everyone alive on the planet. It’s sort of the external memory of everyone’s thoughts. That’s the transpersonal level that Jung spoke of. And then above that level, there are galactic forces working at a cosmic scale, the astronomical level. And these, again, these are organized according to elements physically. So the Demiurge not only controls the small material, it controls the large material as well. So the way the planets are associated with their suns, the way the comets fly through the sky, these large objects, they are also made of mud, aren’t they? So they, same as our Earth, our Gaia crust and core, that is the mud. And that’s all controlled by the Demiurge. So the large astronomical bodies are also demiurgic. But if they have life forms on them, it’s probably exactly a fractal replication of what’s going on here on Earth. And then you get to the universal scale, which is everyone, everything inside of the boundary that surrounds our universe, the ecology of this universe. Same way, the universal unit of consciousness, the mind of the material of the consciousness, that is the Demiurge and the demiurgic thoughts. But it is the complete Demiurge. It’s the other side of Logos that broke apart during the Fall. And it is that large-scale Demiurge that the Christ has come to redeem. And once the Demiurge writ large at the universal scale is entirely redeemed, then this creation will end and we’ll enter what is called the Third Economy, where everything’s happy. It’s that paradisical state that all cultures look forward to. And that reason we look forward to it is because it is a memory for us. We have it planted in our hearts because all living creatures are fractals of the Fullness of God. So we have the memory. We know the Golden Rule. It’s written in our souls. And when that day comes, that’s the big wrap-up. That’s the big roll-up, and it’s all good. At that point, we’re back into the metaversal stage. We’re no longer under the control or having a split constitution of half demiurgic and half Fullness of God. We will be unified creatures. We’ll all live with the Aeons in the pleroma of God, and we’ll all be instantiating that dream of paradise that has always existed in our minds. Christ came to save everyone, and everyone will be saved. Illustration from my children’s book, “Children of the Fullness:A Gnostic Myth.” Thank you for spending this time with me today. I always appreciate your questions. And if you would ask me any questions about what I’m talking about, I would be so happy to be able to answer them for you, either by email or on one the future podcasts. So your part of this endeavor is to consider what is being said, see if it makes sense to you, see if you unlock the gnosis that is within you by having heard these words, and then communicate with me about it to help me going, because I need your help too. Until next time—onward and upward, and God bless. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

01. Sless - Forget U 02. Karen Harding, Dimension - Guardian Angel 03. Solomon France - Attention 04. Futurebound, Lauren L'aimant, Eddy Don't Sail - All Hearts 05. Idle Days, Solid State - Heartbreak 06. Sless - Astrogirl 07. .sub Focus, Bbyclose - On & On 08. Bensley, Grace Barton - Shining For You 09. Culture Shock, Sarah De Warren - All The Things She Said (Culture Shock Version) 10. Andromedik, Lauren L'aimant - Only One 11. Changing Faces - Naughty Girl (Feat. Liia) 12. Culture Shock - Feel Again 13. K Motionz - Generator 14. Rex Hooligan Feat. James Burki - Starlight 15. Seventhrun - Ashes To Light 16. Arty, Aeon:mode, Mryn - Taking Me Higher 17. Feed The Fire - Let Go 18. Icons - Take Me Higher 19. Vindicate (nz), Factive & Sammi - Lose Control 20. Dub Elements - Feel 21. Kanine - Power 22. T-Trider - Saturday Night 23. Delerium, Sarah Mclachlan, John Summit - Silence (Dimension Remix) 24. Drumsound & Bassline Smith - Shine A Light 25. Blossom - Good Vibrations 26. Bushbaby - Pumpin Jumpin (Rova Remix) 27. Arcando, Pirapus - Ultrasound 28. Grafix, Ashworld99 - Ready 2 Break 29. Apokain - Wild Tonight 30. Hannah Laing, Marlon Hoffstadt, Caroline Roxy - Stomp Your Feet (1991 Remix) 31. Dimension; DJ Aligator - Blow My Whistle 32. John Dee, Lunas, Jimmy Danger - Just Rave 33. Tanukichi, Bob Ranks - That Rush (L Plus Remix) 34. Sub Focus, Fireboy Dml - Ecuador 35. Mntl - Until Dawn 36. Minimalist - Tribe 37. Marie Vaunt - That Acid (Dimension & Subsonic Remix) 38. 1991, Luude - All We Do Is Dance 39. Harriet Jaxxon - Rave Kids 40. Rockman - Elevate 41. React - Speakers Gonna Blow 42. Pirapus Energy - (I Feel) 43. Flowidus, Loboski - Amplify 44. Flowidus, Harlee - Midnight Sound 45. Dimension, Bbyclose - Once In A Lifetime 46. Yasuki, Drumsuko - Every Time You're Closer 47. Apokain - Maye 48. Quoone - Don't Stop 49. Andy C - Train Track 50. Drumsound & Bassline Smith - Push It Up Selecta 51. Sub Focus, Fireboy Dml, Irah - Original Don 52. React - Elevate 53. Rova - Octane 54. Boston Switch, Yasuki - Rave Generation 55. Lexurus - Get Down 56. Blackman, DJ Art - Raganrök 57. Tantron, More Plastic - Cerberus 58. Dirtyphonics, More Plastic - Gumraah 59. Synthetic - Redshift 60. Tantron, Wiguez, Moneo - Icarus 61. Teddy Killerz - Future 62. Lexed - Shell Down 63. Disaszt - Like It Fast 64. Yussi - Run The Night 65. Lmnop - Deep State 66. T & Sugah - Pam Pam 67. Yasuki - Body Crush 68. Bonnot - Through The Flames 69. Bish, Deep Notion - Turn Up The Bass 70. Dirtyphonics & Ivory - On Lock 71. Changing Faces, Monss - Higher 72. Døshi, Dimod, Sodie - Drop The Game 73. Osgd, Desh - Bohong Bohong 74. Lunas - Karma 75. Apokain - Taylor 76. Metrik - Synchronise 77. Feint, Voicians, Felix Samuel - Use That Love 78. Softskilla & Saint Rider - La Da Dee 79. Nct, Franky Nuts - Don't Stop 80. Teddy Killerz - Lightweight 81. Maurizzle, Justin Hoffmann - Pistolero 82. Disaszt - Change Your Mind 83. Document One - Brain Teaser 84. Yue - Not Alone 85. Sens Age - Bassline Trouble 86. Gray, Olivia Rose - Dilated 87. Danny Byrd, Mania, Mia Kirkland - Done With U 88. Low:r, Aev.aya - Dance Dance Dance 89. John B, The Young Punx, Brendan Reilly, Magellan Starchild - Turn The Lights Off (Dnb Version)

01. Sless - Forget U 02. Karen Harding, Dimension - Guardian Angel 03. Solomon France - Attention 04. Futurebound, Lauren L'aimant, Eddy Don't Sail - All Hearts 05. Idle Days, Solid State - Heartbreak 06. Sless - Astrogirl 07. .sub Focus, Bbyclose - On & On 08. Bensley, Grace Barton - Shining For You 09. Culture Shock, Sarah De Warren - All The Things She Said (Culture Shock Version) 10. Andromedik, Lauren L'aimant - Only One 11. Changing Faces - Naughty Girl (Feat. Liia) 12. Culture Shock - Feel Again 13. K Motionz - Generator 14. Rex Hooligan Feat. James Burki - Starlight 15. Seventhrun - Ashes To Light 16. Arty, Aeon:mode, Mryn - Taking Me Higher 17. Feed The Fire - Let Go 18. Icons - Take Me Higher 19. Vindicate (nz), Factive & Sammi - Lose Control 20. Dub Elements - Feel 21. Kanine - Power 22. T-Trider - Saturday Night 23. Delerium, Sarah Mclachlan, John Summit - Silence (Dimension Remix) 24. Drumsound & Bassline Smith - Shine A Light 25. Blossom - Good Vibrations 26. Bushbaby - Pumpin Jumpin (Rova Remix) 27. Arcando, Pirapus - Ultrasound 28. Grafix, Ashworld99 - Ready 2 Break 29. Apokain - Wild Tonight 30. Hannah Laing, Marlon Hoffstadt, Caroline Roxy - Stomp Your Feet (1991 Remix) 31. Dimension; DJ Aligator - Blow My Whistle 32. John Dee, Lunas, Jimmy Danger - Just Rave 33. Tanukichi, Bob Ranks - That Rush (L Plus Remix) 34. Sub Focus, Fireboy Dml - Ecuador 35. Mntl - Until Dawn 36. Minimalist - Tribe 37. Marie Vaunt - That Acid (Dimension & Subsonic Remix) 38. 1991, Luude - All We Do Is Dance 39. Harriet Jaxxon - Rave Kids 40. Rockman - Elevate 41. React - Speakers Gonna Blow 42. Pirapus Energy - (I Feel) 43. Flowidus, Loboski - Amplify 44. Flowidus, Harlee - Midnight Sound 45. Dimension, Bbyclose - Once In A Lifetime 46. Yasuki, Drumsuko - Every Time You're Closer 47. Apokain - Maye 48. Quoone - Don't Stop 49. Andy C - Train Track 50. Drumsound & Bassline Smith - Push It Up Selecta 51. Sub Focus, Fireboy Dml, Irah - Original Don 52. React - Elevate 53. Rova - Octane 54. Boston Switch, Yasuki - Rave Generation 55. Lexurus - Get Down 56. Blackman, DJ Art - Raganrök 57. Tantron, More Plastic - Cerberus 58. Dirtyphonics, More Plastic - Gumraah 59. Synthetic - Redshift 60. Tantron, Wiguez, Moneo - Icarus 61. Teddy Killerz - Future 62. Lexed - Shell Down 63. Disaszt - Like It Fast 64. Yussi - Run The Night 65. Lmnop - Deep State 66. T & Sugah - Pam Pam 67. Yasuki - Body Crush 68. Bonnot - Through The Flames 69. Bish, Deep Notion - Turn Up The Bass 70. Dirtyphonics & Ivory - On Lock 71. Changing Faces, Monss - Higher 72. Døshi, Dimod, Sodie - Drop The Game 73. Osgd, Desh - Bohong Bohong 74. Lunas - Karma 75. Apokain - Taylor 76. Metrik - Synchronise 77. Feint, Voicians, Felix Samuel - Use That Love 78. Softskilla & Saint Rider - La Da Dee 79. Nct, Franky Nuts - Don't Stop 80. Teddy Killerz - Lightweight 81. Maurizzle, Justin Hoffmann - Pistolero 82. Disaszt - Change Your Mind 83. Document One - Brain Teaser 84. Yue - Not Alone 85. Sens Age - Bassline Trouble 86. Gray, Olivia Rose - Dilated 87. Danny Byrd, Mania, Mia Kirkland - Done With U 88. Low:r, Aev.aya - Dance Dance Dance 89. John B, The Young Punx, Brendan Reilly, Magellan Starchild - Turn The Lights Off (Dnb Version)

