Podcasts about aeons

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This morning I'm going to read to you a large section out of the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book out of the Nag Hammadi scriptures that I generally follow and teach from. This is about the distinction between the Father and the Son. And again, remember there is no gender. The Father is our Father. It is the source of consciousness out of which all of us come. All consciousness, all life, all love in the universe comes from this One Source. And it's not a thing. It's not an it. It's not simply the source. It is a spring of consciousness and love that loves us and gives us our consciousness. So we have a relationship. We are its offspring. This is why there's a familial name attached to it as the Father. It emanates consciousness and love. So let's start by looking at chapter 64, verse 28 of the Tripartite Tractate. And it says, and this is Thomassen's translation edited by Marvin Meyer from the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, quoting: Now the Father, insofar as he is elevated above the members of the ALL, is unknowable and incomprehensible. His greatness is so immense that if he had revealed himself at once and suddenly, even the highest of the Aeons that have gone forth from him would have perished. For that reason, he withheld his power and his impassibility in that in which he is, remaining ineffable and unnameable, transcending all mind and all speech. Pausing the quote for a minute. Now think about that. People seem to have an innate sense that God is unknowable. We have much smaller minds. We don't have the ability to comprehend the greatness of God. Everybody seems to know that as an intuition. So the thought that we can touch the Source and embody it within ourselves and that we then become God is—it's completely incorrect. It's kind of so-called New Age thought. But we can't do that because the Father itself, or himself, or itself, because it's non-gendered, is unknowable, is uneffable because he's so great. And this is why when the Aeon Who Fell tried to launch itself back into the Father, it fell rather than approaching. It fell because the Father is unapproachable. It is too great. And so the Father repelled that Aeon, which here in the Tripartite Tractate we know as Logos. Other Gnostic traditions refer to that Aeon as Sophia. But it was a protective mechanism for that Aeon because the Father didn't want it to get burned up and annihilated. Quoting again, He, [that is the Father], on the other hand, extended himself and spread himself out. He is the one who gave firmness, location, and a dwelling place to the ALL. And the ALL is another word for the Pleroma. The ALL is the Fullness of everything that is God. It's all of the constituents of God. When I write about it in the Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I capitalize each letter, A-L-L. They're all capitalized because it is God. Quoting again, According to one of his names, he is in fact Father of the ALL. Through his constant suffering on their behalf, having sown in their minds the idea that they should seek what exceeds their capabilities by making them perceive that he is and thus making them seek what he might be. So you see, he's put into the Totalities a yearning, a desire to seek after the Father, to reunite with the Father, as Logos attempted to do, but he doesn't let them know that that's impossible because he doesn't want to repel them in their minds. He wants them to seek after him and to believe that they can come close to him. And by the way, when I speak about the Aeons or the Totalities of the ALL, we are their direct descendants. Everything, because of the principle, as above, so below, everything we say about the Aeons or the ALL applies to us as well. That's why it's good to know about the Aeons because they are the pure source of our consciousness. So we get all muddled up down here with all of the distractions of this material cosmos, but the Aeons are right up there without any material distractions. They are the pureness of the emanation of the Father. So what we can find out about the Aeons and the Totalities of the ALL, we can apply to ourselves. This is why we seek after God. This is why we want to know the Father. But according to this, it's an impossibility to actually know the Father because it exceeds our capabilities. So again, it said that the Father of the ALL sowed in their minds the idea that they should seek what exceeds their capabilities by making them perceive that he is and thus making them seek what he might be. Quoting, He was given them as a delight and nourishment, joy and abundant illumination. And this is his compassion, the knowledge he provides and his union with them. So you see, what the Father gives us is delight and nourishment. He feeds our spirits. He gives us joy and abundant illumination. So we get all of that. We just can't think that we are as great as God because we aren't even approaching the Father because the Father is too great for us to touch. Quoting again, And this is he who is called and who is the Son. He is the sum of the ALL and they understood who he is and he is clothed. So this is saying that the Son is the extension of the Father. He's the part of the Father that extended himself out and spread himself. And it is the Son who has firmness, location and a dwelling place. And it is the Son who is the ALL, who is the Totalities of the ALL. He is the sum of the ALL. And it says they understood who he is because he is them and he is clothed. He wears the ALL like a garment, just the same way that we wear our bodies as a garment. Except it's not exactly the same because most of our body is made up of this material universe that arose during the Fall. But the ALL and the Totalities of the ALL are pure consciousness, pure love and delight and joy. And that is in their totality what is called the Son. On the other hand, that is the one by reason of whom he is called the Son, the one about whom they perceive that he exists and that they have been seeking him. This is the one who exists as Father and of whom one can neither speak nor think. He is the one who exists first. That is, the Father existed first before the Son. But the Son is the one that we can perceive or that the Totalities can perceive. They can't perceive directly the Father, but they can perceive his emanation, which is called the Son. Quoting again, For no one can conceive of him or think of him or draw near to that place toward the exalted, toward the truly preexistent. [That would be the original Father they're talking about.] But every name that is thought or spoken about him is brought forth in glorification as a trace of him, according to the capacity of each one of those who give him glory. So this is saying that the full glory of the Father cannot be known. The Son can be known because he is coexistent with the Totalities of the ALL. So they are him and he is them. But the Father can be perceived as this trace. And in other places, it says like a sweet odor wafting to your nose. That is the trace of the Father coming through the Father, coming through the Son, coming through the Totalities, coming through the Aeons. And that trace comes on through down to a Second Order Powers as well. We smell the beautiful aroma of the glory of the Father, even though we can't know the Father. Quoting again, He, however, whose light dawned from him, stretching himself out to give birth and knowledge to the members of the ALL, he is all these names without falsehood, and he is truly the Father's only First Man. [So we're talking about the Son again.] And the Son has no falsehood. This is not a yin yang balance evil with good type of God. It's all good. It's all beautiful. It's all glorious. And the Son is the First Man of the Father. This is saying that the Son is our prototypical human, the First Man. Quoting again, This is the one I call the form of the formless, the body of the incorporeal, the face of the invisible, the word of the inexpressible, the mind of the inconceivable, the spring that flowed from him, the root of those who have been rooted, the God of those who are ready, the light of those he illuminates, the will of those he has willed, the providence of those for whom he provides, the wisdom of those he has made wise, the strength of those he has given strength, the assembly of those with whom he is present, the revelation of that which is sought after, the eye of those who see, the spirit of those who breathe, the life of those who live, the unity of those who are united. Now this is saying that the Son wears all of those names, and the Son is all of that to the Totalities of the ALL. But again, as above so below, he is all of that to us as well. Quoting again, While all the members of the ALL exist in the single One, that is the Son, the Son and the ALL are united, as he clothes himself completely, and in his single Name, he is never called by it. And in the same unitary way, they are simultaneously, this single One, as well as all of them. He is not divided as a body, nor is he split apart by the names in which he exists, in the sense that this is one thing and that is something else. Nor does he change by [and then there's a missing word], nor does he alter through the names in which he is, being now like this and now something different, so