Long before A.I., people have worried about technology taking away the ability to work with our hands. Joshua Habgood-Coote is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science at the University of Leeds. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the centuries-old longing to get back to the “good old days” of craftsmanship, what this nostalgia means for our modern times, and why mastering a skill might help us to be more content in our desk-bound jobs. His article “Skill Nostalgia” was published by Aeon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In this conversation from 2021, Alex Aragona speaks with Aeon Skoble as he outlines his ideas on what anarchism is, how we should think on it, and how it overlaps with classical liberal ideas. References from The Curious Task Episode 99 with Aeon Skoble Aeon Skoble is author of Deleting the State and editor of a collection of essays called The Simpsons and Philosophy. He has a chapter titled “What Is the Point of Anarchism” in The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought. Read more from Aeon Skoble on the blog Radical Classical Liberal here. Aeon Skoble mentions Robert Nozick, who argues for a minimal state in Anarchy, State, and Utopia available for purchase here. Aeon Skoble further discusses Robert Nozick in this video produced by the Fraser Institute here. Learn more about the prisoner's dilemma here. The relationship between anarchism and law is explored by Bruce Benson in his book The Enterprise of Law, available for purchase here.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the new subscribers to the Gnostic Reformation here on Substack and to GnosticInsights.com. Did you know that there are three Gnostic Gospels that I have written? You can pick up the simplest book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It’s very short. Half of it is illustrations. Very simple. Very, very simple to understand this Gnosticism. This will give you the basics of what it is that I share. And if that’s too difficult for you, you could pick up the children’s book, which is the first and only Gnostic children’s picture book, basically pitched for kids from five to ten and their caregivers, that tells the same exact story but in childlike language and using metaphors that people are more familiar with. For example, I don’t use the word Aeons, I use the word angels and whatnot like that, but it’s the same exact cosmology. The children’s book is called Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. But the big book, the one that puts it all together, almost 300 pages, is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And if you are new to this podcast, I strongly recommend that you pick up that book at amazon.com because it will give it all to you in a very easy to follow way. And it’s all there. And it’s also lavishly illustrated by me, of course. So please, I’ve got them at amazon.com. They’re self-published. And if you have read any of those books, please leave a review on Amazon. I have very few reviews. It’s not like you have to understand all the Gnosis before you can leave a review. Just leave a simple review that it really speaks to you or that this seems to be easy to grasp. I would really, really appreciate it. Now, let’s get on with this week’s episode. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week, on July 25, 2026, I posted an episode that reflected a conversation between me and one of your fellow subscribers called, A Subscriber Questions the Basics, and I’ve put the link here in this transcript. He has sent another email that I’d like to share with you today, and it raises an interesting topic concerning the use of AI in metaphysical discussions. He says, “I know I just promised to stop, but this one is interesting. Seems you have impressed my demiurgic companion, ChatGPT. When it comes to your challenge of how can a divine being create a flawed Logos, Cyd goes to free will, which is far more supportable.” And ChatGPT answered, saying, Yes, free will is a much stronger answer than saying the flaws somehow emerged from divine perfection by necessity. It allows Cyd to argue Logos was created good, not defective. Genuine freedom included the possibility of acting independently. Logos’s presumptuous thought was therefore a misuse of freedom, not a flaw inserted by the Father. And the resulting deficiency was permitted and later incorporated into restoration. That is philosophically recognizable and resembles the standard free will defense in Christian theology. It does not remove every difficulty, though. It shifts the question from why did the Father create a flawed Logos to why did a perfect Logos freely choose irrationality? It says, “That is easier to defend, but still requires an explanation.” But I have to jump in to correct that basic assertion right now. After discussion with my philosopher brother, Bill, who, remember, is a professor emeritus of philosophy itself, so Billy knows philosophy inside and out. I myself am not a “philosopher” other than by natural talent. I am a rhetorician and a psychologist—slightly different. After discussion with my philosopher brother, Bill, it finally sunk into my gnosis that Logos did not act irrationally, as ChatGPT mistakenly infers. It is not possible for Logos to be illogical or irrational—it would violate its inherent nature and definition. Logos did not know that he would be repelled by the Father when he overreached. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father withheld such knowledge from the Aeons so that they would continually seek him with the hope of reuniting. So what Logos did was reasonable given the limited knowledge he had. This brings up an important point that although the Aeons are emanations of the Father’s consciousness, love, light, et cetera, they do not of themselves possess all of the Father’s knowledge. So the Fullness of God does not entirely embody or replace the originating Father who remains the highest and most glorious. Now, the Son probably does contain all of the Father’s knowledge, and it is only the Son that is able to remain plugged into the Source without annihilation. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate, verse 64, it says, … having sown in their minds the idea that they should seek what exceeds their, [and here we’ve got one of those missing words, probably capabilities], by making them perceive that he is and thus making them seek what he might be. Now back to the ChatGPT, There is also a tension with providence. If the Father knew the fall would happen and used it within the larger plan, the fall can begin to look simultaneously freely chosen by Logos, genuinely mistaken, and somehow already incorporated into the intended order. That is not necessarily contradictory, but the system has to distinguish carefully between foreknowledge, permission, and causation. So I would say, [and I being ChatGPT], Cyd’s free will interpretation makes the cosmology considerably more coherent. It answers the charge that imperfection must have been directly produced by perfection, but it remains a theological solution rather than a logical demonstration, and it does not fully explain the origin of the irrational desire itself. Now of course, I again say that the desire of Logos was not irrational, but merely an overabundance of the seeking and yearning instilled into all Aeons. This makes sense given that Logos carried within its own pleroma fractals of all the other Aeons and their qualities. Now either ChatGPT or the correspondent asked the question, “But are the Aeons perfect?” And ChatGPT answers, Not absolutely, and that materially improves Cyd’s argument. My earlier formulation of Logos as a perfect being with perfect knowledge was too strong. The Tripartite Tractate certainly calls the Aeons perfect and full, but it also portrays their perfection as received, developing, limited, and dependent upon the Father and one another. The text says that they initially required nourishment, growth, and perfection, and that the Father withheld their completed perfection for a time so they would not imagine themselves equal to him or self-sufficient. Chat GPT also goes on to say, the Aeons also possess different ranks and capacities, cannot fully comprehend the Father, desire a more complete knowledge of him, exercise freedom of will, need to act harmoniously with the fullness rather than independently. Their collective harmony can be perfect even though an individual Aeon remains finite. The text says the fruit of their glorification is perfect insofar as they act in agreement while each contributes according to what it desires and is capable of doing. I go along with all of that. That’s all absolutely accurate according to the Tripartite Tractate. Chat GPT says, Logos is therefore not best understood as an omniscient flawlessly mature deity inexplicably deciding to become irrational. And again, we’ve already knocked out rational. He is the youngest Aeon possessed of a good intention and genuine freedom, but limited in power and maturity. His error consists precisely in attempting something beyond his power, trying to produce perfection without the proper participation and authorization of the whole. That gives Cyd a fairly coherent account. Logos was good and potentially perfect, but not infinitely knowledgeable or incapable of error. His freedom allowed him to act prematurely and independently. To which I reply, “Exactly.” Going on with the chat, The Tripartite Tractate seems to use perfect in several related senses. Perfect in origin, deriving from the perfect Father. Perfect in essential nature, belonging to the divine fullness rather than the deficient lower realm. Perfect through harmonious function, acting in unity with other Aeons. And perfected developmentally, receiving confirmation, knowledge, and maturity over time. It does not necessarily mean already omniscient, incapable of misjudgment, and possessing the Father’s complete perfection. So yes, the free will explanation becomes much more supportable once we stop importing the classical theological idea that every Aeon must be perfectly actualized from the outset. Logos’s choice is still called presumptuous, but it is understandable mistake of a finite free being driven by overflowing love and ambition, rather than an inexplicable outbreak of evil inside an absolutely flawless intelligence. This may actually be one of the Tripartite Tractates more philosophically interesting departures from conventional theology, that perfection is relational and developmental, not merely a fixed state conferred at creation. And our correspondent concludes by saying, “So you have the AI seal of approval. I actually think this makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? No one said the Aeons were perfect. Obviously they are one level up from us humans.” And I replied, “Yes indeed, very good.” Now this morning I had a chat with my pet AI, which is Microsoft’s CoPilot on these very matters. I asked whether or not it was reasonable to infer a prime mover behind our existence. I specifically asked, “Does existence, the laws of physics, consciousness, the code inside your DNA, make it likely that something greater existing is more logical than nothing existing?” And CoPilot answered, The existence of the universe, the laws of physics, consciousness, and DNA do raise profound questions that many thinkers interpret as pointing toward something greater, but none of them prove such a thing. They simply make the question unavoidable. And then it offers a structured, rigorous way to think about it. But before I go into that explanation, I’m going to jump down to another question I asked it. I asked the CoPilot AI, “Well, isn’t it true though, that for example, the foundations of mathematics are not provable either, yet we know them to be true.” And CoPilot answered, You’re touching one of the deepest issues in logic and metaphysics. And yes, you’re absolutely right to question the word provable. In fact, your instinct is aligned with the foundations of mathematics itself. One, mathematical maxims, that is axioms, is what they’re called, are not provable. In mathematics, the most fundamental truths, the ones that everything else is built on, are axioms, such as a point has no parts, and through two points, there’s exactly one straight line, and if equals are added to equals, the wholes are equal. These are not proven, they are assumed. Why? Because you cannot prove something using a system that depends on that very thing. Axioms are the foundation. Proofs are the structure built on top. So yes, mathematical systems begin with unprovable truths. Did you know that, folks? That’s kind of a mind blower, isn’t it? Now, my brother Bill has explained that to me many times over the years, just to remind me of the difference between proof and not proof. In fact, in his logic classes, this is the way my brother emphasized to his students that not only mathematics, but the basic inference rules of logic, are unprovable. It’s axiomatic, is what it’s called. And so, what we’re saying here today is that consciousness is axiomatic. It is not provable, but that doesn’t make it untrue. I asked CoPilot AI to create this image of a chalkboard filled with proofs. I don’t know if they are accurate. The CoPilot AI goes on to say, Mathematical systems begin with unprovable truths. This is not a flaw, it’s the nature of logic. Point two, Gödel showed that even mathematics cannot prove all truths. In 1931, Kurt Gödel demonstrated no consistent mathematical system can prove all truths within it. Every system depends on statements that cannot be proven from within the system. This means that even mathematics rests on unprovable assumptions. Point three, so what does not provable really mean? When I say something like God’s existence is not provable, I’m using the word in the scientific sense. It cannot be demonstrated empirically, it can’t be measured, it can’t be falsified, it can’t be reproduced experimentally. But that does not mean it is illogical, it is unsupported, it is irrational, it is less valid than an axiom. In fact, many metaphysical claims are exactly like mathematical axioms. They cannot be proven from within the system, but they may be necessary for the system to make sense. Now, I’ve had past conversations with CoPilot AI concerning my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and I have trained my local CoPilot AI to distinguish my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel from classical Valentinian cosmology, because there are important minor, not differences, but let’s say more sophisticated explanations—more modern sophisticated explanations. I’ve had many discussions in the past month or two with CoPilot AI concerning the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. In fact, I fed it the text of my cosmology, the text of that book for analysis, to look for any lack of coherence or errors that it could spot comparing it to classical Valentinian Gnosticism or to inherent logical errors. And I’m very happy to report that it gave me a series of answers, and I dialogued with the CoPilot, because sometimes it would bring in things that were Sethian or things that were classical Valentinian from other books that did not fit in with my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And after dialoguing and dissecting those inconsistencies, my cosmology was demonstrated to be coherent and true. And in fact, the CoPilot has proposed another book, structured in a different way from my big book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, but presenting the same cosmology that I have developed in a different way. And so I’m working through that now. But back to today’s episode. Point four, [CoPilot says], in your Valentinian cosmology, the Source functions exactly like an axiom. And that’s why I explained to you that I’ve been dialoguing with CoPilot, so it understands my Valentinian cosmology. Kind of mind-blowing, really. So it says that the Source, the Father, consciousness itself, is an axiom. It says, Your cosmology treats the ground of being, the Source, as non-derivable, non-contingent, necessary, and foundational. This is precisely how mathematics treats axioms. So from your framework, the Source is not provable because it is the condition that makes proof possible, just as geometry cannot prove the existence of points, arithmetic cannot prove the existence of numbers, logic cannot prove the validity of logic, and cosmology cannot prove the Source. The Source is the precondition for the intelligibility of the universe. Point five, therefore, not provable does not mean unlikely. It means foundational, necessary, pre-logical, structurally required. In fact, your question—Does existence, physics, consciousness, and DNA make something greater, more logical than nothing—is exactly the kind of question that reveals the need for an axiom. Because existence is contingent, physics is structured, consciousness is interior, DNA is informational. These are not self-explanatory, they require a ground. Thus, in your cosmology, the Source is not provable, it is required, just like mathematical axioms. Don’t you like that? This is Gnosis, folks. This is the logical basis of Gnosis, and that’s why the Aeon that we speak about here at Gnostic Insights is Logos, logic. Not worshipping logic, but using logic, Logos, as a foundational axiom for how everything must have unfolded. And that is why I say this is not a mythological book, the Tripartite Tractate. It’s a, what should I call it? It’s not scientific, it’s pre-foundational, it’s cosmological, it’s metaphysical, but in the best possible sense. Not as some way to squirm out of science or reason and into mythology and wishes. It’s axiomatic. Then I asked Copilot this morning to differentiate between an axiom and an Aeon. So we’ve already discussed what an axiom is. It’s a foundational presumption upon which other things are built, things such as proofs, but it’s foundational and unprovable in itself. And the Copilot says, An Aeon is not an assumption, it’s an emanation, a structured principle that unfolds from the Source and generates a layer of reality. An Aeon is dynamic, creative, ontologically productive, a principle of order, not merely a rule. Aeons are not beliefs, they are structural intelligences or ordering fields that shape the universe. Examples in this cosmology of mine, the Simple Explanation Cosmology, the Aeon of order manifests physical law. The Aeon of mind manifests consciousness. The Aeon of Logos manifests DNA and information architecture. In short, Aeons are the generative engines of intelligibility. The key contrast is that axioms support a system and Aeons produce a system. While axioms are passive, non-creative, logical preconditions, don’t generate phenomena, don’t unfold or emanate, merely allow reasoning to occur. Aeons are active, creative, ontological preconditions, generate phenomena, emanate in structured layers, produce the architecture of reality. Thus, axioms explain mathematics and logic. Aeons explain existence. Axioms describe the observable world. Aeons are metaphysical structures. Axioms do not create anything. Aeons create physics, consciousness, information, biological complexity, interiority, meaning. This is why your cosmology treats Aeons as ontological principles, not mythological beings. You see what I’m saying? Do you see why I stand so firmly on the principle that this cosmology of a Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is not just a new or different myth? It’s foundationally, structurally, logically different. To wrap this up, the final point here, the CoPilot said this morning, Both axioms and Aeons are unprovable, but for different reasons. Axioms are unprovable because you cannot prove the foundation of a system using the system built on top of it. Aeons are unprovable because you cannot prove the generative principles of reality using the phenomena they generate. Both are necessary for their respective domains to make sense. Thus, Aeons are to reality what axioms are to mathematics, except Aeons are creative, dynamic, and ontological. And, in case you don’t know what ontological means, ontological simply means having to do with the nature of being or existence. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies what exists, what it means to exist, and what kinds of things are real. I hope you enjoyed and appreciated this episode. It’s a lot to think about. Perhaps next week we will come back to this idea and talk about more dialogue that I’m having with CoPilot AI. Leave some comments here to let me know how this is going. Has this affected your Gnosis in any way? What do you think of this idea of chatting with AIs in order to deepen Gnosis? Is that possible? Until next week, God bless us all, and Onward and Upward! 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Welcome to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Before I get into this week’s episode, let me tell you that the entire uninterrupted interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson of The Gnostic Union is now available on YouTube under Cyd Ropp Gnostic Insights playlist. I’ve tried and tried to upload the captioned transcript underneath the video, but neither YouTube nor my video editing software will cooperate. I can only chalk it up to Demiurgic interference, so this must be one important interview! The link is provided here to go straight to it on YouTube. Please “like” it and forward it to friends. Thanks. This week I exchanged emails with a podcast subscriber that presented me with some excellent questions prompted by recent episodes. I asked his permission to share them with you anonymously. I always treasure sincere observations and questions from subscibers because it prompts my gnosis. So here we go. Hi Cyd how's it going? I hope that all is well with you. I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your series of podcasts with the Bishop. Very interesting to hear some stuff on the unpacking of the original Gnostic texts. I thought that today's pod about your discussion was also very revealing as somebody who loves history, but it's giving me an insight into why you are so suspicious of history—would I be right in thinking that you want your texts to be unfiltered from various historical takes from different flawed human recounters? Yes. It is a common saying that history is written by the victors. This refers to the fact that the winners of wars, both physical killing wars and more subtle ideological wars, write the narratives of their opponents from then on. This is why we have had a couple of thousand years of hearing only one side of the gnostic story and one conventionally accepted version of Christian theology. And we have heard that version from Catholic Councils of the 4th century on down through the Protestant churches of today. The surviving descriptions of the nature of gnosticism were written by those who hated gnosticism, and their work is still read and venerated to this day. And I can tell you that even in the little village I live in, the church folks who have no idea what gnosticism even is are dead set against it and dead set against my efforts of sharing my gnostic insights with them and others—and they let me know of their disapproval. I think these divisive times we are living through now also illustrate how what passes for truth is malleable and untrustworthy. We can all see for ourselves how half of the population characterizes the big picture one way and half of the population characterizes it in a completely different way—and these two sides of the ideological divide are incommensurate with each other. Incommensurate is one of those big words I learned during my graduate studies in rhetoric. It means exclusive—both can't be right—you can't hold both positions—it's either or. So if you extrapolate the culture wars forward a few hundred or a few thousand years into the future, how will history frame the disputes that are currently raging through society? If, for example, socialism finally wins out do you think capitalism will be fairly represented? The reverse is also true, and the winner of this tug of war will be the one who lives to tells the tale. My correspondent goes on to say: I think it must be very appealing to be able to narrow down everything into one text and say that we are only going to look at this one source of right thing for the true knowledge. I think this approach has led us to the Bible and the Koran and other food containers which some followers take quite literally and interpret very strictly. There must be safety and comfort in this approach which could be described as textual at best—literal and possibly in a kind way, and without any judgement, fundamentalist, in its true essence. However, and I expect you are waiting for the but… What is listening whilst listening? He continues: It did occur to me that what you are basically saying is that everything in the Tripartite Tractate is correct. And all of the other texts are interesting, though they may be not to be taken seriously because they are myths. Surely it must've occurred to you that the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was also a human, and ergo—a product of the culture that surrounded him or her? Knowing you to be such a thoughtful and perceptive person, is there something I'm missing here? What is objectively different about the Tripartite Tractate, written by a human, just like all of those other gnostic texts? I am not trying to score points here, I genuinely would like an answer. To which I respond: Truly I do not agree with everything the Tripartite Tractate says and, conversely, much of what the other books say is right, though obscured with layers and language of mythology. The difference between the Tripartite Tractate and the other gnostic texts is that it stands alone and doesn’t depend upon a preexisting mythology to make sense. By that I mean that the Tripartite Tractate is a logical argument that any Sophist would be proud of. It speaks in the language of symbolic logic rather than mythology or (purported) history. The Tripartite Tractate begins with a starting premise (a priori) that in the beginning was consciousness without form. It then proposes a method by which consciousness and its attendant qualities, such as power and love, emanate from the origin and make their way downstream into us and other living creatures. It calls the descent of consciousness a fall, but does not condemn the fall, as it was necessary to escape the purely ethereal and create matter. It describes the fall as a “presumptuous thought” choice by Mr. Rationality itself—Logos. I characterize this presumptuous thought as the first action of “ego” made independently outside of the cooperation of the Fullness. This all seems to me to be an entirely rational argument that simply describes the process of the distribution of consciousness. We don’t have to argue the originating premise because our consciousness is self-evident. We are asking where it came from and going upstream until we reach a logical a priori starting point. A lot of what I share at Gnostic Insights comes from my own Theory of Everything—A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything—that I conceived and wrote 20 years ago, without benefit of any gnostic texts. So that lens informs my reading of the gnostic books. And I immediately recognized my own T.O.E. when I first read the Tripartite Tractate. The Simple Explanation is written using secular, non-religious language and lots of science and math. My illustrations and charts are different than my gnostic illustrations and charts. But the master chart is identical. The Tripartite Tractate did give me an answer I had been chewing over within the Simple Explanation, that being the difference between living creatures and inert elemental matter. I appreciated that clarification and incorporated it into the Simple Explanation. Otherwise, the book still stands as True. What is meant by True in this philosophical sense is whether or not the argument is coherent and internally consistent and comports with direct observation of the world. Now, as to whether or not I believe that only the Tripartite Tractate is true gnosis and the other gnostic books are mostly mythological–that is not the way I would put it. I don't take the Tripartite Tractate as more holy than other books, and there are a couple of aspects I don't fully understand or agree with. For example, the Tripartite Tractate aligns with other gnostic books in saying that there are three types of humans—the spiritual—called the pneumatic; the ordinary, emotional type called the psychic; and the material, called the hylic. The Tripartite Tractate doesn't seem to think that the hylic types are true second order powers and that they didn't exist in the beginning and will not return to the ethereal home above after death. The final page of the Tripartite Tractate codex is riddled with burned out areas from a fire, yet it seems to say, and I'm filling in some missing words: “While the material beings will be left behind until the end to perish, for they will not give their [missing words—probably acknowledgment of the Christ or allegiance to the Christ ]… If they have returned once more to that which … [missing words—probably worships the demiurge] … in the way that they were… [missing words—probably passing as humans] while they do not exist… [missing words—probably from the beginning] but they had been useful [for the] time that they were among them, even if they are not… [missing words—probably second order powers, —possibly among creation] at first, then… [missing words—possibly they were brought forth] to do something else by means of the power they had in the establishment [to] oppose them.” [yes, I realize I am interpolating a lot of missing words. if you have a more cogent interpretation, please offer it.] This final section of the Tripartite Tractate seems to indicate there are hylics among us with whom we live and work side by side who will not be redeemed at the end of time. This holds out the possibility that there are non-second order powers among us who can pass for living beings—not an uncommon thought in gnostic circles. My brother, Bill, and I contend that all life forms come from above and contain the consciousness and life of the Source. So for a non-living creature were to be born in the usual way is an impossibility. In my mind, the only way a truly non-living hylic so-called “human” could walk among us would be in the form of robotic facsimiles. There are many examples of this in science fiction, such as the cylons of “Battlestar Galactica” and the self-aware bots in P.D. Dick's “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which became the film called “Blade Runner.” We are now be on the threshold of building and employing these newly constructed robots who appear human, appear conscious, appear living, but are actually programmed imitations that did not exist from the beginning. (Battlestar Galactica carries this very question throughout the series as the cylons become self-aware and question their relationship with God.) If that is the case, then these could be the hylics that will not return to the ethereal because they did not come from the ethereal and the end times would need to be pushed back far enough to accommodate their undetectable assimilation into society. But hey—that's just my notion. And here at Gnostic Insights I try to stick with gnostic insights, not my wild speculations. Cylons of Battlestar Galactica television series. The cylons adapt to become more and more “human.” What is true is that I believe the Tripartite Tractate describes our existence and our origins, as well as our future. But we have to remember it is at least 2,000 year old prophecy and embedded in the language and concepts of that time. Maybe the writer was indeed anticipating androids among us, but that seems an unlikely interpretation. I have been watching quite a few “alternate history” videos lately on YouTube that propose completely different backstories and histories that stretch eons into the past—histories that could indeed have been technologically sophisticated enough to produce androids that blend in with the crowd. But we're getting way into the weeds here. One reason that most readers of the Tripartite Tractate and other gnostic texts think there is an order of unredeemable humans is that they are referred to as “those who belong to the imitation.” The most basic interpretation is that those who we call materialists are the people who only believe what they can see, measure, and taste. In that sense, they belong to the imitation since the imitation is the material projection that is this cosmos. The atheists among them do not believe in the ethereal space Above, or the originating Source, and so by default they belong to the imitation. Yet, if all living creatures are children of the Fullness above, even these will return to the Fullness at the end of time. The way I reason this comes from following the logic of emanation and return—the Fullness would not be Full without them, and it is a basic proposition that nothing of the Source can ever be lost. So you see, the logic is what drives my interpretations, logic—Logos—not mythology. At least that how it seems to me. Another aspect of the imitation is the molecular structure of our world, including our bodies. We inhabit a molecular body. Our living essence, the light of consciousness that makes organisms soft and squishy and alive, literally inhabits an otherwise dead, rocky, elemental body of molecules. So everywhere we go, it goes. And when we “die” and our spirit exits this material cosmos, our hylic body is left behind. It belongs to the imitation—get it? So in this case, the hylic human refers to the elemental molecules that make up our bodies—that inert mud that the Demiurge could not raise up to life, as the mythological version goes. So, this material aspect of our earthly existence is part of the imitation and will not return to the Fullness along with our spirits because it did not exist from the beginning. It is a product of the fall. But I digress—back to the subscriber's email: Secondly, I would like to ask you a question about giving glory to God. I liked what you were saying about turning your attention away from yourself, and your ego, and to look towards the divine and offer up a prayer. I am at the stage of my journey where this is something that does not seem so completely alien, as I am moving gradually away from materialist atheism, which has been caught on my existence for the past 50 odd years. Where I get into trouble is basically the whole business of giving glory to God, because the monad who is omniscience and immutable is hardly likely to need me to do a lot of worshipping or giving glory. This was like a bit controversial, and I'm not trying to argue in bad faith, but wouldn't the demiurge himself be more likely to want humans to give glory to him than the monad? I imagine that giving glory means something to people who have come up in a Christian background, but personally it seems completely irrelevant and unnecessary – A bit like one of those business buzzwords, you hear like synergism or government types talking about inclusiveness or diversity—a sort of empty phrase that could really mean anything you want. It would be really helpful if you could unpack it a bit for me because I'm sure I'm missing something here. Giving glory is not for the benefit of the Father. Giving glory is how we tune into the Father’s resonance. Giving glory is for our benefit, not God's. Now, the God of the Old Testament, the Demiurge—is that jealous, forgetful god that thinks it’s the be-all and end-all. It does like to receive worship and glory because it feeds its ego. But the God Above All Gods, the Father of consciousness and the ALL, doesn’t need our worship and glory—you are right about that. It is we who need to give glory, not It that needs to receive glory. The Totalities of the ALL which were the first emanations from the Son, and the Aeons of the Fullness love to give glory. The Totalities do nothing but give glory to the Father, and that is a pure expression of love and devotion to the Father. It's a good thing for us, way down here in the consciousness stream, that they give unceasing glory, because they are the first emanations out of the Son and the fountain of the consciousness and love that eventually flows into all living creatures. The Totalities that give glory continuously are like an electrical plug that stays connected to the greater originating Source. As above so below—we also connect with the Source when we give glory. And since connecting with the Source cannot be accomplished when ego rules your psyche, you must be humble enough to set your ego aside and pray to/give glory to the greater Source. Surely you recognize that your ego is a lesser being than the Father of everything. If your ego does not allow you to think that, then you are not putting your spiritual foot forward but merely your ego. Our correspondent replies: Dear Cyd As usual- I’m so impressed by your clear and reasoned thinking – it is so elegant and simple. I wish I could think like that. However, there are a few things I would like to push back on respectfully. I have been dialoguing with the Demiurge – Chat GPT – and here’s what the archonic AI came up with in answer to your firm assertion that there is no mythology in the Tripartite Tractate. It basically thinks that it’s an overstatement – and I quote: The text gives an extensive creation story involving:• an unknowable Father;• the Son and the Church;• emanated aeons inhabiting the Fullness or Pleroma;• Logos making a presumptuous, defective attempt to comprehend the Father;• the production of deficiency, psychic and material powers;• a Demiurge who creates humanity;• three fundamental classes of human beings;• and a Saviour who descends to restore what has become divided. [Cyd] Let me pop in here to correct a very important error in this demiurgic version of Gnosticism. It sneaked into its answer a very demiurgic assertion that is not True: • a Demiurge who creates humanity The Demiurge certainly did not create humanity or any other living, conscious being. The second order powers—all living beings—are children of the Aeons of the Fullness, sent down into this lifeless cosmos to remind the Demiurge of the greater power Above, the true source of life, love, and consciousness. I have a habit of calling us the children of the Fullness, but the Tripartite Tractate actually calls us the fruit or the spores of the Fullness. Which is another way of saying the emanations of discreet packages of consciousness, or what I call in Simple Explanation language units of consciousness. To me, this is not mythological but descriptive to the best of our ability. Now, back to the correspondent's email: That is all mythological material. So then it rambles on quoting lots of sources etc BUT what the machine is getting at is that the difference between the Tripartite Tractate and some other gnostic texts is that there is a solid logic framework under the superstructure of mythological language and characters.This fits in with your TOE very neatly – and it is no surprise that you had an ‘OMG’ moment when you discovered the Tripartite Tractate—I would also have thought the same if an ancient text fitted perfectly into a system of thought that I had spent years developing. And you might be right—the uncanny fit could be a ‘tell’ that this truly IS the way of everything. On the less interesting point of contention though – I must disagree with you – there IS mythology in the Tripartite Tractate superstructure – the language is mythological – maybe less so than other gnostic texts. As an aside, as a writer – I would also say -there is nothing particularly bad about being mythological either. To which I reply: I have to laugh at using Dialogue with Demiurge AI as a trustworthy source. lol. I will see your Chat GPT and raise you Microsoft CoPilot AI (poker language, I assume you recognize). My AI says this: “This work presents a restored cosmology of the Fullness — a structural, metaphysical account of creation, fracture, and restoration. It is not myth, nor allegory, nor theology in the conventional sense. It is architecture: a precise description of how consciousness, relation, and harmony operate across the three great phases of existence.” I like that description—that the Tripartite Tractate gives the metaphysical architecture of consciousness rather than a myth. I always like to take the higher, meta view of information, which is literally a step above the normal language and arguments. That’s the secret of how I observe and reconcile seemingly irreconcilable positions—by looking up above the words for the meaning behind them. It seems to me that most people are lost in the language and “can’t see the forest for the trees.” Not meaning you, necessarily, it’s just my observation of how understanding goes awry. By taking the meta approach, the concepts automatically simplify as many points of view and language choices are collapsed into their base meanings. The words I use in my Simple Explanation of gnosis and science and everything else are not written in stone. They are my attempt to convey large concepts in the simple, most recognizable forms. If I say “god” it’s because people are familiar with that term. I offer alternative words, like Source, Mother-Father, Metaverse, the Great One, the Origin, so that people will see that the particular word is less important than what it represents and that what they think of as god has a broader meaning than the meme they have been holding onto. These images from my well-worn copy of the Tripartite Tractate of The Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer, show you the process by which I read and interpret arcane texts. I put the language into illustrated concepts and words I can recognize and understand. The writer shared this final thought from the Chat GPT: There is also a genuine philosophical difficulty: how can a perfect and harmonious divine Fullness generate an irrational act? Saying that Logos possessed the capacity to exceed his proper limits explains the mechanism only by placing the possibility of deficiency inside the supposedly perfect order. He says, I think that is actually a pretty decent question from our AI demiurge—right? I expect that you have a great answer though. To which I reply: As to the Demiurge’s new question that you have put forth in this email—that’s an old canard that is often trotted out to stump theists. “How could a good and perfect God allow for the creation of evil?” I am not at all stumped by that question. The answer can most simply be stated in two words: Free Will. If we begin with the premise that the Father/Source/etc. emanates its entire nature outward with its emanation, then obviously free will is a part of that emanation. After all, it is inarguable that the Source possesses free will. The Aeons have free will. Logos is an Aeon. Logos has free will. While the rest of the Aeons were using their free will to cooperate with each other and to glorify the Father and the Son, Logos used its free will to go in a fresh direction. Logos thought it would be going upward to rejoin the highest glory. The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos didn’t realize this was in impossibility, because no one can approach the power source that is the Origin without being annihilated. And like a magnetic polarity, Logos was repelled by the Source and was knocked out of alignment with the Fullness (the fall). This dissonance became our material cosmos. And because Logos had free will, we have free will. This all flows logically from the a priori definition of the Source. This may sound mythological, but it is not. It could be easily described in scientific terms. Like the way a beam of focused light still allows for stray photons to go off beam. Or boiling water in the kettle mostly clumps together on the top of the water as bubbles, but some bubbles go outward to the edge of the kettle and pop. And so forth. The limit is our language, not the architecture or process. The limit is also imposed by the meme bundle being held the human observer-inquirer when their memes do not allow for certain possibilities to be seen and accepted. It is our meme attachments that limit our capacity to observe and learn. So says me.

What does it mean to love your country?  Is that nationalism?  And isn't nationalism—you know—bad?  And how should our allegiance and love of country be weighed against our duties and affections to family and faith?   Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by John Wilsey to discuss his latest book, God and Country: Upholding Faith, History, and National Identity, the origins of nationalism and how it differs from patriotism, the link between history and love of ones country, the battles between the Romantics and Rationalists, and that great public servant, the freak show John Quincy Adams.   About John Wilsey From the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary   Dr. John Wilsey is Professor of Church History and Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology.   Prior to coming to Southern, Wilsey taught elementary, middle, and high school students in history and Bible for eleven years in North Carolina and Virginia. He also has served Southern Baptist churches, as an associate pastor in Charlottesville, Virginia for eight years and interim pastor for three years in Spring, Texas. Between 2011 and 2017, he taught history and philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, with most of his teaching load in a fully accredited baccalaureate program in a maximum-security unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.   Dr. Wilsey's primary areas of teaching at Southern Seminary and Boyce College are in modern church history, history of Western thought, and American history. He supervises PhD dissertations in the areas of American church history and history of philosophy.   In addition to his work at Southern Seminary and Boyce College, Wilsey has held several fellowships, including with the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville as non-resident fellow (2023-2024); the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty as Affiliate Scholar (2016-2020); the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal as Wilbur Fellow (2023); and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in the Politics Department at Princeton University as William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life (2017-2018). He currently holds fellowships at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy as Senior Fellow, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention as Research Fellow, and the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary as Research Fellow.   Wilsey's academic works have been reviewed in outlets such as National Review, Publisher's Weekly, Journal of Church and State, Fides et Historia, Providence, Church History, Reading Religion, Catholic Books Review, Reviews in American History, Anxious Bench, Claremont Review of Books, First Things, The American Conservative, Christianity Today, and The Federalist. He has appeared on podcasts and programs hosted by the Acton Institute, New Books Network, Current, Thinking in Public, Law and Liberty, the City of Man Podcast, Christ Over All, the Museum of the Bible, the Family Research Council, BBC Radio Wales, 9Marks, the McConnell Center, the Commonwealth Policy Center, and Ben Franklin's World.   Wilsey has produced peer-reviewed pieces in the journal Religions and in academic books published by Palgrave and Routledge. He has contributed other chapters to books published by Crossway and B&H Academic as well as long-form articles to Modern Age: A Conservative Review and Fides et Historia. He has served as manuscript reviewer for American Political Thought, Religions, InterVarsity Press, and New York University Press. He has also served as book review editor for H-AmRel of the H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online network and The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.   Wilsey has served on the Ciceronian Society Advisory Board, the Kern Foundation Advisory Council, the Board of Directors of the Society for Values in Higher Education, the Scholar's Council for the Center for the Electoral College, the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives Advisory Board, and the Annual Meeting Proposal Review Board for Church History as well as the Membership Committee of the Evangelical Theological Society.   In 2020, Wilsey was named Tutor of the Year in Boyce College's Augustine Honors Collegium. He has addressed students, faculty, and public audiences as an invited lecturer at Princeton University, Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Louisville, the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, Waynesburg University, Calvin University, St. Francis University, Hannibal-LaGrange University, Charleston Southern University, Grand Valley State University, the College of Biblical Studies, Houston Baptist University, Northwest Nazarene University, the University of Wyoming, Samford University, Spring Arbor University, Ave Maria University, the Philos Project, the Religious Freedom Institute, the Russell Kirk Center, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and the Kentucky Historical Association.   Over the years, Wilsey has remained active with academic societies, reading papers at meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Conference on Faith and History, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Christian Scholars' Conference, the Society for Values in Higher Education, the Society for US Intellectual History, the African American Intellectual History Society, the Ciceronian Society, the Association for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Center for Christian Study in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Ciceronian Society, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Philadelphia Society, and the James Madison Society.   Wilsey is a columnist for World Opinions, and his other public writings have appeared in outlets such as Law and Liberty, Current, Modern Reformation, Acton's Commentary, Christianity Today, Providence, Public Discourse, 9Marks Journal, The Gospel Coalition, Aeon, History News Network, The American Conservative, The Imaginative Conservative, Anxious Bench, Religion and Liberty, and Religion in American History. He has reviewed numerous books for outlets such as Themelios, Southeastern Theological Review, Public Discourse, Fides et Historia, Westminster Theological Journal, Trinity Journal, The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Journal of Church and State, Evangelical Quarterly, Journal of Markets and Morality, Religion and Liberty, Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care, H-Diplo, Ad Fontes, and The London Lyceum.   Wilsey is married to Mandy, his wife of twenty-seven years, and they have two children. He is an elder at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.  