that he would be one person now and something else at another time. Rather, he is entirely himself forever. He is each and every one of the members of the ALL eternally at the same time. He is what all of them are, as father of the ALL. And the members of the ALL are fathers as well. For he is himself knowledge for himself, and he is each one of his qualities and powers. And he is himself the eye for all that he knows, seeing all of it in himself, having a son and a form. So you see, because the Son and the ALL are completely united, it's saying that the Son sees them all at once, and the ALL sees the Son all at once, not split up into all of the various qualities, although the Father does see them all, because the Father knows all. Quoting again, Thus his powers and qualities are innumerable and inaudible because of the way in which he gives birth to them. The births of his words, his commands, and his members of the ALL are innumerable and indivisible. He knows them, for they are himself. When they speak, they are all in one single name. And if he brings them forth, it is in order that they may be found to exist as individual qualities, forming a unity. So this is talking about the Totalities of the ALL. That's why they're referred to as Totalities, because they are not individuals. They are part of this indivisible unity of the Son, and yet they're all there in their individuality. They just don't realize it, because they don't know themselves as singular identities, because they form a unity that is the Son. He did not, however, reveal his multiplicity at once to the members of the ALL, nor did he reveal his sameness to those who had issued forth from him. Now, all of those who have gone forth from him, that is, the Aeons of the Aeons, being emissions born of a procreative nature, also procreate through their own procreative nature to the glory of the Father, just as he had been the cause of their existence. This is what we said earlier. He makes the Aeons into roots and springs and fathers. For that which they glorified, they bore, for it possesses knowledge and wisdom, and they understood that they have gone forth from the knowledge and the understanding of the ALL. So we're talking about the Totalities. They are the Aeons of the Aeons. They are the direct parental units of what we then know as the Aeons of the Pleroma of God. But the Totalities were their forerunners, and they are the ones that are unified with the Son. And the Son, of course, is unified with the Father. However, these Totalities are like roots and springs and fathers, and they glorify the Father, they glorify the Son, and the things that they glorify, they give birth to. Quoting again, If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each Aeon, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who himself is the ALL. For that reason, they were drawn through the singing of praise and through the power of the oneness of him from whom they had come forth, that being the Son, into mutual intermingling, union, and oneness. From their assembled Fullness, they offered a glorification worthy of the Father, an image that was One, and at the same time many, because it was brought forth for the glory of the One, and because they had come forward toward him who himself is the entirety of the ALL. Okay, the Totalities, you see, have been giving glory to the Father in the direction of the Son, toward the Son. And that's S-O-N, easy to confuse with S-U-N, but that would be a whole different set of mythologies. And they had to all give glory together. That's why they're called Totalities. They didn't give glory individually. They were one voice. They didn't know themselves as individuals. They were all at once that one thing, the ALL. And it was the ALL giving glory all together in the direction of the Son and Father that caused them then to procreate. Now we're moving into a section called the Three Fruits of Glorification, and that's chapter 68, verse 36 through 70, verse 19. This then was a tribute from the Aeons to the one who had brought forth the ALL, a first fruit offering of those who are immortal and eternal. [That's the Father and the Son.] For when it issued from the living Aeons, it left them perfect and full, caused by something perfect and full, since they were full and perfect, having given glory in a perfect manner in communion. So what this is saying is that nothing was diminished. Everything was full and perfect because they all together sang their glory without personal identification. It was all for one and one for all. For inasmuch as the Father lacks nothing, he returns the glory they give to those who glorify to make them manifest by what he himself is. The cause that brought about for them the second glorification is, in fact, that which was returned unto them from the Father . When they understood the grace from the Father through which they had borne fruit with one another, so that just as they had been bringing forth by glorifying the Father, in the same way they might also themselves be made manifest in their act of giving glory, so as to be revealed as being perfect. So that is the second glorification that is being described. The glory that they were giving, that the Totalities gave to the Father and the Son, reflected back onto them without any loss or diminishment. It's full and complete. You know we're talking about fractal formulas, right? The Son is a fractal of the Father . The Totalities are the pure, complete, fractal formula of the Son, and they give glory to the Son and the Father without being diminished whatsoever, because they do it in unison, in full communion. So then, They became fathers of the third glorification, [or we could say the third iteration of the fractal.] They became fathers of the third glorification, which was produced in accordance with the free will and the power they had been born with, enabling them to give glory in unison while at the same time, independently of one another, according to the will of each. You see now, this is how the third glorification, or the third iteration, differs from the second iteration. The second glory had to all give glory, all together, all at once, all the time. They had no personal identity. But in that giving of glory, they gave birth to the third glorification, which showed each of those Aeons that they had free will. Thus, both the first and the second glorifications are perfect and full, for they are manifestations of the perfect and full Father and of the perfect things that issued from the glorification of him who is perfect. The fruit of the third glorification, however, is produced by the will of each individual Aeon and of each of the Father ‘s qualities and powers. This fruit is a perfect fullness to the extent that what the Aeons desire and are capable of in giving glory to the Father comes from their union as well as from each of them individually. You see, here we have the birth of ego. Because ego is identification of individuality, whereas the pure Self was further up line—that is the ALL, the Totalities, the Son. We have both of those characteristics within us. We have the Totalities of the ALL that we generally call our Self with a capital S. That is the pureness of God that reflects the totality of the Father and the Son, without shadow or blemish or fault. And then we have ego, which is recognition of our individuality and our individual free will. And it differs from the one Self because we are singing our own song of praise from our position. That's our ego. For this reason, they exist as minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, a place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth. And each of us as well has our own place, position, place of rest, duties and whatnot. And that is our ego identification and the free will that we exercise through our ego. Our entire unit of consciousness, as I would put it in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, our entire unit of consciousness consists of the Self, which is the One, and the ego, which is our individuality and our personal will. That is our unit of consciousness. I am all that. Plus, I have this body that attached to me when I came down here into this material world. So the First Fruit is the totality of the ALL that is coexistent with the Son. The Second Fruit is when the Son and Totalities gave glory to one another and that produced the Aeons of the Fullness and they understood and were perfectly revealed. And then the Third Fruit is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, the third glorification by the will of the individual Aeons and their and the Father ‘s qualities and powers. That's the Hierarchy of the Fullness—that's the Third Fruit. And these are the ones that sit and dream of Paradise. And these are the ones who give glory together and in various combinations and produce us, the Second Order of powers. I really love the language of the Tripartite Tractate. It's very beautiful scripture. I think that the understanding we gain here by reading the Tripartite Tractate deepens the knowledge of who the Father is and who the Son is and what the Aeons are. This is not an assembly of mythological characters. This is pure consciousness emanating from the Source and flowing out to us with consciousness, love, free will, joy, and the desire to seek after the Father. We inherit all of that from the Aeons and the Aeons of the Aeons and the Son. So until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Welcome to Day 2766 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom – Theology Thursday – Gnosticism: Its History, Teachings, and its Contrast with Christianity Wisdom-Trek Podcast Script - Day 2766 Welcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps!   