100 years of Cthulhu! What happens when we go back to that story, as it is? Are we living in post-Cthulhulean times, or are we still building the Old Ones? Plus: what ever happened to the Aeon of Horus?  Check out ⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/consensusunreality⁠ for this full episode and 2 exclusive eps monthly, our full episode archive, written content, printed magazine and more..  Merch coming soon... Intro music by Treatment https://treatmentforu.bandcamp.com/album/pond-life  

Created by GUNGNIR Founder and Publisher Matthew Medney, the series features appearances from a rotating cast of comedians that include Julia Hladkowicz (America's Got Talent, Comics Unleashed), Rama Vallury (Super Pumped), Raquel Woodruff (This Time), Jordan Stidham (The Martian Broadcast), Donna Dubrow(Ex Studio Executive, Professionally Unimpressed), as well as “Ad-Man” legend Cliff Medney. Badd, Gramm-mar is a chaotic comedy series about a dysfunctional Los Angeles book club where every week a new book sparks a completely different collision of personalities, perspectives, and worldviews – which inevitably leads to some form of complete emotional meltdown over conflicting opinions regarding the book. Part review show, part social experiment, and part emotional group therapy disguised as fandom discourse, the series follows a rotating cast of readers, “failed” creatives, intellectuals, romantasy addicts, comic shop lifers, and people still trying to graduate to adulthood. Each episode centers around a new “book of the week,” ranging from science fiction epics and romantasy sensations, to literary classics and underground cult favorites, but the conversations quickly spiral far beyond the page. What starts as debates about stories becomes arguments about class, identity, ambition, politics, love, aging, masculinity, feminism, success, failure, and the increasingly unstable state of modern culture itself.“Badd, Gramm-mar began as an experiment to help readers discover great books, but it quickly evolved into something we believed could be a beacon for the book community.” said Matthew Medney, Founder and Publisher of GUNGNIR.“What emerged wasn't a book club. It was a collision of perspectives. Every episode brings together five voices from different walks of life and asks them to debate the same story, revealing as much about themselves as the book in front of them. The comedy is real, the disagreements are authentic, and occasionally the insights are of value. While we may be reviewing books on the surface, Badd, Gramm-mar is ultimately a conversation about the cultural zeitgeist. Books remain one of the last great bastions of subcultural identity, where tribes are formed, ideas are tested, and the future of culture is quietly negotiated one page at a time.”The series blends emotionally grounded character comedy with improvised chaos, where every member of the club represents a completely different worldview and walk of life. During the season, the club is forced to relocate to a new venue due to its own dysfunction, transforming the setting into an evolving reflection of the group's emotional state. Among the graphic novels and prose the group will be reviewing in its first months include Fourth Wing, Ministry Of Time, Project Hail Mary and Absolute Batman, as well as GUNGNIR titles Aeon, Existence Equation, Last Breeds and Deadweight. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.

Created by GUNGNIR Founder and Publisher Matthew Medney, the series features appearances from a rotating cast of comedians that include Julia Hladkowicz (America's Got Talent, Comics Unleashed), Rama Vallury (Super Pumped), Raquel Woodruff (This Time), Jordan Stidham (The Martian Broadcast), Donna Dubrow(Ex Studio Executive, Professionally Unimpressed), as well as “Ad-Man” legend Cliff Medney. Badd, Gramm-mar is a chaotic comedy series about a dysfunctional Los Angeles book club where every week a new book sparks a completely different collision of personalities, perspectives, and worldviews – which inevitably leads to some form of complete emotional meltdown over conflicting opinions regarding the book. Part review show, part social experiment, and part emotional group therapy disguised as fandom discourse, the series follows a rotating cast of readers, “failed” creatives, intellectuals, romantasy addicts, comic shop lifers, and people still trying to graduate to adulthood. Each episode centers around a new “book of the week,” ranging from science fiction epics and romantasy sensations, to literary classics and underground cult favorites, but the conversations quickly spiral far beyond the page. What starts as debates about stories becomes arguments about class, identity, ambition, politics, love, aging, masculinity, feminism, success, failure, and the increasingly unstable state of modern culture itself.“Badd, Gramm-mar began as an experiment to help readers discover great books, but it quickly evolved into something we believed could be a beacon for the book community.” said Matthew Medney, Founder and Publisher of GUNGNIR.“What emerged wasn't a book club. It was a collision of perspectives. Every episode brings together five voices from different walks of life and asks them to debate the same story, revealing as much about themselves as the book in front of them. The comedy is real, the disagreements are authentic, and occasionally the insights are of value. While we may be reviewing books on the surface, Badd, Gramm-mar is ultimately a conversation about the cultural zeitgeist. Books remain one of the last great bastions of subcultural identity, where tribes are formed, ideas are tested, and the future of culture is quietly negotiated one page at a time.”The series blends emotionally grounded character comedy with improvised chaos, where every member of the club represents a completely different worldview and walk of life. During the season, the club is forced to relocate to a new venue due to its own dysfunction, transforming the setting into an evolving reflection of the group's emotional state. Among the graphic novels and prose the group will be reviewing in its first months include Fourth Wing, Ministry Of Time, Project Hail Mary and Absolute Batman, as well as GUNGNIR titles Aeon, Existence Equation, Last Breeds and Deadweight. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 80 Did ancient asteroid impacts prevent Earth's continents from forming A new study suggests the barrage of asteroid impacts that slammed into the ancient Earth during the Hadean Eon between 4.6 and four billion years ago may have prevented the formation of the planet's first continents. Could the ice giants Uranus and Neptune really be magma worlds A new study suggests that the solar systems two ice giants Uranus and Neptune might actually be magma worlds. World's biggest atom smasher powers down The world's most powerful atom smasher has been shut down for a four year major refit. The Science Report Sedentary behaviour linked to a 9% higher risk of death by cancer. Confirmation that mRNA vaccines are safe and highly effective. Artificial night time lighting has made planet Earth 16 percent brighter between 2014 and 2022. Study shows sending an electric current through black coffee can measure its strength and roast. Skeptics guide to AI and misinformation. Our Guests This Week: Professor Tim Johnson from Curtin University   And our regular guests: Alex Zaharov-Reutt from techadvice.life Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics  

Mourning is cited as a need on the Nonviolent Communication needs list, paired with its counterpart: joy. Along with many others, I believe that we have largely lost the capacity to mourn, and that this loss costs us more than we realize, including in our most intimate relationships.Join me in this episode as I draw on the work of environmental anthropologist Sophie Chao, whose Aeon essay *How to Mourn a Forest* documents the mourning practices of the Marind people of West Papua, a community whose ancestral lands are being destroyed by oil palm plantation expansion. What the Marind offer is a glimpse into what I call active mourning, not the private collapse of grief, but a deliberate, communal practice of turning toward loss rather than away from it. I also touch on how, in my work with couples, it's not uncommon for one of the individual's parents to have recently died and how unbeknownst to them, residual feelings from childhood will quietly resurface within the relationship in surprising ways. ---**Referenced in this episode:**Sophie Chao — *How to Mourn a Forest*, Aeon Magazine, 23 May 2023https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-mourn-a-forest-a-lesson-from-west-papuaMarshall Rosenberg — Nonviolent Communication: A Language of LifeStephen Jenkinson — *Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul*"Grief is not a feeling, it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you — we are not on the receiving end of grief, we are on the practising end of grief."The Marind song in this episode was composed by Andreas, a Marind youth, and is quoted within Sophie Chao's essay:**Find Rachelle:** rachellelamb.com