I am Guthrie Chamberlain, and we are on Day 2766 of our Trek.   The Purpose of Wisdom-Trek is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Our current series of Theology Thursday lessons is written by theologian and teacher John Daniels. I have found that his lessons are short, easy to understand, doctrinally sound, and applicable to all who desire to learn more of God's Word. John's lessons can be found on his website   theologyinfive.com.   Today's lesson is titled Gnosticism: Its History, Teachings, and its Contrast with Christianity. Gnosticism emerged in the first and second centuries CE as a complex and diverse set of spiritual beliefs. It integrated elements from a variety of religious and philosophical contexts, including Judaism, Greek philosophy, eastern religions, and also borrowed heavily from Christian symbols and texts.  Gnosticism thrived in the Mediterranean world and the Middle East until the 5th century. Despite its lack of a unified doctrine or centralized structure, the various sects and groups falling under the Gnostic label shared some core beliefs and ideas. Gnosticism came back into public awareness with the discovery of a collection of Gnostic texts in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. Segment one: WHAT IS GNOSTICISM? A significant aspect of Gnosticism is its portrayal of the creator of the physical world, often identified with the God of the Old Testament, as a flawed and even malevolent being known as the Demiurge. According to Gnostic belief, the Demiurge is responsible for entrapping divine sparks, fragments of the supreme being's essence, within human bodies. Gnosticism advocates a dualistic worldview, positing a stark contrast between the spiritual realm (considered good) and the material world (viewed as evil). Central to Gnostic belief is a distant, unknowable supreme being, along with various lesser divine entities known as Aeons, emanating from this source. Gnostics proposed that salvation and liberation from the material world were achieved through ‘gnosis,' or secret knowledge about the divine nature and the self. Gnostics often presented Jesus not as the savior through his death and resurrection but as the revealer of this hidden knowledge. Segment two: GNOSTICISM'S CONTRAST WITH CHRISTIANITY Gnosticism's teachings stand in contrast with mainstream Christian doctrines for several reasons: Divergent Christology: Gnostic representations of Jesus diverged significantly from the mainstream Christian understanding of Jesus as fully divine and fully human, offering salvation through his death and resurrection. Salvation Through Knowledge: Gnosticism emphasized salvation through secret knowledge, a departure from the Christian teaching of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ (Ephesians two verses eight and nine). Dualism and the Demiurge: Gnosticism's stark dualism and its depiction of the Demiurge conflicted with the Christian teaching of God as the benevolent creator of all things, both spiritual and material (Genesis 1), and that the material creation is fundamentally good. Authority of Scriptures: Gnostics often favored secret texts and teachings, which contradicted the recognized canonical Scriptures of Christianity. This...

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

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

I had another episode planned for today, but at the last minute I decided to rerun this Christmas episode for you. I think this will become our traditional Christmas episode here at Gnostic Insights. And, if you are new to this podcast, welcome! Next week’s episode will be controversial, so I thought it best to wait until after Christmas for its release. Today, we're going to look at the nature of the Christ—the who, what, why of Christ. Most people are familiar with seeing the baby Jesus in the manger and that's what we celebrate at Christmas time, the birth of the Christ on Earth in the form of a human. But the Christ is an ethereal creature that predates the birth of Jesus. Jesus and the Christ aren't exactly the same, although Jesus was fully Christ. The Christ predates the birth of the human known as Jesus. So, let's learn more about the Christ and why the Christ figure is so essential to us Second Order Powers.  Gnosticism is the forerunner of the modern Christian faith. As such, a better understanding of the figure of the Christ is essential to understanding both Gnosticism and Christianity. The cosmology that I talk about here on the podcast was well known to Jesus and his original followers, but it was cut out of Christianity about 1700 years ago by the Nicene Council, at the urging of the Pope and the Roman Emperor. Because this theology was subtracted from orthodox Christianity, many of the ideas of gnostic cosmology sound odd and unfamiliar to modern churchgoers. Some of the ideas may even sound heretical at first glance due to their unfamiliarity. Yet the theology contained in these early scriptures makes sense of so many puzzling aspects of Christian faith that they must be reexamined. That's why I call the Substack The Gnostic Reformation. I'm confident that once you understand gnostic Christianity, you will better understand your relationship with God. According to gnostic cosmology as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, we humans and all other forms of life on Earth, from bacteria and eukaryotes on up, are the fruit of the Pleroma and Logos. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked in a never-ending battle for dominion over the Earth with forces that were generated as a result of the Fall. Due to the law of mutual combat, we have forgotten our origin in the Fullness and our mission to bring love and harmony to creation and have instead taken on many of the characteristics of the shadows of the Deficiency. The Second Order Powers are locked in a never-ending war with the Deficiency. Here below, we constantly battle the physical forces of death and entropy, as well as the spiritual forces of vice, sin, delusion and despair. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of this focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness, along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father. The singular fruit of the Fullness and the Father is known by various names: the Christ, the Savior and the Redeemer, the Advocate, the Light, and the Beloved. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled-up into one perfect form. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believed the same. Here is a more complete explanation of who Jesus was. It's said that Jesus was conceived without sin because he carried within his body the perfection of man and God. This would mean that Jesus was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity. Hence the importance of the virgin birth that then imparted that perfect DNA to the baby. Jesus was also without negative karma attached to his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. The components of Jesus's body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate. As Colossians 1:19 says, “For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on Earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.” This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic Gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and Son came to material instantiation on Earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggle between birth and death that plague us all. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures describes this process: “As for those of the shadow, Logos separated himself from them in every way, since they fight against him and are not at all humble before him. The stumbling which happened to the Aeons of the Father was brought to them as if it were their own, in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Fullnesses so that they might be instructed about the Deficiency by the single One, from whom alone they all received strength to eliminate the defects. They gathered together, asking the Father, with beneficent intent, that there be aid from above from the Father for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then, from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit. And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which was his beloved Son, but the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased to put himself on them as a garment through which he gave perfection to the defective one and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, the One who is properly called Savior and the Redeemer and the Well-pleasing One, and the Beloved, the One to whom prayers have been offered, and the Christ and the light of those appointed in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet what other name may be applied to him except the Son, as we have previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know? Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but also they generated their own, for the Aeons who give glory, generated their countenance and their face. They came forth in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the One who gave it to him.” (That is from the Tripartite Tractate sections 85 through 87.) So you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who had founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to Earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought forth their own personal and recognizable Savior. Redemption has already taken place. It is up to the Second Order Powers and the one who fell to recognize and accept that redemption in order to complete the mission of the Christ. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall. Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. Gnostics believe that some day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus, the Christ, is Lord. Repentance and redemption comes harder for some than for others. Some souls take more time to recognize and remember. Ultimately, though, there comes a day of reckoning, for the Father will not be denied forever. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyful place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father's consciousness from the beginning. These shadows are not real and they will have no home with us in Paradise. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. Now here's a gnostic perspective of Jesus on the cross. One of the central themes of the Christian faith is the death of Jesus on the cross. Christians the world over focus on the body of Jesus hanging on the cross, and I've often wondered, why this fixation of Jesus on the cross? Why is the crucifix the focal point of every church and altar? Why do people wear the cross as jewelry or hang a crucifix in their bedroom? The obvious answer Christians give is that without the cross, Jesus could not have saved humanity from sin, for he bore our sins into the grave with his death and they were washed away with his resurrection from the dead. Praise be to God, but why the cross? If Jesus had been stoned to death or drowned or beaten or thrown from a high tower, would we still feel such affinity for the stone, a lake, a club or a roof? I don't think so. I think there is something very special about the shape of the cross itself. I ask this question because Jesus never said, I'm soon to pass on from this world, and I want you to focus on my body hanging on the cross as I take on the sins of the world. And yet, that's what people do, as if that were the entire point of the Gospel. As far as I can tell, Jesus did not ask for his death and resurrection to be the focal point of worship. What Jesus actually said was: “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), and, “Whoever welcomes me welcomes the Father that sent me” (Luke 9:48). In other words, Jesus acknowledged himself in reference to his Father and he deflected glory to his Father. Yet Jesus is worshipped by modern Christians to the extent that the Father almost goes unmentioned. Thank goodness for the Lord's prayer, which is directed to the Father and not to the Son. Jesus taught it to be said to the Father; he did not teach it to be recited to himself. No slight to the Son, of course, we're merely emphasizing the importance of the God Above All Gods. During the last supper, Jesus instructed his followers to think of his broken body as they break and eat bread and to consider his blood as the fulfillment of a contract with humanity as they drink wine. This is what Jesus left the church as instruction regarding his death. He did not instruct them to erect images of crosses and to worship him hanging on a cross, as if he were stuck up there forever. Yes, Protestants have allowed Jesus to come down off the cross and therefore their crosses are unoccupied to remind us that Jesus resurrected, but still the focus is on the cross. Again—why the cross in particular? Here is the symbolism of the cross as I understand it. We who dwell on Earth are engaged in endless warfare with the Imitation that always seeks to lure us away from our Father in Heaven. Oftentimes we don't even realize we're engaged in warfare with the Imitation, because it can appear disguised as goodness. This is what is meant by the Devil being a liar. Things are proposed “for our own good,” but they're not; they're proposed for power and control. We Second Order of Powers are engaged in this endless warfare and, although we come from a good disposition of the Father and the Fullness, we have forgotten our heavenly nature and become deluded because of rage and other passions and addictions. The Christ came to Earth in the form of a Son of Man to bring the Third Order of Powers to Earth as the solution to overcoming the phantoms of the Imitation that have mired the Second Order Powers in error and ignorance. Those who have eyes to see the Christ are able to remember their Father in Heaven. Those who remember their Father in Heaven and repent from the Imitation are redeemed. Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the promise to redeem the fallen. Jesus as the Son of God and the Son of Man brought salvation to the Deficiency and restored it to the Kingdom of Heaven. The reason the cross looks as it does and occupies such a central role in worship is that the cross represents human beings. The Cross is shaped like a human, a Son of Man. It is no accident that Jesus was crucified on a cross because Jesus is a Son of Man, the Son of Man. The Cross should remind us that humankind has been redeemed by the body and blood of Christ in an even more profound way than acknowledging the indignity and suffering of Christ on the cross. It should remind us that the Son of God—the Christ—bridged with the form of his human body spirit-to-matter, which is top-to-bottom, and neighbor-to-neighbor, which is side-to-side, just as the shape of the cross. In the Gnostic Gospel, redemption comes to all of creation through the incarnation of the Son of God into the body of the Son of Man. The manner of the Savior's birth, death, and resurrection will come to every soul as they realize their Father is in Heaven and to Heaven they will return. For, as it says, “every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” That affirmation comes from the New Testament (Philippians 2:10). It just takes time. We aren't there yet because of the common delusion of presumptuous thought, which causes people to behave selfishly. Ego must first make way for the love of Christ to take over the throne of the Self. Only then may you rise above the egoic imitation, for then you will have a champion and a king. The very public way that Jesus was crucified and the very public way that he resurrected gives us all hope of the same: Jesus demonstrates proof of resurrection and his life, death, and resurrection is about all of us, not only about the Christ. Jesus is the exemplar of our resurrection. And, by the way, in a Gnostic sense, which could be considered heretical by many Christians, the story of Jesus and the Christ and the Father don't even have to be believed as historical fact, which many nay-sayers make the cornerstone of their argument against Christ and God. The very concepts themselves—the very thoughts, the mind—is what carries this. We are consciousness and this Christ story is in our consciousness for our salvation. Think on that… I acknowledge that this is a very different version of Christianity than has been traditionally presented to us. This is gnosis that was originally contained in the sacred scriptures that formed the New Testament prior to the Pope and Emperor of Rome getting their hands on it and stripping it out. It's nice to know. I hope you get it. It doesn't really matter, because all you need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. That is the bottom line. We are emanations directly of the Father and the Father has promised to save us all and bring us all home. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.” This has been taken to mean that one must acknowledge the power of the Christ before the Christ can redeem you. But, you see, this would put all of the power of redemption in your hands rather than Christ's. The Christ will redeem all Second Order Powers by the end of time, with or without your prior acknowledgment. All redemption comes to the Father through the Christ, and that is in Christ's hands. What accepting the Christ now does for you is open the door for the Third Order Powers to enter your egoic soul. This power makes it possible to live a joyous and virtuous life. It allows the love of the Father to flow through you and out into the world. And it eases your transition after the physical death of your body, so you may enter the afterlife without fear, knowing that you rest in the Pleroma of the Christ. The Final Economy is our foretaste of Paradise. No more shadows, no more sorrow. I hope that this information is helpful to you and will help you remember your gnosis. Merry Christmas. God bless us all. And onward and upward. If you are getting any gnosis from this information, please consider supporting Gnostic Insights with a generous donation. It helps keep me motivated. I’m a one-person enterprise with full responsibility for every aspect of this podcast, from writing to recording to editing to artwork to paying for the hosting services that bring this gnosis to you. I could really use some more support! Please do what you can. 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