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week was part one of my interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson of the Gnostic Union, and he explained to us a bit about who the Gnostic Union is and what they believe in. At the beginning of that episode, I read from the Gnostic Union website their history and mission statement. And my brother Billy called me up and said, “Oh, but there’s a point of their theology that’s all wrong. I know they’re ecumenical and all, but we mustn’t fall into the error of wrong teaching.” And, you know, I totally agree with that concept, not teaching anything that is incorrect or that doesn’t make sense, according to the Gnosticism that I share with you here. And it created a very large discussion between my brother and me. And I don’t even have enough time in this short introduction to go into the point that Bill brought up out of their statement of beliefs. So we’ll wait and we’ll do that when these interviews are all over and that way we can go into depth and give the topic the attention it deserves. You see, the Gnosticism that I share with you here mostly comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. And the Tripartite Tractate is a very unusual book. It is not a book of mythology. It is not a book of ancient myths concerning angels and demigods and great battles in heaven and so forth. It’s not that kind of book. We think of it as physics. It’s literally a book that describes the cosmology and the cosmogony, that is, how consciousness came to be transmitted from the base state of consciousness that we call the Father or the Source, and all the way downstream into, ultimately, us. We’re sitting here talking and thinking about it. This is pure consciousness we’re talking about. It’s not particularities. You understand? Gnosis itself we think of as that river of consciousness. That’s what gnosis is. So, I often say, if my dog can’t understand the gnosis, it’s not really gnosis—it's a knowledge claim. If a blade of grass or a tree in the forest can’t bask in the gnosis, then it’s not really gnosis. It’s a human knowledge claim. This is the reason why here at Gnostic Insights and on the Gnostic Reformation, we do not dwell in the history of things. We dwell in the understanding or the gnosis itself. The cosmogony and cosmology of Gnosticism that I share with you here is a logical step-by-step rollout of the consciousness of the Father or the Source. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. It’s the base state. It’s the matrix of consciousness itself and how it flows down to us. There are necessary steps described in the Tripartite Tractate for how that consciousness is differentiated and particularized and then rolled down. And how it is that we material beings are different than the ethereal beings. How could that have possibly happened? It’s like that. It’s a logical progression that necessarily comes out of an a priori statement of consciousness as the ground state. That’s quite a bit different than mythologies of how these angels fit in with these gods and goddesses down here on earth and so forth. Because those particularities definitely come out of the mind of humans. They can be inspired. Okay, I’ll give you that. But they are knowledge claims. They’re not necessarily gnosis and because of that they can go wrong. They can be wrong. Whereas starting with this a priori notion of consciousness ending up in us and how does that occur? By what means does that possibly happen? And how is it that we earthlings plug into that illimitable consciousness? That’s a different thing. That’s a description of process. That’s an understanding or a gnosis of what it is that we are part of. 15 steps in Gnostic Cosmology So I’m not knocking the history or the particularities that Bishop Wilson shares with us. But the gnosis that leads you to enlightenment is simply this: We come from the Father [El Elyon] or from the Source or from the Mother-Father or from the Great Mother—whatever you want to call it. We come from that Source, that unlimited well of consciousness and life and power and might and love. And then we will return to that. That’s all you have to know. We come from Above and we return to Above. And with that knowledge, that’s your base state. That’s what the blades of grass and the dogs and the trees all understand. All the rest of the particularities of who and why and how, those are just details being filled in. Some of them out of gnosis, but most of them out of tradition or history. So we’ll be proceeding now into part two of my interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson of the Gnostic Union. And later on, we’re going to talk some more about the difference between mythology and the process of gnosis. That is what this podcast specializes in. That’s what my brother Bill and I have parsed out and discovered out of direct mining of the Tripartite Tractate. Our gnosis comes from that and it proceeds in an orderly fashion that doesn’t require any extra research. It’s all about gnosis and what must be. But here, let’s go back to this interview with Brother Wilson. **************************************************************** Cyd: Well, tell me more about your Bible that you wrote. What do you call it? You call it… Bishop Nathan Wilson: I call it The Gnostic Christian Truth Bible. I actually asked one of the older bishops that trained me, Bishop Jason, and he started that. So, I like the name. So, I thought, okay, I want to put Gnostic Christian in there. So, I was going to call it first the Truth Bible. He requested that, but I thought, well, Gnostic Christian makes it less likely for the Catholics to come after me as well, and the Protestants. Many do not like my translations. They are quite upset that I’ve done this, but they don’t put too much light on me. So, it’s best not to give me too much attention, basically. So, the less attention I have, the less people know about this, but which is something unique about mine. I don’t just offer my translations. I offer the original Koine Greek with it, so they can look at the actual text. So, even if my translation, say, could be wrong, they could look straight at that text and go argue with the text that they see, which I also wanted to include for their own reason, and when I included the alternative English, it’s so I might read it one way, but someone else is going to read it another way, and that can teach me something new. I feel, oh, I didn’t understand it like that. So, that’s why I wanted to keep that in there too, and a couple of words I kept in there were Greek. So, I kept Logos. I kept Kosmos, Zoe, Sophia, Archon. Magus. I kept all these words. So, very, very Gnostic, and you won’t find these in the English translations. They have gone out of their ways to censor them. I also kept the word daemon or daimon, daemon, so I did not put that down as demon because that’s not what it means. So, I kept the original Greek context of use, and I also add a Greek, Koine Greek, index in my translation so people can actually look at little snippets of what these words mean. So, I have some things in here. So, this is just on one page on basically all Greek with English meaning. So, there’s Logos, which I explained means God’s word, God’s authority, God’s reasoning, song, and speech, and utterance. So, when you see Christians speak that Jesus is speaking the Word, or in the beginning there was Word, they are doing a disservice to what’s being implied. This is the word of God. Very different, and even the word God we use is very English. I did keep up, but for the English sake of things. So, English people wouldn’t freak out too much on me, and another thing is also a safer mouthful, because this Word means supreme deity, deity of deities, which is very interesting. Otherwise, we would go into a god, which is lesser gods as well. So, we have a pantheon. So, it was very different, like even monotheism would evolve into what we think it is today, but in the ancient past with ancient Jewish people, they did believe in other gods, it’s just they chose to worship one god. So, this would be not the same as monotheism now, where you completely reject them as non-existent. This wasn’t that case. So, they had a very different mind. So I kept Sophia being wisdom. I mentioned this is how this is feminine wisdom, God’s feminine wisdom, coming from the Hebrew word Chokmah. Sometimes those are called Chokmah. So, I kept that in there as Sophia. Zoe, I kept too, meaning basically when you see eternal Zoe, that’s eternal life. So, that’s implying the feminine wisdom again, but also the spiritual benefits one receives with a spiritual relationship with God, or what’s with mine. So, I kept that in there. So, it’s very feminine, and that’s being removed. They would not want you to know that life is Zoe, and there’s other words they could have used for life or soul, but they chose to use the word Zoe, and that’s important. So, I kept that in there. And I’ve also got Megas. I’ve already mentioned that, but Magus comes from—here’s two words that are entwined, but the thing was the church has used a later translation, which would be terrible, but that’s kind of wrong, and this is because the language would evolve over time. It came to words Megus and Magos, which basically would be Magi, and then great and powerful, larger than life. So, Jesus was also called Iesous Magos. So, Jesus the Great, Jesus the Wise, has been censored because of Magus, and they don’t want you to know about Simon Magus. They don’t want you to know anything about Gnosticism. So, this has been censored, and I’ve also put some passages where find this. I kept Daemon in here, or Diamon. Gehenna, I also translated in here. I kept Gehenna. I did not use hell because hell is German. It’s realm of light in German, so it’s a Germanic word. So, I kept the word Gehenna, which is ultimately what we would kind of call hell, but it’s not what people think it is. That’s an evolved tradition. So, Gehenna or even Abaddon, these are two different words, but the same thing. Gehenna was the place where the soul was destroyed or purified. So, the text can translate to eternal punishment, but that’s not strictly bound to it. That’s more would be a later theology bound to that translation where it means period of time. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean all these different things. It’s like the word soma where it’s all about Jesus’ body. It can be living body, dead body, or a carcass, or even the living body of the church, which is more symbolic, but fascinating. I also kept in here a couple words, such as I explained Hades, which is mentioned with Sheol and how that’s separate from Gehenna. I’ve kept Helios, Selene, Astron, or Asterios, as well as Aletheia. These words are very interesting because they are all gods. They’re all Greco-Roman gods. So, the scholars or, I really should say, a Christian apologist, that state there’s no pagan gods in the New Testament—they are entirely wrong. It’s just that they have looked at it in a modern Greek eye instead of looking at an ancient past—they would have seen the gods being mentioned. So that’s very interesting. So when Jesus says that the stars and the sun is falling, he’s not speaking about the sun and stars. He’s speaking about the Helios, the Roman sun god is falling, and the stars and goddesses falling, as well as Selene, the moon, so the moon goddess. That’s the falling of the pagan Roman gods that was subjecting the Jewish people. So very different theology. So theology matters. So we have to look at how people believed back these times. [Jesus speaks of the stars, moon, and sun in Matthew 24:29, Mark 13:25, Luke 21:25. Assigning them as gods and goddesses is Bishop Wilson's interpretation.] The Jewish people did not like the Romans. Not saying that all of them did not. We had some that were pro-Roman. One of the Romans that was involved in the Jewish revolt, fighting against the Jewish people, was Jewish, which is cool. And he was related to Philo of Alexandria. So very interesting. I think he might be his grandson. Cyd: Let me jump in for a second as we’re speaking about gods and the God Above All Gods versus lesser gods. Is it your thought that the God of the Jews of the Old Testament, Jehovah, is a lesser god as opposed to the God Above All Gods? Bishop Nathan Wilson: Yes. Cyd: Okay, so Jehovah is the tribal god of the Old Testament? Bishop Nathan Wilson: Yes, a bit of a mix. So there’s two gods. Well, there’s a couple, if you’ve got to go every single god being mentioned. But what they’re describing is, say, Deuteronomy 32:8, you have El Elyon dividing up the nations according to the Elohim being children of El, and Yahweh received his inheritance from the most high God. So Yahweh was more like a guardian deity, basically. He was a brother of Baal. But some Canaanites believed that Yahweh was Baal. So Yahweh kind of came later after Baal. But the first to worship Yahweh were the Sashu of Yahweh. So they were Canaanite raiders. Hebrew was also a Canaanite language.  [The earliest trace of Yahweh isn't Israelite—it's desert-born. Egyptian inscriptions speak of the “Shasu of YHW,” nomadic peoples on the edges of Canaan, sometimes regarded as raiders. It suggests the name of Yahweh may have emerged out of the wilderness before it was ever claimed by Israel. Even Hebrew itself comes out of the same Canaanite linguistic world.] So I see the views—the ones that were worshipping El would be the ones that would become the Essenes or Jewish mystics. So the Essenes worshipped El. They didn’t worship Yahweh. They viewed Yahweh as a lesser god, which is one reason they challenged the temple, because they viewed, you guys aren’t worshipping God, you’re worshipping the lesser deity, you’re worshipping an angel. And so they rejected the temple. And the priesthood was corrupt. So then you also had the Magharians or Magarites. They were first century BC era Jews. They were proto-Gnostic, so that’s a scholar term. So they were Jewish mystics. They believed that Yahweh was a demiurge and that he was a lieutenant. So not an evil demiurge, but he was ignorant of the most high Father El Elyon, but that’s not a name to them. That was just a title meaning most high God. So they didn’t believe in God with a name, the unknowable Father, they believed was beyond sex as well. So Mother-Father, basically. So beyond all things. Too perfect to interfere with matter. And they believed that the Torah had been corrupted. So that’s fascinating. So that’s a group that we want to talk about. So we had about 25 different versions of Judaism during that time with all different beliefs. So what type of Jew was Jesus? This makes a big, big difference. So not all Jews worshipped Yahweh. Some viewed him as a lesser God and some viewed him as the devil, which is whack. So the only Gnostics or proto-Gnostics would use that word devil at that time. So we have the wisdom of Solomon, which is the first text adored by Christians that they would say, look, this is our Messiah mentioning he’s a dying and rising Messiah calling himself the Son of God and he’s been crucified. So this means that just like our text, he would die a shameful death. But this text mentions that through death, the devil enters the world. So the Pharisees didn’t believe in the devil. The Sadducees didn’t either. But what’s interesting about the Pharisees and Sadducees and the Herodians, which kind of made up both these groups, they were a part of both, just the Herodians mostly supported King Herod. They believed that either King Herod was the Messiah or his family would be, or they belonged to the Sadducees and didn’t believe in a Messiah. So the Sadducees didn’t believe in angels. They didn’t believe in an afterlife. They believed once you were dead, the soul turned to dust. God was too perfect to interfere with humans. So that’s an interesting belief. But we had different subsects of Sadducees that had a different opinion to that. They believed that God did interfere with humans, but we had total free will. So they could interfere with some things, but there was no Messiah. There was no angels. So they believed that a human could be a messenger of God. That was about it. So like Moses. Then you had the Pharisees. They believed that Satan served Yahweh. His job was to test humanity or seduce humanity away from God. So that way mankind had free will. But some Pharisees didn’t believe that. They believed that Satan, Hasatan, was just symbolic for mankind’s inclination towards evil. So they didn’t believe in an evil being. So their belief was that God ordained good and evil, basically, would use evil for his own will. So that’s trippy, very trippy. So the Pharisees had a very different belief. They didn’t believe in the adversary against God. They didn’t believe in fallen angels. Later on, they would take on this belief, borrowing it from mystics and zealots. So funny enough, they would be influenced by Jesus’ teachings, such as saving a life on the Sabbath. The Pharisees would not do that. But to be fair, some Essenes wouldn’t do that either. Some Essenes were very warlike, wanting to join God’s angelic army fighting at the Armageddon of the last days of the world. But these mystics, they are the only groups that believed in fallen angels and believed in a place of punishment. The only groups. And that’s fascinating. So they believed in a physical adversary against God. And these beliefs are carried on in the Christianity with the Armageddon day, or even the belief that God basically allows Satan to do what he wants, but he’s going to conquer over him. That was an Essene belief. They believed that Belial was the adversary against God, a fallen angel, leader of the fallen angels, and God would allow him the sin because he would destroy him in the end. So that was an Essene belief, but not all that belief. Some believed that basically fallen angels chose to rebel against God, so they had free will and that God would overcome them in the end. So that’s different. So we have to look at those beliefs because that makes a big difference in theology as well. And one reason I chose to keep daemon or daimon in the text is because this doesn’t mean Jesus is casting out evil demons, but rather, well, the ghost of the mystic belief of pagan gods were fallen angels. So he’s casting out pagan gods, or he’s just casting out unclean spirits, depending on what the definition of word is, because that daimon or unclean spirit, for instance, isn’t always referenced to a pagan god. It’s just someone who’s died vengeful or angry at God, and is now just a ghost causing haunting. So it depends on how it’s being used. So I kept those words in there. So if the word said unclean spirit, I kept that as unclean spirit. But if it was going into a daimon for a pagan god, basically I’ll keep it as that daimon, so they could choose how they’re going to read it. Because sometimes you’re dealing with two things at once. Sometimes you’re dealing with an unclean spirit, then a pagan god’s being mentioned too. So this archon ruler’s having little other minions subject under him. So we even have an archon ruler being mentioned. So an archon of the daemons, ruler of pagan gods. So other gods had dominions, basically. So they viewed these other gods having their own realms of power, which we also see in the Gnostic text. So I kept all that. I also kept the archon of the synagogue, which is a ruler of the synagogue. So it’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s just political rulers that are mentioned. So an archon of the Gentiles, for instance, is just a ruler of Gentiles, just a politician. I have kept archons in the sense of Yahweh somewhat, I believe, as being the devil. Because in John 8:44, we have Jesus going up to the Pharisees and Sadducees and Herodians who made up the high priesthood. He says, You are of your father, the devil. But if only these Gnostic Jews believed in the devil and their God is Yahweh, who’s he calling devil? And then when the daemons are calling him Son of the most high God, they’re calling him huios, which means son. Huios tou theou tou hypsistou, which is Greek for Son of the most high God. But if you put this in the Hebrew, it’s Son of El Elyon. So this is what the pagan gods are calling him. So the lesser gods. And then he’s also saying that we’re all the children of El Elyon, which is also fascinating. And also the word for son they’re using just means child. It can be male or female. But again, they’re wanting a male audience. So they restricted it, which is a shame. Cyd: How about the word aeon? A E O N. What do you do with that word? You know, in my work with the Tripartite Tractate, it seems to me that most references of aeon in the New Testament translate it as time, a period of time, or the end of the ages, the ages. Whereas I tend to see it always as eternal beings from the ethereal plane. What do you think about that? Bishop Nathan Wilson: I love that. I think that too. I think it’s a mixture of all these things, which is also, I keep, it depends on the context of use. But a lot of times you do see the text that is referring to a higher being, which is beautiful to mention, especially when you’re looking at Gnostic works. But you do see this in the New Testament as well. So you see one text mentioning, for instance, who is this Sophia and this higher power? And that’s how the text can translate too, which is fascinating. So that means who’s this unknown higher power. And then it mentions about the Aeon. And so you see all this sort of stuff being mentioned. Yes, it means an eternal being or an angelic being, but it can also mean eternity or a period of time. So depending on the context of use. So words have power as well. So that’s interesting. So again, how it’s used can make a world of a difference. And it’s interesting when they’re using certain words because there are some times that they could have chosen to use a different word. So when they’ve used a certain word like that, that can change the entire context of meaning. Cyd: Right. Like saying there’s some reference to judgment at the end of the age. And I’m always thinking that it’s judgment from the Aeons when I see that. But I’m not translating from scratch, I’m taking biblical translation, so what do I know? Bishop Nathan Wilson: You’re spot on though. So you’re correct. So it can translate that as well. And we have to realize that we have different versions of Christianity. So that’s certainly appropriate for a first century understanding. Most people are looking at from fourth century. So you’re looking at it from a first century point of view. And so you’re ahead of others in that sort of case, which is beautiful to see. So that’s rare. And I chose to keep that for that reason. So people can have their own conclusions, not having it forced onto them. Cyd: You are very much into the history of things. You’re an historian. I am not at all interested in history per se. I’m always talking about what other people believed in other times. That is not pertinent to our gnosis here and now. So what do you view the purpose of this deep historical knowledge that you have concerning the Jews and the Essenes and whatnot? And is it necessary to go into all of that? Bishop Nathan Wilson: If you want to, I guess, teach from a historical perspective as well as a spiritual one, then yes. But if you want to go for spiritual, you can just go by the heart. There were plenty of spiritual teachers that were illiterate, that could not read, that could not write, and they had a beautiful message. So there’s something more powerful that we can receive within that you won’t obtain from books. But ultimately, you can also have wisdom gained from books. It can be a form of worship or a form of connecting with the divine as well. We have many forms of worship or many forms of experience what’s divine or having that intimate moment with what’s divine to reflect and to deepen our purpose. I wanted to know the historical man we call Jesus and ultimately put into practice what he put into practice. So I wanted to look at the history side of things and especially also, what’s another word I would like to use, decondition myself, decondition past beliefs that were harmful, that did not serve me and ultimately not serving others, and also find out that I was wrong about many things, which I wanted to know as well. So what brought me to this was to know the man we call Jesus, Yeshua, or Yehoshua, whichever term you like, whichever name you want to use. So I want to know not just that, but I want to know his practices, what he did with his life, how his first followers lived, how the first Christians lived, and what I could use for my own spiritual path and how I could put that into practice. So that’s why I want to look at the history side of things. I think if you want to put into practice the different techniques of all the many different Gnostics, then you’re going to have to look at some of the history side of things to find those practices. That doesn’t mean that every single practice is necessary for you. So what works for me might not work for others. What works for others might not work for me. So double-edged sword. Cyd: What sort of practices are you referring to? Are these rituals? What’s the practices? Bishop Nathan Wilson: I go into some of the ancient rituals as well. Some of them I might look at the prayers that they would use, the diet they would take, or means of worship. So how they would go about their forms of private practice. So that sort of stuff. And then I might apply it into my own life and see how I can go. There’s still more I’d like to go and check out more. So I’m still studying a couple of some of the ancient practices as well. So from different or religious perspectives as well. And then I can see how I can put it to my own form of use. So I looked at a lot of Jewish Christians, they would do the shema for instance, before their meditations. And I’ll do that as well. [“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one… You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength…”] They also did breath works back then, which would also induce a sense of intoxication if you want to use, or light headness. And in turn that can also open a new state of reality. So entering the spiritual realm can be a vehicle, if you will, to get there. So to open the mind. And that’s also a practice that’s been used in ancient past. And we can certainly use that today. We have modern practices, say like Wim Hof, that teach breath work in meditation. That’s also useful. So sometimes looking at the past, we do see stuff in today’s world that’s not really new. It’s just being basically reentering this world again, from past knowledge gained of old. And I find that in a lot of Gnostic stuff. When you look at history, you kind of see that Gnostics kind of did a lot of things first, that what we’re doing now that we think is modern, but it’s not. It’s ancient. Cyd: That’s why conventional Christians who read my books, they say, oh, you’re just all new age. And I’m like, no, it’s not new age at all. It’s ancient. Bishop Nathan Wilson: Which is a shame that Christians have been shut off into their own world, which is kind of funny. I actually tell most Christians that they are, in fact, new age, because these beliefs are ancient. And what they are going by is, depending on what version of Christianity, if you’re Protestant, that’s 16th century, I believe. Non-denominal, 18th century. Protestant, 16th century. Catholicism, late second century. Orthodoxy, as we know it now, would be about 14th century. But older Orthodoxy, which would be the split from the Catholic church, is fourth century. So it’s when you go to Gnostic Christians, first century, and we’re really the only groups that are surviving, the Jewish Christians got killed. They ultimately were wiped out or would convert to mainstream Judaism or would become Christian or Islam, they would follow as well. So some would be converted to Muslims, which is also interesting as well. We as Gnostics were also harmed by these other groups, by Catholics, Protestants, Muslims as well. At one point Zoroastrians, but that was only one particular era. And we’ve basically arisen from all that, from that underground, and we’ve still survived, which is fascinating. It’s beautiful that we have. And also the texts that have been rediscovered, this is not accidental. This is all happening for a reason. What’s divine is experiencing itself where it can experience itself and express itself again safely in today’s world. In ancient past, it was dangerous to have diversion after the fourth century, which is a shame because the Catholics would kill those who came before them. They didn’t like that. And they even knew that some of the Gnostics, they had older writings, but they still denied them, which is funny. So it’s why such the hate, which is such a shame. So it goes back to that control of power, my way or the highway, basically. And it was never meant to be like that. It was meant to be very universal. It was meant to be very diverse. The first Christians were Gnostics and Jewish Christians, a mixture between strict law observing Jews and a mixture of Gentiles. And then you had the Jewish mystics that became the Christian mystics, which is fascinating. That was the original groups. And the original groups would argue amongst each other. The strict law observing Jews wanted circumcision, where the mystics said, no, no circumcision of the hearts, let the Gentiles come. That’s fine. So even when we look at the word, say, ethnos, for instance, in the Gospels, when you see kingdom against kingdom, nation against nation, these are the same things. So what they’re actually talking about is Gentile against Gentile and kingdom against kingdom. So the Jewish people didn’t have a kingdom at this stage. It was a mixture of Judea, Galilee and Samaria. So we’re the Samaritans. So that’s also something to take into account, too. So they didn’t like that. They were looking for a messiah to reunify the Jewish people, restore the Jewish faith and make Israel a kingdom again. And so some of them didn’t like the fact that Jesus wasn’t after this, for instance. So they didn’t like some of these teachings. It was a bit different. But if you look at the mystics, they had a very different interpretations. They did believe in a renewal of the Jewish faith, but a renewal back to El Elyon and a rejection of Yahweh. So that’s very different. So when you look at repentance, for Israel to repent, meaning for all of Israel to return back to El Elyon. And if you look at for the Gentiles conversion, that would be referring to not converting to any religion, but converting to God. So God outside religion. So fascinating. So you see all this in the original text. Cyd: And why do you suppose, this might be an unanswerable question, but why do you suppose conventional modern Christians are so, you know, extremely antagonistic towards Gnostic Christians? Is it fear or what? Bishop Nathan Wilson: Well, they’ve been told you're the enemy, basically. And yes, some of it is fear. Fear as well of the unknown. And also because of the need of an opponent. So they believe that they are doing a good thing. And if they don’t do this, they can be punished. So it’s the case of where a victim becomes an abuser. So most Christians have never even heard about Gnostics. It’s only the real ones who are into spiritual warfare, basically, and really full on extremist dogmatic ones that are familiar with, and apologetics. But they are now feeling like they’re losing the battle because more people were interested in Gnosticism and especially interested in other Jewish groups and the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the Nag Hammadi. So they’re realizing their other texts and there’s other options now. And that’s great. And regarding even my translations, one reason I chose to do it that I did, I found out that no modern English Bible translates from one source material. They’re all a mixture of different sources. So we have the Codex Sinaiticus mixed with the Latin Vulgate, mixing with Germanic copies, and then mixing ancient Koine Greek into modern Hebrew, putting it back into Greek. And that’s not good at all. So we’re just changing—we’re swapping chapters because we feel uncomfortable with them. So I was mortified when I was looking at that. And so I realized I couldn’t trust basically my Bible anymore. So I thought, well, I’m making this myself. And then I thought, well, I’m going to release it. Let’s go and share it too and do what they will with it. And it opened a lot of doorways to me, actually. So that’s one reason I wanted to give that out so people can have their own faith in their own interpretation and also believe in the message of Yeshua, bringing people back to the Most High God, to the Unknowable God, the Living Father, the Mother-Father. And we also see the Mother being mentioned in other texts too. It’s just mostly blocked out by mainstream Christianity, which is unfair, unfair to women and unfair to humanity with their approaches. It’s been very violent. So we need to remove that violence because that’s nothing to do with Yeshua’s teachings. He didn’t teach us to go around fighting each other. He said, Those who are for me are with me. They don’t understand his message. They very much follow the Catholic teachings of Paul that they’ve been given. And so they can look at the Gnostic teachings of Paul as well, which are also in there. Paul’s letters, we now know they’re mostly all forgeries. We don’t have any original copies either. They’re all later fourth century and we have some second century fragments. But the oldest reference to Paul is from the Ten Letters of Marcion. And he’s the man who compiled the first Christian Bible. And some people can argue, some people don’t believe he was a Gnostic. Others think he was a Gnostic. I think he was a type of Gnostic because he believed in a demiurge. So he believed that the God of the Jews was Yahweh and not the Supreme God of Jesus. That is a very Gnostic belief. But the thing is, the word Gnostic was given to us by the Catholic church, was a way of separating us and identifying us. But we wear it as a badge of honor because we understand they’re just calling us knowledgeable Christians, which is kind of funny. So language is powerful and the Catholic church certainly forgot it. So because of them, we now use daimon as demon. So they’ve basically demonized Jesus. They’ve demonized the Holy Spirit, which is their greatest sin. And they’ve demonized God and every other God. So they don’t know what damage they’ve done. And that’s not good. So I wanted to reverse that damage and bring people back to what I believe is the message of Yeshua, of Jesus, and to have their own spiritual relationship with God, an individual relationship, which is something that I want to see more of. That’s a very beautiful thing. You can’t define that intimate experience without living it. Cyd: Right, right. Well, that's all we have time for in this episode. We'll pick it up again next week for part three of my interview with Bishop Nathan Wilson of The Gnostic Union Church.  I like the way he talks, huh? Until next week, onward and upward and God bless us all.