I had another episode planned for today, but at the last minute I decided to rerun this Christmas episode for you. I think this will become our traditional Christmas episode here at Gnostic Insights. And, if you are new to this podcast, welcome! Next week’s episode will be controversial, so I thought it best to wait until after Christmas for its release. Today, we're going to look at the nature of the Christ—the who, what, why of Christ. Most people are familiar with seeing the baby Jesus in the manger and that's what we celebrate at Christmas time, the birth of the Christ on Earth in the form of a human. But the Christ is an ethereal creature that predates the birth of Jesus. Jesus and the Christ aren't exactly the same, although Jesus was fully Christ. The Christ predates the birth of the human known as Jesus. So, let's learn more about the Christ and why the Christ figure is so essential to us Second Order Powers.  Gnosticism is the forerunner of the modern Christian faith. As such, a better understanding of the figure of the Christ is essential to understanding both Gnosticism and Christianity. The cosmology that I talk about here on the podcast was well known to Jesus and his original followers, but it was cut out of Christianity about 1700 years ago by the Nicene Council, at the urging of the Pope and the Roman Emperor. Because this theology was subtracted from orthodox Christianity, many of the ideas of gnostic cosmology sound odd and unfamiliar to modern churchgoers. Some of the ideas may even sound heretical at first glance due to their unfamiliarity. Yet the theology contained in these early scriptures makes sense of so many puzzling aspects of Christian faith that they must be reexamined. That's why I call the Substack The Gnostic Reformation. I'm confident that once you understand gnostic Christianity, you will better understand your relationship with God. According to gnostic cosmology as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, we humans and all other forms of life on Earth, from bacteria and eukaryotes on up, are the fruit of the Pleroma and Logos. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked in a never-ending battle for dominion over the Earth with forces that were generated as a result of the Fall. Due to the law of mutual combat, we have forgotten our origin in the Fullness and our mission to bring love and harmony to creation and have instead taken on many of the characteristics of the shadows of the Deficiency. The Second Order Powers are locked in a never-ending war with the Deficiency. Here below, we constantly battle the physical forces of death and entropy, as well as the spiritual forces of vice, sin, delusion and despair. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of this focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness, along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father. The singular fruit of the Fullness and the Father is known by various names: the Christ, the Savior and the Redeemer, the Advocate, the Light, and the Beloved. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled-up into one perfect form. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believed the same. Here is a more complete explanation of who Jesus was. It's said that Jesus was conceived without sin because he carried within his body the perfection of man and God. This would mean that Jesus was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity. Hence the importance of the virgin birth that then imparted that perfect DNA to the baby. Jesus was also without negative karma attached to his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. The components of Jesus's body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate. As Colossians 1:19 says, “For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on Earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.” This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic Gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and Son came to material instantiation on Earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggle between birth and death that plague us all. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures describes this process: “As for those of the shadow, Logos separated himself from them in every way, since they fight against him and are not at all humble before him. The stumbling which happened to the Aeons of the Father was brought to them as if it were their own, in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Fullnesses so that they might be instructed about the Deficiency by the single One, from whom alone they all received strength to eliminate the defects. They gathered together, asking the Father, with beneficent intent, that there be aid from above from the Father for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then, from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit. And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which was his beloved Son, but the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased to put himself on them as a garment through which he gave perfection to the defective one and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, the One who is properly called Savior and the Redeemer and the Well-pleasing One, and the Beloved, the One to whom prayers have been offered, and the Christ and the light of those appointed in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet what other name may be applied to him except the Son, as we have previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know? Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but also they generated their own, for the Aeons who give glory, generated their countenance and their face. They came forth in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the One who gave it to him.” (That is from the Tripartite Tractate sections 85 through 87.) So you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who had founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to Earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought forth their own personal and recognizable Savior. Redemption has already taken place. It is up to the Second Order Powers and the one who fell to recognize and accept that redemption in order to complete the mission of the Christ. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall. Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. Gnostics believe that some day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus, the Christ, is Lord. Repentance and redemption comes harder for some than for others. Some souls take more time to recognize and remember. Ultimately, though, there comes a day of reckoning, for the Father will not be denied forever. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyful place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father's consciousness from the beginning. These shadows are not real and they will have no home with us in Paradise. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. Now here's a gnostic perspective of Jesus on the cross. One of the central themes of the Christian faith is the death of Jesus on the cross. Christians the world over focus on the body of Jesus hanging on the cross, and I've often wondered, why this fixation of Jesus on the cross? Why is the crucifix the focal point of every church and altar? Why do people wear the cross as jewelry or hang a crucifix in their bedroom? The obvious answer Christians give is that without the cross, Jesus could not have saved humanity from sin, for he bore our sins into the grave with his death and they were washed away with his resurrection from the dead. Praise be to God, but why the cross? If Jesus had been stoned to death or drowned or beaten or thrown from a high tower, would we still feel such affinity for the stone, a lake, a club or a roof? I don't think so. I think there is something very special about the shape of the cross itself. I ask this question because Jesus never said, I'm soon to pass on from this world, and I want you to focus on my body hanging on the cross as I take on the sins of the world. And yet, that's what people do, as if that were the entire point of the Gospel. As far as I can tell, Jesus did not ask for his death and resurrection to be the focal point of worship. What Jesus actually said was: “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), and, “Whoever welcomes me welcomes the Father that sent me” (Luke 9:48). In other words, Jesus acknowledged himself in reference to his Father and he deflected glory to his Father. Yet Jesus is worshipped by modern Christians to the extent that the Father almost goes unmentioned. Thank goodness for the Lord's prayer, which is directed to the Father and not to the Son. Jesus taught it to be said to the Father; he did not teach it to be recited to himself. No slight to the Son, of course, we're merely emphasizing the importance of the God Above All Gods. During the last supper, Jesus instructed his followers to think of his broken body as they break and eat bread and to consider his blood as the fulfillment of a contract with humanity as they drink wine. This is what Jesus left the church as instruction regarding his death. He did not instruct them to erect images of crosses and to worship him hanging on a cross, as if he were stuck up there forever. Yes, Protestants have allowed Jesus to come down off the cross and therefore their crosses are unoccupied to remind us that Jesus resurrected, but still the focus is on the cross. Again—why the cross in particular? Here is the symbolism of the cross as I understand it. We who dwell on Earth are engaged in endless warfare with the Imitation that always seeks to lure us away from our Father in Heaven. Oftentimes we don't even realize we're engaged in warfare with the Imitation, because it can appear disguised as goodness. This is what is meant by the Devil being a liar. Things are proposed “for our own good,” but they're not; they're proposed for power and control. We Second Order of Powers are engaged in this endless warfare and, although we come from a good disposition of the Father and the Fullness, we have forgotten our heavenly nature and become deluded because of rage and other passions and addictions. The Christ came to Earth in the form of a Son of Man to bring the Third Order of Powers to Earth as the solution to overcoming the phantoms of the Imitation that have mired the Second Order Powers in error and ignorance. Those who have eyes to see the Christ are able to remember their Father in Heaven. Those who remember their Father in Heaven and repent from the Imitation are redeemed. Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the promise to redeem the fallen. Jesus as the Son of God and the Son of Man brought salvation to the Deficiency and restored it to the Kingdom of Heaven. The reason the cross looks as it does and occupies such a central role in worship is that the cross represents human beings. The Cross is shaped like a human, a Son of Man. It is no accident that Jesus was crucified on a cross because Jesus is a Son of Man, the Son of Man. The Cross should remind us that humankind has been redeemed by the body and blood of Christ in an even more profound way than acknowledging the indignity and suffering of Christ on the cross. It should remind us that the Son of God—the Christ—bridged with the form of his human body spirit-to-matter, which is top-to-bottom, and neighbor-to-neighbor, which is side-to-side, just as the shape of the cross. In the Gnostic Gospel, redemption comes to all of creation through the incarnation of the Son of God into the body of the Son of Man. The manner of the Savior's birth, death, and resurrection will come to every soul as they realize their Father is in Heaven and to Heaven they will return. For, as it says, “every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” That affirmation comes from the New Testament (Philippians 2:10). It just takes time. We aren't there yet because of the common delusion of presumptuous thought, which causes people to behave selfishly. Ego must first make way for the love of Christ to take over the throne of the Self. Only then may you rise above the egoic imitation, for then you will have a champion and a king. The very public way that Jesus was crucified and the very public way that he resurrected gives us all hope of the same: Jesus demonstrates proof of resurrection and his life, death, and resurrection is about all of us, not only about the Christ. Jesus is the exemplar of our resurrection. And, by the way, in a Gnostic sense, which could be considered heretical by many Christians, the story of Jesus and the Christ and the Father don't even have to be believed as historical fact, which many nay-sayers make the cornerstone of their argument against Christ and God. The very concepts themselves—the very thoughts, the mind—is what carries this. We are consciousness and this Christ story is in our consciousness for our salvation. Think on that… I acknowledge that this is a very different version of Christianity than has been traditionally presented to us. This is gnosis that was originally contained in the sacred scriptures that formed the New Testament prior to the Pope and Emperor of Rome getting their hands on it and stripping it out. It's nice to know. I hope you get it. It doesn't really matter, because all you need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. That is the bottom line. We are emanations directly of the Father and the Father has promised to save us all and bring us all home. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.” This has been taken to mean that one must acknowledge the power of the Christ before the Christ can redeem you. But, you see, this would put all of the power of redemption in your hands rather than Christ's. The Christ will redeem all Second Order Powers by the end of time, with or without your prior acknowledgment. All redemption comes to the Father through the Christ, and that is in Christ's hands. What accepting the Christ now does for you is open the door for the Third Order Powers to enter your egoic soul. This power makes it possible to live a joyous and virtuous life. It allows the love of the Father to flow through you and out into the world. And it eases your transition after the physical death of your body, so you may enter the afterlife without fear, knowing that you rest in the Pleroma of the Christ. The Final Economy is our foretaste of Paradise. No more shadows, no more sorrow. I hope that this information is helpful to you and will help you remember your gnosis. Merry Christmas. God bless us all. And onward and upward. If you are getting any gnosis from this information, please consider supporting Gnostic Insights with a generous donation. It helps keep me motivated. I’m a one-person enterprise with full responsibility for every aspect of this podcast, from writing to recording to editing to artwork to paying for the hosting services that bring this gnosis to you. I could really use some more support! Please do what you can. 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

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

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

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

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

The Metal Exchange Podcast guys discuss Corrosion of Conformity's 1991 release, "Blind".Justin's Recommended Track: White NoiseChris' Recommended Track: Dance of the Deadhttps://coc.com/https://www.facebook.com/corrosionofconformityListen to "Blind": https://open.spotify.com/album/7kLqk3fireCdZxAZmCud3k*Become a Member of our Patreon*⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/TheMetalExchangePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠*Purchase our theme song - "The Blade of Nicchi"⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://taliesin3.bandcamp.com/track/blood-sky-the-blade-of-nicchi-feat-micheal-mills⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠*Other Band Mentions*In Virtue: https://invirtue.band/ & https://www.facebook.com/invirtuePrimaluce: https://www.primaluce.net/ & https://www.facebook.com/primalucemusicAeons: https://aeons.online/ & https://www.facebook.com/Aeons.IOMBloodbound: https://www.facebook.com/bloodboundmetalAedan Sky: https://www.facebook.com/AedanskyOfficialArch Enemy: https://www.archenemy.net/ & https://www.facebook.com/archenemyofficialAngra: https://angra.net/ & https://www.facebook.com/AngraOfficialPageFirewind: https://firewind.gr/ & https://www.facebook.com/firewindofficialProg Storm Festival: https://www.progstorm.com/ & https://www.facebook.com/progstormfestival*Join us at The Metal Exchange*⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/MetalExchange⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://metalexchangepodcast.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/TheMetalExchangePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/metalexchanges⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bsky.app/profile/themetalexchange.bsky.social⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/themetalexchangepodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/user/4tn81zpim10zdl0qu1azagd8o⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Create your ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ today! #madeonzencastrOffer Code: METALEXCHANGE

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I think we’ve got a lot of new listeners now and new subscribers. And since you haven’t been with us from the beginning, I’d like to review the Gnostic cosmology. A basic premise of Gnosticism is that we are all born with gnosis inherent within us. We already have the answers. We already are our perfect Selves. But because of the nature of the never-ending war that we find ourselves in here in this material cosmos, we forget our inherent nature. And we begin to engage in the war through what the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi calls the law of mutual combat. That being, since we are attacked, we attack back. And then we engage in that back and forth enough that we completely forget our mission and our goal and who we are. So today, I want to run through what I call the illustrated Gnostic cosmology. And I’m putting the illustration into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you really would do well to go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustration that we’re talking about. Now, when you first look at this Gnostic cosmology, it’s very strange looking, and it’s probably incomprehensible. But by the time I talk you through this, you’ll be able to follow the steps. There are 15 steps in this Gnostic cosmology. And once you recognize these stations, then you will literally understand Gnosis. You will remember your Gnosis, and you’ll understand what all of the various versions of Gnosticism have been trying to say. One reason is that this is a pictorial presentation. It’s not just words, because I’ve noticed when reading the various books of the Nag Hammadi, for example, some of which are Valentinian Gnosticism, some of which are Sethian Gnosticism, some are straight-out Greek philosophy by Plato. They use different words, but the concepts are the same. So what I always attempt to do is to level up to a meta-level, above the words, and envision and then picture it so that you can describe it with the words you prefer. So let’s get started. The background image of this entire Gnostic cosmology key I picture as pure inky blackness, like the sky with no stars or moons. That is the ground state of consciousness. And that is the Father’s mind. Now the Father is another one of these words where many people would like to disagree with saying Father. They want to say Source, or, for example, as it is called in the Secret Book of John, the One, the Parent, the Invisible Spirit. However, in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, which is the book that I mainly use as a reference, that initial, illimitable consciousness is called the Father. Now, that’s the ground state. That’s the first principle. Consciousness is not a byproduct of the little gray cells. Consciousness predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows. Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity, into a monad, as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the All were formed. That’s step number three. And the Totalities of the All are all of the variabilities that make up the Son. So, the Totalities and the Son are coexistent, but it is all of the characteristics broken out and enumerated that form what are called the Totalities of the All. The Totalities of the All do not recognize themselves as individuals. They are only spokes on the wheel. They have no personal identity. They know that they are part of the Son, and they glorify the Son, and they glorify the Father. So, they are glorifying upstream, as we like to say. And it is through this giving of glory that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. Now, instead of one singular unit that is coexistent entirely with the Son, they blossom into self-identities, and they arrange themselves in a hierarchy. So, step four is the Totalities of the All migrating from a burst of sunshine that’s sitting within the Son into a pyramidal shape, because the pyramid is the essential shape of a hierarchy. There’s more at the bottom than there is at the top. Everything keeps leveling up, following a basic Gnostic rule of the higher the fewer, until you eventually arrive at a capstone at the very top, just like our physical pyramids look. And this entity, at number five, is called the hierarchy of the Aeons of the Fullness. And in Gnosticism, we usually identify the word aeon with consciousness, with an individual. It’s an entity. It’s not a unit of time. It’s a unit of consciousness. And so the Aeons of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God are infinite in number. There aren’t only eight or 64 or 365. Those may be ones that are named in other books of Gnosticism, but conceptually, you see, they’d have to be innumerable, because they are part of the illimitable consciousness of the Father, via the Son. And the job of the hierarchies of the Fullness, well, they’ve each got a position, a place, a duty, and a name. And basically what they do is sing songs of glory upstream to the Father and the Son, just like the Totalities did. And in this combination of the Aeons in the Fullness of God, they dream. They dream of Paradise. They dream of the intelligent design of this cosmos that we live in. And so all of us down here, we’re prefigured in the minds of the Fullness of God. And that Fullness of God is generally what we humans imagine as Heaven or Paradise. Humans in cultures all over the world have a dream of Paradise. And the reason why we all have this exact same dream of Paradise is because that’s where we come from. We are the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness, and we instantiate their dream of Paradise. Now, according to the Tripartite Tractate, the object that in my drawings looks like a starburst re-sorted themselves into this hierarchy of the Fullness of God. The last Aeon that was produced through a combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God, giving glory to the Father and the Son. In the Tripartite Tractate, that Aeon, that final Aeon, the capstone to the pyramid, sitting right up there on top, is called Logos. And Logos means reasoning. It means logic. The next step in the story is when that final Aeon that’s sitting on top of the Fullness of God wants to re-insert itself into the Father—the original source of consciousness—wants to plug into the Father the way that the Son remains plugged into the Father. It tries to take that position, and it can’t do it. And it is repelled by the Father, and that is the Fall. The Father repelled that Aeon from being able to plug into itself. I wouldn’t say that Logos was trying to become God. That’s kind of an insulting way to put it. I would say that that final Aeon was simply trying to reunite with the Father. But it couldn’t. It was repelled because no one can come to the illimitable. It’s too powerful. The Tripartite Tractate says they would be annihilated because the Father’s power is too great. It would just burn it up. And so instead of plugging into the Father, Logos fell. And that, according to Gnosticism, is the Fall. And it was the Fall that created our material cosmos. Now, you could say that that was Sophia that fell and her child Yaldabaoth. I prefer to keep it simple and just to say that it’s Logos that fell. Logos was a very special Aeon that contained within its one unity, fractal representations of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness. So Logos was perfect and complete, representing the Son of God. However, he was a fractal level down. Logos crowned the top of the Fullness with fractals of all the other Aeons. He didn’t have the power, didn’t have the greatness of the original Son in step two. But he had the pattern. He had the blueprint. He thought he was complete and could build Paradise, the Paradise that all of the Aeons dreamed up together in step five. He thought he could do that because he contained the Fullness of God in a smaller fractal form. But he was mistaken and he crashed out of the ethereal plane, boom, broke apart, and his pleroma lost its hierarchical arrangement. It became random and chaotic. That is step eight. I generally depict that random chaos as quantum foam. It’s just boiling in and out of existence. Nothing can stick. Nothing can stay. Nothing can level up. It’s chaotic. Logos tried his best to bring it all back in order, tried to put his pleroma back together into a proper hierarchy, but it would not cooperate. And he was aghast, it says. He was very upset, very disturbed by the disturbance that had come out of him. He meant to bring perfection and instead he brought chaos. And he was now separated from the Fullness of God. Well, the Fullnesses prayed to help Logos return, and the best part of Logos, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, step 10, the best part of Logos returned to the Fullness of God, but it abandoned the chaos below. So what is that chaos? I’ve identified that chaotic disturbance that came out of Logos as not only quantum foam, but the Fallen ego of Logos. You see, all of the Aeons have an ego. They’ve got their perfect One Self that is a fractal copy of the Son, but they’ve also got positions, places, names, duties, which is to say they have an ego. And an ego is just their designation. It’s just their address and their name, rank, and serial number. That’s their ego. It’s not self-centered. It’s just a name. But when Logos falls and abandons his ego down below, then it is an ego that came into being that is separated from the One Self of the Son. It’s outside of the direct flow of consciousness and life and love of the Father and the Son and the God. So it is the beginning of ego running amok. Ego came to its own realization, woke up, so to speak, found itself in this weird, dark, chaotic space, and he thought he was God because he didn’t remember where he came from. He didn’t realize he was the fallen ego of Logos. He had all of the blueprints for Paradise because they were in the mind of Logos when he fell. And he also had the ambitious overreaching that Logos was doing when he fell. Step 11 in the diagram shows the chaos and this disordered pleroma of the ego of Logos down here, no longer looking like a pyramid but just random bubbles. But there’s a border around it now because the Father put up a border around the fallen bits in order to contain them, in order to protect the Fullness of God from the disaster that was occurring, we would say, down below. Logos, now reunited with the Fullness, prays for his fallen ego, prays for this mess that he left behind. Demiurge came to awareness down there at step 11. So the ego of Logos, abandoned down below, becomes what Gnostics call the Demiurge. And the Demiurge, thinking it was God, having all the blueprints for Paradise, thought it could build Paradise now down here inside of this border. And this border, by the way, could be likened to the expanding bubble around our universe. The Big Bang would have been the splat in step 8 when Logos crashed apart and began emitting these particles. So Fullness and Logos prayed for help to come to what is called now the Deficiency. Our cosmos is known as the Deficiency or the imitation because it’s a knock-off of Paradise. And what they want is to rescue the Demiurge. They’re not trying to condemn the Demiurge to hell. They’re trying to rescue the Demiurge and bring him back up to the Fullness to reunite with Logos and plug back in with them because that’s where it belongs. So in step 12, we have the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness being sent down into this material cosmos. The Demiurge has been working on the material cosmos in step 11. He can’t get it to come to life because he doesn’t contain the consciousness and life of the Fullness and the Father. He’s a flat version, like a mirror image or like a projection on a movie screen. He doesn’t have the true depth of consciousness. Archons lack consciousness, they are not self-aware the way the Aeons are. They are tightly restrained and very strictly ordered by very strict laws of physics and chemistry and whatnot by the mind of the Demiurge only. They are projections of the Demiurge. They are shadows of the Aeons. They’re like the inversions of the beauty of that Aeonic Golden Pyramid, but they are lacking consciousness, life, and love. So the Aeons send down what are called the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The Second Order of Powers is all of the life and consciousness and love of the Father flowing down from the Fullness of God down into this fallen cosmos. That is all living creatures. Everything that’s alive from the bacteria and the cells and the organs that make up our bodies and all of the critters and birds and fish, all of the insects and mammals, all living creatures, the grasses and the trees, the moss and the slime molds, everything that’s alive is a fruit of the Fullness of God. Fruits of the Aeons pre-designed in the Fullness of God and sent down here to instantiate life, love, and consciousness into this otherwise dead disaster of a cosmos. And we come down with a mission. We Second Order Powers were supposed to come down here to remind the Demiurge of the Father above; to remind the Demiurge of Logos, his better half; to remind the Demiurge of love and consciousness and that he is not God and he needs to return home. Come home, Demiurge, come home. We are supposed to be calling to the Demiurge to return home to the Fullness of God. Well, we got caught in a never-ending war instead with the material world. See, at conception, we are all bonded to the molecular level. So when a creature has the spark of life come into it from the Fullness down here, when it bonds to that material level, that molecule that then begins reproducing, reproducing, reproducing according to the pattern from above that that creature brought into the cosmos with it. We all carry the Fullness of God within every part of our living bodies, every one of our cells, every one of our organs. We are full of the Fullness of God. We have consciousness. It’s self-evident. We love. That is also self-evident. We operate according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others to help build things that we can’t do on our own. We make families and work together. We make villages and work together. We make small communities and build things that we can all enjoy together. But we forget our job. We forget about bringing love and remembrance to the Demiurge because of the never-ending war of spirit against material, the never-ending war of right and left, the never-ending war between us and the archons, the never-ending war. It’s a constant battle here between life and death. And so the Fullnesses realized that that plan wasn’t working. We forgot to do our jobs. They prayed upstream to the Father, to the Son, to the Totalities, and they prayed for true salvation to come now and rescue the Second Order Powers, just like we were supposed to rescue the Demiurge. Now it takes a superpower, the most superpower, to come into our cosmos, rescue all of the Second Order Powers by reminding us of God’s love and what our true mission is of sharing love. We can’t do it on our own. We already proved that we lost the battle in step 13. So step 14 is sending down the Savior, sending down the most powerful entity of the ethereal plane, that being what is called the Christ. And Christ is the Son of God. Christ is the Fullnesses all praying together. Christ is the Totalities all singing the song together. Christ has the most power of any entity ever, more than enough power to bring remembrance, love, salvation, peace, comfort, joy to all of us down here who have forgotten. That’s the job of the Christ. That’s step 14. And step 15 is once the Christ succeeds in bringing remembrance to everyone, then we can move into what will be called the Third Economy. We’re in the Second Economy now. That’s the economy or the system of the material world. The First Economy was the Fullness of God, where the First Order of Powers live. The Second Economy is this cosmos that we live in, where the Second Order of Powers live. And the Third Economy is after this material cosmos passes away, dissolves like snow, gets all rolled up and wrapped up, and we all return to the Fullness of God. The Third Economy is the dream of Paradise the cosmos will instantiate after this Second Economy dissolves at the end of time. We all return to the new Third Economy ruled by the Third Order of Powers, and that’s the pleroma of Christ. Christ is the Third Order of Powers, and there is an individual Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers. We can’t do it on our own. We cannot love to the extent needed to demonstrate to the Demiurge love. We get caught in wars. We kill each other. We fight with each other. We quarrel. We quibble. We blow each other up and chop off heads. Bad, very bad. The Christ and the Third Order Powers comes to each of us as an individual, comes to you, comes to me, comes to our neighbors, comes to all of the critters and all of the plants, but I don’t think they’re quite as fallen as we are. I think they’re doing a pretty good job of living their lives according to what is required down here in the Second Economy. But true salvation, true redemption from this world comes by accepting the assistance of the Christ. Okay, I think we’ll stop there today. That’s the end of this Gnostic Cosmology. Next week, we’ll talk about the yeah, so what? to all of this. What good will that do me? What good will that do the world? Tune back in next week and we’ll talk about it. Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t be shy. Make some comments. I look forward to reading them. God bless and onward and upward. 15 steps in Gnostic Cosmology

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I think we’ve got a lot of new listeners now and new subscribers. And since you haven’t been with us from the beginning, I’d like to review the Gnostic cosmology. A basic premise of Gnosticism is that we are all born with gnosis inherent within us. We already have the answers. We already are our perfect Selves. But because of the nature of the never-ending war that we find ourselves in here in this material cosmos, we forget our inherent nature. And we begin to engage in the war through what the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi calls the law of mutual combat. That being, since we are attacked, we attack back. And then we engage in that back and forth enough that we completely forget our mission and our goal and who we are. So today, I want to run through what I call the illustrated Gnostic cosmology. And I’m putting the illustration into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you really would do well to go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustration that we’re talking about. Now, when you first look at this Gnostic cosmology, it’s very strange looking, and it’s probably incomprehensible. But by the time I talk you through this, you’ll be able to follow the steps. There are 15 steps in this Gnostic cosmology. And once you recognize these stations, then you will literally understand Gnosis. You will remember your Gnosis, and you’ll understand what all of the various versions of Gnosticism have been trying to say. One reason is that this is a pictorial presentation. It’s not just words, because I’ve noticed when reading the various books of the Nag Hammadi, for example, some of which are Valentinian Gnosticism, some of which are Sethian Gnosticism, some are straight-out Greek philosophy by Plato. They use different words, but the concepts are the same. So what I always attempt to do is to level up to a meta-level, above the words, and envision and then picture it so that you can describe it with the words you prefer. So let’s get started. The background image of this entire Gnostic cosmology key I picture as pure inky blackness, like the sky with no stars or moons. That is the ground state of consciousness. And that is the Father’s mind. Now