******Support the channel******Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenterPayPal: paypal.me/thedissenterPayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuyPayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9lPayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpzPayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9mPayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ******Follow me on******Website: https://www.thedissenter.net/The Dissenter Goodreads list: https://shorturl.at/7BMoBFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/Twitter: https://x.com/TheDissenterYT This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/ Dr. Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. His research is primarily in contemporary ethics and philosophy of religion. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, Prospect Magazine, Relevant Magazine, Michael Hyatt Magazine, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, Greater Good Magazine, Nautilus Magazine, Fathom Magazine, Institute of Art and Ideas, and Christianity Today. He's the author of several books, the most recent one being The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. In this episode, we focus on The Honesty Crisis. We talk about what honesty is, and what constitutes an honest person. We discuss whether there is ever permissible to lie, and whether omission is always a form of dishonesty. We talk about how honest people are, based on psychological studies. We discuss whether we are living through a dishonesty crisis, and explore online dishonesty, with a focus on deepfakes and social media. We talk about how people can become more honest. Finally, we discuss whether inconsistency can be a form of dishonesty.--A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, BERNARDO SEIXAS, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, HEDIN BRØNNER, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ALEX CHAU, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, VALENTIN STEINMANN, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, LUCY, MANVIR SINGH, PETRA WEIMANN, CAROLA FEEST, MAURO JÚNIOR, TONY BARRETT, NIKOLAI VISHNEVSKY, STEVEN GANGESTAD, TED FARRIS, HUGO B., JORDAN MANSFIELD, CHARLOTTE ALLEN, PETER STOYKO, DAVID TONNER, LEE BECK, PATRICK DALTON-HOLMES, NICK KRASNEY, RACHEL ZAK, DENNIS XAVIER, CHINMAYA BHAT, RHYS, ALEX MACLEOD, HAIDAR, JULIEN PORCHER, ROBERT SUNDSTRÖM, JON STEWART, AND JENNY M!A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, NICK GOLDEN, CHRISTINE GLASS, IGOR NIKIFOROVSKI, PER KRAULIS, ADAM HUNT, AND JOÃO BARBOSA!AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER,SERGIU CODREANU, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!

The common evolutionary question centers around nature vs. nurture, but maybe we should be asking if we are designed to cooperate or compete? Jonathan R. Goodman is a social scientist based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge and is the author of “Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World.” He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss Darwinian survival vs. species interdependence, what makes us either selfless or selfish and how humans respond in real-world situations that test these theories. His article in Aeon is “How selfish are we?” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week I was listening to one of the radio preachers I like to listen to and I caught a sermon on the Pentecost, and I realized I had at that point a Gnostic insight that Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, when it infused the disciples in the upper room—that is the coming of the Third Order of Powers released by the Christ after his resurrection—that the Third Order Powers are the “anointing of the Holy Spirit.” So quickly, let’s look at the Acts of the Apostles book out of the New Testament, Chapter 2, which is what we now call Pentecost. And when the day arrived that completed the fifty days after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place, and suddenly there came a noise, like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now dwelling in Jerusalem, there were devout Judeans from every nation under the sky, and on the advent of this noise, the multitude gathered and were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying, look, are not all of those who speak Galileans? And how is it that each one of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised? And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, what does this portend? But others, ridiculing them, said, ah, they’re full of sweet new wine. But Peter, standing up along with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them all. Judean men and all of you staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and lend your ears to my words, for these men are not drunk, as you suppose, as it is the third hour of the day. Rather, this is what was declared through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall dream dreams.” [Hart's New Testament] Pentecost by el Greco Now, it’s a much longer passage, and it’s very thrilling and exciting, but we don’t have time today to go into it. Perhaps we’ll speak about this in more depth very soon. But that is the first Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. And I’m going to talk about that today to clear up that confusion, because I’ve always had a bit of a confusion over what we speak of as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us in a Christian manner, or the Holy Spirit coming like tongues of fire in the Pentecost story of the upper room in the book of Acts, yet we all have the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within every cell of our bodies and throughout our entire organism. All of the Second Order powers are infused with the power of God. So what is the Holy Spirit then? And now I understand the distinction between the infusion of the Third Order of Powers and the infusion of the Second Order of Powers. You see, we are Second Order Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are First Order Powers. They have their place Above. We are their fruit. We are their spores. (And I actually ran across a radio preacher, of all things, again last week, saying that the original word for fruit as used in the New Testament is spore. And I’m like, yes, that is exactly what I’ve been saying. So that was another cool Gnostic insight that came by way of a Christian radio preacher. So you can never tell what you’re going to hear on Christian radio.) So, we are the spores of the First Order of Powers. We are their fruit. We are their children. We are the Second Order of Powers, and that is all living things in the cosmos. Everything that moves around, everything that’s soft and squishy, the meat, as I like to say, as opposed to the mud, which is the realm of the Demiurge—the rocks and minerals, the molecules and atoms. But the Third Order of Powers is the army of the Christ. We’ve spoken of that often. We’ve had three recent episodes about the indwelling of the Christ. For example, The Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi from May 29th, 2026, Army of the Christ, May 16th, 2026, and Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge from May 9th, 2026. These all have to do with the coming of the Third Order of Powers. And the coming of the Third Order of Powers didn’t come to Earth until Christ walked the Earth in the form of a human, and that is Jesus the Christ. He’s the only one who has ever claimed that “I and my Father are One.” Jesus is not the same as Buddha. Jesus is not the same as Muhammad or any other prophet. Jesus is not simply a good teacher or an exemplar of morality and ethics. If you think that, as many modern theologians do—the postmodern theologians, the deconstructionists—they have reduced the power of Jesus to that of a prophet or a teacher. And even people I hear, strangely enough, out there on YouTube, claiming that Jesus was a fraud—that there is no such thing as anything that happened in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. That’s an absurdity that is being promulgated by non-believers. If you are a believer in the Father, then you are a believer in the Christ, because Christ was the emissary of the Father to Earth to bring the correcting algorithm, I like to call it, to Earth to patch up our Second Order Power that has been forgotten. We’re born with it. We fully instantiate it within our bodies, but we’ve overlaid it with all kinds of junk, karma and memes from our environment that cloud our gnosis, cloud our ability to perceive the power of the Aeons within us. Christ came, the Third Order of Powers, the army of the Christ, to help us to remember, to remind us of our Second Order power, to remind us of where we come from, to remind us of the Father and the Aeons above. I took notes from the Pentecost sermon I listened to, and I’m going to represent these notes as a Gnostic teaching for you, because once you have the gnosis working in you, once you’ve come to terms with Christ and the Father and the Aeons and the gnosis that you were born with, once you begin to remember your inherent transcendence, then you can read the New Testament with eyes wide open. You can understand the mysteries of the New Testament much better than typical Christians do, because they’re trapped in a formula that is derivative of the early Catholics that had stripped the gnosis out of the Bible in the first place. So we must free ourselves from the doctrine, but not free ourselves of the gnosis. Tricky. The occasion known as Pentecost was when Jesus had been crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then ascended back up above into the Fullness—above the Fullness, because he’s the king of all. And he had promised that he would send a helper—to not worry. He had told his disciples, don’t worry, I’m sending you a helper to help you bring the gnosis to the world, essentially is what he said. This was also promised in the Old Testament. And here I’m going to read you a very important verse out of the Old Testament and translate it for you into Gnostic terms. The verse is Ezekiel 36:24—28, where God promises to cleanse and put a new heart and a new spirit into believers. Now it’s tricky when going all the way back to the Old Testament, because the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, well, it’s pretty much equivalent to the Demiurge. And that’s very dicey, very tricky. The ego of the God of the Old Testament, the ego of Jehovah, is when Jehovah speaks in very egoistic terms about itself and about obedience and the law because, remember, Jehovah is law-bound. The Demiurge doesn’t remember; the Demiurge has forgotten its origins above. When this radio preacher referenced Ezekiel 36, I went to what’s called the online Bible Gateway. That’s a resource you can use. And you type in any phrase or any citation, such as Ezekiel 36:24—28, and it will give you all of the various translations. And you can choose which translation you read or you read them all. Well, since this was a Hebrew exhortation, I decided to use the Orthodox Jewish Bible, which does have a lot of Hebrew in it. So then we have to go into Hebrew translations, but that was a good exercise as well. Oh, to go back and clear up confusion about how to read the Old Testament—if the Old Testament is largely demiurgic, it’s basically when Jehovah is speaking that’s demiurgic. But the prophets were in touch with their gnosis. The prophets were talking to the God Above All Gods. They weren’t talking to Jehovah. They were talking to the God Above All Gods. So their prophecies are coming from above. That seems a pretty simple way to understand it. So the histories are one thing. That’s the histories of the of the Hebrews who were the people of Jehovah. Jehovah was their tribal god. And then there are the prophets who were speaking to the God Above All Gods and giving the Hebrews instructions from the God Above All Gods. These are higher instructions than Jehovah. You see, Jehovah doesn’t remember that it’s a fallen part of an Aeon. Here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about that Aeon as Logos. Many other Gnostics call it Sophia. I prefer Logos. That’s out of the Tripartite Tractate. Logos split apart when he fell and abandoned the chaos down below. And the Demiurge is part of that chaos. So the Demiurge put this world in order, formed the heavens and the Earth in a godlike manner, because he had all the blueprints. He had the remembrance of how things went together, but he didn’t have the remembrance of the Father or the remembrance of his better ascended Self, that being Logos, or the Aeons out of which he fell, the Fullness out of which he came. The Demiurge woke up down here in chaos and remembered that things should not be chaos, wanted them to go back into an orderly manner, had the blueprints of Paradise, essentially, that’s how you can put it, and formed this Earth. But this is an imitation. This is a deficiency of Paradise, and it’s especially deficient because there’s no love here. The minerals do not know love. The mud does not know love. Love doesn’t come from the bottom up, from the Demiurge up, from Jehovah up. Love, consciousness, comes from the God Above All Gods down to us in the form of a Second Order Powers. But we have forgotten, and the Demiurge forgot. So here is a word from one of the prophets who was in touch with the God Above All Gods, giving assurance that salvation would come, that remembrance would come. The Demiurge doesn’t block the prophets because it egotistically thinks that the prophets are speaking of it. You know, the Demiurge takes personally being God, but he’s mistaken in that. He’s a lesser god, the god of this cosmos, but the God Above All Gods is the one who speaks through the prophets. Here’s Ezekiel 36:24—26, from the New King James Version. For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Or as The Orthodox Jewish Bible puts it, A lev chadásh also will I give you, and a ruach chadasháh will I put within you; and I will take away the lev ha-éven (stony heart) out of your basár, and I will give you a lev basár. Now, when it speaks of I will give you a new heart, in Hebrew that is lev chadásh. Lev means inner self, the seat of will and moral character. Chadásh means anew, fresh, renewed, restored. So lev chadásh refers to a renewed inner disposition. A transformed moral center. A recreated will aligned with the Father rather than with stubbornness or idolatry. And when it speaks of and put a new spirit within you, in Hebrew that word, the new spirit, is ruach chadasháh. And it means a new spirit, an awakened pneuma. And pneuma is a Gnostic term. That is the spiritual part of us. Our One Self. So the ruach chadasháh is the spirit. Ruach is spirit, breath, animating force, inner vitality. That’s what it means. Chadasháh means fresh, new, renewed. So in Ezekiel, ruach chadasháh means a new animating principle. A renewed inner drive or spiritual vitality placed within the person. You see where I’m going with this? This is the Third Order of Powers. A new motivating force that empowers obedience and life. This cleansing of a new heart and putting a new spirit within you, ruach chadasháh. It means stripping away the meme shroud is how I generally refer to it in the Simple Explanation. Peeling off all those layers of confusion that obscure our originating Fullness. That’s the filthiness. It’s not the original sin. We aren’t born with original sin. We are born as Second Order Powers, much loved out of the first order powers of the Fullness of God. We forget when we come down here into this material world created by the Demiurge. And then we plug into this culture around us. Think of the media and the social media and all of the lies and confusions that are spread, both purposefully meant to mislead you and confuse you, and just accidentally because people make mistakes and people say the wrong things, even when they think they’re saying the right things. So that’s the filthiness. And the idols— these are the things that you cling to. Generally this narcissistic age we live in is an age of idols, but the idols that we worship aren’t little statues of gods. They are our exercise equipment and our bags of makeup and our, well, of course they can be influencers and they can be movie stars and television actors and musicians and sports figures and politicians. Those can be your idols if you treat them as idols, if you idolize them, if you go all weak in the knees and do anything they say. But we also have our own idols in the form of the things that we cling to and pile up around us that we buy, got to have this, got to have that, got to have this, got to have that. These are idols. So this is a promise to cleanse us from that. In other words, to strip away your meme shroud and let the Fullness shine forth from within you. But it goes beyond that, because it says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And that new heart is the lev chadásh, which is new spirit. And the new heart is lev basár, which literally means in Hebrew, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche. Oh, see, our psyche, that is not our pneuma—that's a Gnostic term as well. We have our pneuma, which is our spiritual Fullness. We have our psyche, which is our psychological aspect—our ego lives there. And we have our hylic, which is the material to which we are bonded in this material world. So this passage promises to put a new heart within us, a lev basár, a soft, receptive psyche; that is to soften our hearts, because they’re hardened by the world and by the memes we cling to. It says, furthermore, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh. And the heart of stone in Hebrew is lev ha-éven, meaning heart of stone, or a hardened psyche. Going to remove that heart of stone, which is very interesting, because of course, I say that the hard rocky places, the stones are demiurgic. That’s the material level, that’s the elemental level. So the heart of stone is the demiurgic heart that we have put inside of us, that we’re bonded to. But this passage wants to turn it into a new heart, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche, as we were originally born with—lev basár. So it says, I will give you that new heart and put a new spirit within you, and take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. The heart of stone, lev ha-éven. And the purifying waters are what do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you. In Hebrew, that was literally mayim tehorím, meaning clean, purifying waters. Jesus spoke of the purifying waters. In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus had sneaked out one night to speak privately with Jesus. He didn’t want anyone to know. And Nicodemus said to Jesus, Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform unless God is within him. And in reply, Jesus said to him, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless someone is born from Above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Jesus replied, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed, because I’ve told you it is necessary for you to be born from Above. [Hart's New Testament] Jesus is speaking of the same water, the water of the spirit, that cleanses us and allows us to be born again from Above. Later on in the book of John, Chapter 7, verse 37, Jesus stood up and said loudly, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts living streams of waters will flow. Now he said this in regard to the spirit, whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament] And this is speaking of the Holy Spirit—what we call the Holy Spirit—because of course we have spirit, we’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us, the First Order of Powers. But he’s talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that comes after Jesus is “glorified.” And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living Above, just as we will all be living Above, in a glorified body, in the presence of the Father. Now, the promise that Jesus referred to—he was quoting out of the Old Testament—something that all of the listeners in his audience already knew. And it’s from Isaiah 12:3 that says, Therefore with joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation. The water that is being drawn is this water that’s being referred to, that we’ve been discussing, out of Ezekiel 36:24—28. That is the living water, the mayim tehorím—the Holy Spirit that bathes us now within and without. We draw the living water of the Third Order Powers into us. This is why accepting the mission of the Christ into your innermost being is essential, because there’s no other way to wash away the memes, the obscurations of the world around us that confuses us and causes us to forget. We’re born with a noble nature. We’re born as Second Order Powers, directly from the Fullness above, but we get lost in the confusion of this world that is created and run by the Demiurge. We forget our ethereal origins. We forget about the Father. We forget about the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The spirit that we’re born with becomes smothered, smothered by the worldly memes we cling to and that cling to us. The living water that comes into our new softened heart can only come when you relinquish the ego that is causing you to hold on tightly to those memes, all those false promises that the world gives. They will not save you. They will not make you happy. They might give you a momentary piece of pleasure when something arrives in the box from Amazon on the front porch, but as soon as you’ve used it, it’s just another thing. But the living water never dies. It’s living waters from the Father flowing all the way downstream through the Son, through the Fullnesses, and only through Christ inside of us can we be washed, baptized from within to loosen the hold. So, the lev chadásh, renew your psychic heart, captures the same teaching that the Tripartite Tractate teaches—that the psyche must be reoriented and made stable. The ruach chadashá, awakening within you the spirit that is from Above, is the same as activating the pneumatic seed, as we say in Gnosticism, not a moral reform. The lev basár, a living heart, soft, able to receive the light, receptive, this is the Tripartite Tractate’s softened, harmonized psyche, that can receive the pneumatic imprint of Christ. And the divine seed will rise within you and rule in peace is what the Tripartite Tractate says of the pneuma ruling through the psyche once integration occurs. So, this is the Gnostic paraphrase then of Ezekiel 36:26—28: I will renew your ego's psychic heart, and I will awaken within you the pneumatic spirit—the One Self that flows from above. I will remove the heart hardened by the archons and the never-ending war, and I will restore your Second Order heart, soft, receptive, and able to receive the light. Through this new heart and new spirit, the divine seed of the Christ within you will rise and rule in peace. That’s just another way we could say the phrase in Ezekiel, in a more Gnostic way. It’s a bath, loosens the hold, washes away those memes, those sins, as the church likes to call it. But it’s more than just your mistakes and your problems. It’s all the stuff that we have around us. That is the job of the Christ, to open our eyes to our original Second Order power, to live within us, to correct our mistakes, to correct our faulty algorithms, to protect us from this demiurgic immersion that we find ourselves in, in this material world. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represents all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. Step aside. Take your ego off the throne. Take the Demiurge off the throne, if you’ve enthroned it. Put down your idols. Push away your possessions, at least long enough to allow the Third Order Powers to come in. Ask the Christ to come in and wash you with the Holy Spirit. Invite the Holy Spirit, the army of the Third Order of Powers, into your organism, literally, and it will cleanse you. It will wash you. Walk in the Spirit of God. Let your eyes be opened to the truth. We’ll talk more about this again. Until then, God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

In the second of two episodes about Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, David talks to critic and memoirist Catherine Taylor about the novel's place in the history of feminism. Is its idea of ‘free women' meant to be ironic? Why are the things that shocked its original readers not the things that shock its readers today? What makes Lessing so much more angry about male hypocrisy than she is about male brutality? And what else by Lessing should we all read? Read more by Catherine on Doris Lessing in this recent essay published in Aeon https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-can-learn-from-doris-lessings-experiments-in-living Join us on Friday 19th June at the Regent Street Cinema in London for the final film in our current season: a screening of Never Let Me Go followed by a live podcast recording with geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford. Tickets available now https://bit.ly/4x641XC You can find out everything you need to know about this podcast – who we are, what we do, plus merch, events and full lists of all episodes including PPF+ bonus episodes on our website https://www.ppfideas.com Next Time in Great Political Fictions: The Dispossessed Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Laura Russ, the new executive director of the Shenehon Center for Real Estate at the University of St. Thomas, talks to F&C reporter Dan Netter. Russ talks about the transition from her position at the nonprofit Aeon and where she intends to take the Shenehon Center.

Every 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 army for Him, as for a king, in which those who belong to this thought share the command and are united in agreement. He also sowed in him, invisibly, a word designed for understanding, and gave him the power to detach and dispel from himself those who were disobedient to him. Those of the imitation, on the other hand, were unprepared for the light, for they had come into being out of darkness and could not comprehend it. To them the light came as a brief terrifying flash, a leap and a blow, that drove them deeper into the shadows of the abyss. To them this utter darkness was home. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 89] The Aeon, Logos, who had Fallen and then abandoned the deficiency he had created, decided to pray that the fixed economy might attain all those who had gone forth from him, including those still clinging to the imitation. In this manner Logos was also made right from the Fall, as those of the deficiency attained the economy of the ALL, and the Second Order of Powers united with the knowledge that had been given them. [verse 91] So those of the deficiency were found worthy of becoming rulers over the unspeakable darkness as their own property and the lot that fell to them. This is what he granted them, so that they too might become useful for the economy that was to be, and of which they were oblivious. And so it came to pass that every grace and food that was contemplated through prayer and the ALL came to be. For the word greatly increased mutual cooperation and expectant hope, and they experienced happiness, deep rest, and undefiled pleasures to the extent each was able to embrace them. [verse 92] Now what this is saying in Simple Explanation terms is that the fruit of the ALL and the Father becomes another fractal iteration of the ethereal Consciousness. The Christ Principle is a perfect fractal iteration of the Father's Consciousness that takes into account the new information arising from the goings-on in our bounded space. The Father, the Son, and the Aeons of the Fullness have just amended the primary algorithm of this universe to include up-to-date data specific to each individual unit of consciousness in our space-time continuum. This new code represents patches to the fragmentary error code of the deficiency in order to end the stalemate and re-establish harmony and proper functioning of the economy. When the Tripartite Tractate speaks of “forms consisting of many forms,” this refers to the nested fractal hierarchies that make up all of the life in of our universe. Our Universal Unit of Consciousness is continually pouring in information, values, love, and coherence. The Christ came into the world to redeem all of creation through His body and His blood, literally, because His body and His blood instantiate the entirely perfect Fullness of the All. The cross bridges Fullness to Earth, neighbor to neighbor. Salvation comes not only to those of us on Earth, but also to the Fullness above, and to Logos in particular, the Aeon whose Fall brought creation into existence. The face of the revealed Christ, quote, possessed the Word of the Son together with His essence, His power, and His form. He was the one He desired and delighted in. He was the one who had been prayed for in love. This Aeon was light and a desire to set aright, an openness for instruction and an eye designed for vision, qualities that it had from those above. Moreover, it was wisdom for His thought against the ones who were placed lower in the economy, a word for speech and other perfecting things of this kind. Those who are redeemed by the Christ are unshackled from the chains that bind the material and psychical orders to this world, so much so, in fact, that they form a new Third Order of Powers, the spiritual ones. The redeemed are also known as the Assembly of Salvation, the Bride, the Church, and the Elect, or the Election. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 93 and 94] The Tripartite Tractate mentions the name of Jesus only a couple of times, and the Savior and the Christ many more times than that. And, of course, the entire book begins with long discourses concerning the nature of the Father and the Son. Here is what it says about Jesus at this point in the story. Because the seed of the promise about Jesus Christ had been deposited, whose revelation and unification we have ministered to, this promise now enabled instruction and a return to that which they had been from the beginning, that of which they possessed a drop inciting them to return to it, which is what is called redemption. And that means to be released from captivity and to obtain freedom. The captivity is of those who were slaves of ignorance, which reigned in its own territories. [verse 117] So the Gnostic Gospel claims that we humans, and all of creation, are all children, or fruit, of the spiritual realm of the Fullness, redeemed by the body and the blood of Christ in the form of a drop of remembrance, a seed of the promise that now enabled instruction and a return to that which we had been from the beginning. Humans were endowed with reason so they could remember their true inheritance and repent of their tenacious claim to material life. This redemption comes easier to some than to others. The Tripartite describes this as humanity coming to exist as three different types with regard to its essence: a spiritual type, a psychological type, and a material type, reproducing the pattern of the three kinds of disposition of the Word from which sprung the material, the psychological, and spiritual beings. The spiritual kind of human is like light from light and like spirit from spirit. It received knowledge straight away from the revelation. When he remembered that which is superior and prayed for salvation, he has salvation without any uncertainty. And these are the prophets, the evangelists, the teachers of the word, whose job it is to help their brothers and sisters to remember the Father above. The psychological kind, however, being light from fire, they tarried before recognizing the one who had appeared to it, and still more before rushing to him in faith. This type is content to have a pledge of assurance of things to come. They’re content to have a promise of a future heaven. Those who rid themselves of the lust for domination that was given to them temporarily and for short periods, who give glory and abandon their rage, will be recompensed for their humility by being allowed to endure indefinitely. [verses 118 and 119] These are most of us folks who feel we’re doing just fine, leading a mostly moral and comparatively upright life, good family people, good citizens, realizing nobody’s perfect, we try to be helpful to neighbors. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that The material kind, however, is alien in every respect. It is like darkness that avoids the shining light because it is dissolved by its manifestation, for it did not accept his coming, and is even filled with hatred against the Lord because he revealed himself. They are those who arrogantly pride themselves in their vainglorious lust, who love temporary glory, who are oblivious to the fact that the power they have has been entrusted to them only for a limited time and period, and for that reason have not acknowledged that the Son of God is the Lord of the All and the Savior, and who have failed to rid themselves either of their fury or their way of imitating those who are evil. They will receive judgment for their ignorance and their senselessness, and that judgment is suffering. [verses 120 and 121] I would describe these material people as proud atheists with no fear of God because they reject sober contemplation of God. Others may proudly call themselves scientists, still others academics. Some may be politicians, industrialists, tech giants, entertainers, or philandering priests. They are successful materialists who have no inclination to replace their ego with God. They mock believers, believing themselves superior to those poor deluded fools. Through Christ and the Third Order Powers, restoration came to the deficiency below. Christ’s incarnation in the body of Jesus and the spilling of his blood onto the earth brought the ALL and the Aeons of the Fullness face to face with the material agony of life, suffering, and death. The final restoration, however, will take place after the ALL is manifested in him who is the Son, the one who is the redemption, who is the road toward the incomprehensible Father, who is the return to the preexistent, and after the members of the ALL have been manifested in him who is truly the inconceivable, ineffable, invisible, and ungraspable one, so that the ALL obtains its redemption. [verses 123-124] The most accurate interpretation of these verses is that the angels were literally inside the body of Jesus, forming a community in him, living and dying with him. Indeed, all of our karyotic cells work as an integrated community inside each of us, devoted to taking care of the needs of our bodies, and we are fractals of the ALL. As for the true baptism into which the members of the ALL descend, and where they come into being, there is no other baptism except the one, and that is the redemption, which takes place in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, after confession of faith has been made in those names, and after one has believed that the things one has been told are real. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 127] Where we Gnostics differ from conventional modern Christianity is that you will have the opportunity to repent and be redeemed during your judgment period, your life review, after this physical body passes away. For then you will come face to face with the truth of it all and there will be no denying it. But until then, until and unless one repents and acknowledges our ethereal origins and ultimate return, there will be suffering brought about by our own ignorance. The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise initially dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies, that paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In paradise there is nothing but life, and so all the grass is always green, the flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily with their family and their friends. Even those who are brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside themselves the seed that is the lust for domination, they will receive the recompense of good things if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things, and provided they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love of temporary glory so as to do the command of the Lord of glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the eternal kingdom. [verse 131] And in my opinion, this is like elected officials whose lust for dominion gets them elected into office, yet they work not just to keep themselves reelected and in power, but they're actually working toward the good of the ALL. So you can have a combination of domination and lust for power and yet work in conjunction with those who are redeemed and those who want only the good for the ALL. That's the way Congress ought to work. As for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision, so they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice that this is how things are. For the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration. Even if some are exalted because of this economy, having been set up as causes for the things that happened, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them, they, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. These too will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency, and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the pre-existent Aeon. [verse 133] The only forms banished to the outer darkness are those attributes of the deficiency that did not exist from the beginning, the shadows and phantoms of the imitation that bring nothing but death and destruction. These are shadows of the Aeons, so when the light comes, the light dispels the shadows and they vanish. And there you have the completion of Gnostic cosmology. Tell me what you think. Let's start a conversation. Onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Hello 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 All Gods on the ethereal plane. And we are born with the full remembrance of the Fullness of God within us. And Jesus came with the army of Christ, which is called the Third Order of Powers. And this army of Christ is armed with all of the love, and remembrance, and consciousness, and free will, and all of the virtues fully remembered, fully expressed. They all came down along with the Christ. And there is one of these Third Order Powers for every one of us Second Order Powers. You have a soldier of the army of Christ assigned to you who came with not only the face of the Son, the face of the Christ, the full embodiment of the Fullness of God, but it came with your face. So that when you pray for salvation, when you pray for redemption—Oh dear God, I don’t know if I can take this anymore. This world is too tragic. It’s too terrible. It’s too full of pain, and suffering, and death, and illness. Please, Lord, rescue me—that prayer goes to the Third Order of Power assigned to you—your guardian angel, if you will. And it’s part of the body of Christ. It is a Third Order of Power that is assigned to you, and you alone. And that is how it is that when you pray for redemption, you can be redeemed instantly. It’s already been done. The Christ has already brought all the Third Order Powers down, one for every one of us. And when you open yourself up, when you admit that you long for the Father above, you long to be reunited with the Fullness of God, you will instantly be reunited with the Fullness of God. That doesn’t mean you’re going to drop dead and be sucked up to heaven. It means that now you have all the remembrance, all the power, all the consciousness, and all of the free will embodied by Jesus. You are like Jesus, at least for that moment you have accepted your Third Order of Powers to take control of your soul. You’re not giving up power. You’re taking away power from the Demiurge. You’ve already given up your power. You’re being pulled this way and that, pulled down and backwards by the Demiurge and the archons. They’re taking your energy. They’re sucking your soul downward and backward. That’s how they maintain their power. That’s how they maintain their control. But true freedom belongs above. True freedom only comes from above. And that’s why we have to align our prayers and align our sights upward. So, I explained all this yesterday to my Hindi friend, who is my tech services guy, and we’re often on the phone together for long periods of time as he’s cleaning the hard drives or downloading updates and so forth. And he totally agreed with what I was saying, because Hinduism is like that. It accepts everyone’s beliefs about God. In Hinduism, people don’t go to hell because they don’t agree with you. People create hell because they have cut themselves off from the goodness of God. In that, we are very much aligned in our belief systems. All we have to know is that the path to the Father above is straight up. It’s just straight up, like a beam of light. It’s a beam of truth that shines down upon us. Just move that ego off of the throne. Move desire for personal power and recognition off of the throne of your embodiment, of your body, of yourself, and allow the Christ to enter your soul. You will immediately be transformed. You will be immediately put in alignment with the Fullness of God. And then you will see for yourself. This is a first-person experience. It doesn’t have to come from someone else. You do not have to perform arcane rituals. You only need to bump your ego off of the throne and pray to God Above All Gods for Christ to enter and guide you. Let’s start there and see if we can’t do that. Please write back to me. Tell me about your experience. Someone please try this, what I’m recommending today. Just move your ego aside for a moment. Pray to the Father for the Christ to enter you, to remind you of the God Above All Gods, to remind you of truth, simplicity, righteousness, the virtues, our aeonic inheritance. Just ask it to remind you, and you will be reminded because we’re all born with this remembrance. Give it a try. Let me know how it goes. Until next week, God bless us all and onward and upward. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represent all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption.

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On episode 257, we welcome Christian B. Miller to discuss the growing honesty crises shaping modern society, the philosophical and psychological roots of dishonesty and self-deception, the impact of AI and deepfakes on our ability to trust reality, the rise of AI use and academic integrity concerns in education, how social media rewards performance over authenticity, the spread of misinformation and political polarization online, whether technology is scaling deception faster than virtue can adapt, the importance of preserving honesty as a foundational human virtue, and what still gives Christian hope for humanity's relationship with truth in an increasingly dishonest world.  Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is the author of over 130 articles as well as Moral Psychology (2021) and four books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a contributor for Forbes, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. His new book, available May 19, 2026, is called The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. | Christian Miller | ► Website | https://www.christianbmiller.com ► Twitter | https://twitter.com/CharacterGap ► Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/charactergap ► Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/CharacterGap ► The Honesty Crisis Book | https://amzn.to/4uSp1z1 Where you can find us: | Seize The Moment Podcast | ► Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/SeizeTheMomentPodcast ► Twitter | https://twitter.com/seize_podcast  ► Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/seizethemomentpodcast ► TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@seizethemomentpodcast  

Welcome back! This week we continue from last week's extension with Colin Wilson's The Occult, and his interesting perspective on what these heightened states are, how they are achieved and maintained, as well as some notable characters associated with the topic. We also question why this area of research is so rife with charlatans and fakes? As always, make of this what you will, but Wilson really makes a great case for all of it. Welcome to your Plus+ Extension, and thank you for joining us on Plus+! This is a weird, wild realm we have here, riddled with strange happenings in the sky. High strangeness is intimately interwoven with everyday-ness. Today, we examine a smattering of seemingly unconnected events, accounts, and perspectives of some of the most bizarre encounters by some day-to-day dwelling, normal folks just living out their lives and then, suddenly…Whammmy, they are visited by the freaky, and it woos them into further investigation. The Occult: A History Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus: History. Magick. Psychedelia. Ufology The Temple of High Witchcraft: Ceremonies, Spheres and The Witches' Qabalah Éliphas LéviPlus+ ExtensionThe extension of the show is EXCLUSIVE to Plus+ Members. To join. click HERE. A small compilation of oddly shaped UFOs The Varied Shapes of UFOs: A Review of Reported Phenomena The What's What of UFOs: The Five Most Common Shapes Silver Screen Saucers: Sorting Fact from Fantasy in Hollywood's UFO Movies The 1973 UFO Chronology - A World-Wide Wave LinksLinks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us Fan MailMy guest today is Maryka Biaggio, author of Marjory and Me, listed in the Spiritualism category on Art In Fiction. View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xK3aC6WBKr8How Maryka discovered the true story of Margery Crandon, Boston socialite, celebrated medium, and the woman who took on Harry Houdini.The bold structural choice to narrate Margery's story through Walter, Margery's dead brother.How Walter's folksy voice arrived as a moment of pure creative magic, and why Maryka describes writing as 90% struggle and 10% magic.The 1920s spiritualism craze: how the Great War and 1919 flu epidemic left grieving families desperate to contact the dead.Maryka's deliberate choice to keep the central question (is Walter real or a ruse?) permanently ambiguous.The challenges of writing real figures including Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and WB Yeats while staying true to their documented beliefs.Houdini's obsessive crusade against spiritualism, including Congressional hearings so raucous the police had to be called in.How Maryka's background as a clinical psychologist informs her deeply individual character development.Maryka's research toolkit: authoritative nonfiction, Aeon timeline software, Newspapers.com, and period novels.Reading from the opening of Margery and Me.One thing Maryka learned from writing Margery and Me.Her writing process and advice about researching.Maryka's next novel, co-written with Vanitha Sankaram, and inspired by Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and subversive medieval poetry.Read more about Maryka Biaggio: https://marykabiaggio.com/Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2300+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Find out more on her website....

If you enjoy this episode, we're sure you will enjoy more content like this on The Occult Rejects.  In fact, we have curated playlists on occult topics like grimoires, esoteric concepts and phenomena, occult history, analyzing true crime and cults with an occult lens, Para politics, and occultism in music. Whether you enjoy consuming your content visually or via audio, we've got you covered - and it will always be provided free of charge.  So, if you enjoy what we do and want to support our work of providing accessible, free content on various platforms, please consider making a donation to the links provided below.  Thank you and enjoy the episode!Links For The Occult Rejectshttps://linktr.ee/theoccultrejectsOccult Research Institutehttps://www.occultresearchinstitute.org/Cash Apphttps://cash.app/$theoccultrejectsVenmo@TheOccultRejectsBuy Me A Coffeebuymeacoffee.com/TheOccultRejectsAlso want to remind people about the website, if you're into reading we have tons of information by multiple contributors, and we got t-shirts up on the site if you're interested. Fun fact, the art is all based on the eyeball. Now let me introduce the rest of the panel and guests.

A very important topic, and the sequel to my chat with Angie Speaks on her book, Late-Stage Babylon: Navigating the Post-Secular Spiritual Crisis. In an era of deep cultural upheaval, the resurgence of interest in UAPs and non-human technology signals the birth of a new secular mythology where extraterrestrials replace traditional deities. This shift represents a form of secular eschatology, reframing ancient longings for divine intervention and revelation into a scientific quest for contact with higher intelligence. While these flying saucers often function as Jungian mandalas symbolizing a collective desire for psychic wholeness, a modern “materialist capture” threatens to reduce this numinous mystery to cold discussions of propulsion systems and surveillance. Ultimately, we must decide if the alien question is an invitation to spiritual awakening or a tool of the counterfeit spirit used to encourage human submission to vast, inhuman forces. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant (Princeton UP, 2026) provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist and courtier navigating the learned and courtly circles of early modern Europe and the Republic of Letters.Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his “Paris sojourn” as a young diplomat and in Germany at the court of Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover. She challenges the image of Leibniz as an isolated genius, revealing instead a man of multiple identities whose thought was shaped by a deep engagement with the social and intellectual milieus of his time. Borowski shows us Leibniz as he was known to his contemporaries, enabling us to rediscover him as an enigmatic young man who was complex and all too human.An exhilarating work of scholarship, Leibniz in His World demonstrates how this uncommon intellect, torn between his ideals and the necessity to work for absolutist states, struggled to make a name for himself during his formative years. Audrey Borowski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the philosophy of AI. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

01. Wilkinson - Come Down 02. Merage, Egzod & Islet Oak - Hiding In Plain Sight 03. Skepsis, Charlotte Haining - Slipping 04. Dimod, Flicky, Cinet - Love Bomb 05. Dimension, Bbyclose - Once In A Lifetime 06. Delta Heavy, Aeon:mode, Nu - La - Glow 07. Genetics, Lottie Jones, Artino - At All Costs 08. D - Sabber - Havoc 09. The Upbeats, What So Not, Stace Cadet - Wanted 10. Kora Wang & Foor - 脱离地面 11. Children Of Our Stars - Come With Me 12. Brian Brainstorm - Falling In Love 13. Teddy Killerz - Dream 14. Licia, Dux N Bass - Electricity 15. Astro Luce - Tell The World 16. Cyantific - So Real 17. Wilkinson - All The Way (feat. iiola) 18. Ekko & Sidetrack, T & Sugah - What You Want 19. Monss & Document One - Nobody's There 20. Bensley - 1-800-BEN-SLEY 21. Hissteria - HEAVYWEIGHT SOUND 22. Georgie Riot, Ceadie - Good Time 23. Gino - Du Du Du 24. Fade Black - Malfunction 25. Killbox - War by Remote 26. Merikan - Face Off 27. The Last Bear Ender, Zardonic - Kernel Breaker (feat. Noisesmith, Roel Peijs & Kylee Brielle) (Remix) 28. Xomni - Bad Fortune 29. Impex Botinha 30. Bennie - Control Freak 31. Freaks & Geeks - Back To You 32. Stanza & Grimm - Runaway (DisasZt Remix) 33. Deezave - Quantum Flip 34. Vici, Screamarts - Groove To It 35. It Is Jev - Woe 36. Calyx - Triple Shot 37. Ill Dynamics - Stuck Inna 38. Samath, Data Model - Bottom Feeder 39. Akov - Never Be The Same 40. Aksel - Right Here 41. Bodrak - Dryness 42. Hasky - Techno Love 43. Particle, Atmos - Blade 44. Skantia, Smg - Absent 45. Eastcolors, Neinzge - Chillin 46. Ozma & Avenax - Kapli 47. Treex - Hide The Truth 48. Fafu, T.r.a.c., Yungchen Lhamo - Infinite (Remix) 49. 3kingz - Kick Out 50. Bitsune, M'go, Basskillah - Top a Top 51. Roni Size - Scrambled Eggs VIP 52. Crystal Clear - Set It Up 53. Nkz - Saxo Fantastico 54. Coco, Rendah, Oko Uk - Legit 55. Milo (UK) - Stumbling Block 56. Upgrade - Tipsy 57. Rift - The Truth (Apollo Navigation Remix) 58. Dutta, Chuckwtf - Muddy 59. Glitch City, Leaf - Spirit World 60. Covert Garden - Facility 61. Markee Ledge, Megatron Mc - Mystical Warrior 62. DJ Zent = Streetfighter 63. Dynamite Mc - Brilliant Mode 64. Danny Byrd, Sigma, Kurupt Fm, Natty D - LEGENDARY STATUS (feat. Klaudia Keziah) 65. Ray Keith - The Doctor 66. Mr Quest - Back To The Rave (Everybody Mix) 67. Pete Cannon - Wave Curfew 68. Serum - Chop House (Benny L Remix) 69. Vedanta - Patterning 70. Distracted Society - Massive 71. Trans:t, Fifth - Lost 72. In:most Feat. Visionobi - Rabbit Hole 73. Nia Archives - Danger 74. Konetix, Megan Linnell - Chasing The Highs 75. 4am Kru, Layla Sibelle - Rush 76. Roommate - Rasta Vibration 77. Invisible Landscape - Zero Sum Game 78. Ljhigh - Keys 79. Catching Cairo, Clipz - 10FOOT 80. Marble Elephant - Whispers (Sub:liminal Remix) 81. Neuronex - As Seen From Above 82. Chic, Fizzy Gillespie, Mista Trick - Everybody Dance (Mista Trick Remix) 83. Soul Connection - In Darkest Hours

Plenty of crime dramas and horror films feature a psychopath on a rampage. That diagnosis, however, might be the real fiction. Rasmus Rosenberg Larsenis is assistant professor of forensic epistemology and philosophy of science at the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada and an affiliated scientist at the National Center for Ontological Research in the U.S. He is also the author of “Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis.” He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why psychopathy isn't real, how that diagnosis came about, and why even serial killers don't have all the traits we assume they do. His companion piece to his book, “There are no psychopaths,” was published in Aeon. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jeff and Rebecca talk about the big ACOTAR update, Audible dropping the price on its standard product, market trends, recent reading, and much more. Follow the podcast via ⁠RSS⁠, ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠, and ⁠Spotify⁠. Join ⁠The Book Riot Podcast Patreon⁠ for bonus content and ad-free listening. Subscribe to ⁠The Book Riot Newsletter⁠ for regular updates to get the most out of your reading life. The Book Riot Podcast is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Discussed in this episode: ⁠Shout-out to this Aeon piece about how we're thinking about the decline of literacy wrong⁠ ⁠Sarah J. Maas announces next 2 ACOTAR books⁠ ⁠Market trends from Circana's report to booksellers⁠ ⁠Audible has launched a Standard Membership Plan for $8.99/month⁠ ⁠2026 Audie Award winners⁠ ⁠Utah has banned 4 more books from public schools⁠ ⁠Lee & Low pauses diversity baseline survey to focus on fighting book bans⁠ ⁠First comprehensive report on the state of America's Black-owned bookstores⁠ This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeff and Rebecca talk about the big ACOTAR update, Audible dropping the price on its standard product, market trends, recent reading, and much more. Follow the podcast via RSS, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Join The Book Riot Podcast Patreon for bonus content and ad-free listening. Subscribe to The Book Riot Newsletter for regular updates to get the most out of your reading life. The Book Riot Podcast is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Discussed in this episode: Shout-out to this Aeon piece about how we're thinking about the decline of literacy wrong Sarah J. Maas announces next 2 ACOTAR books Market trends from Circana's report to booksellers Audible has launched a Standard Membership Plan for $8.99/month 2026 Audie Award winners Utah has banned 4 more books from public schools Lee & Low pauses diversity baseline survey to focus on fighting book bans First comprehensive report on the state of America's Black-owned bookstores This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices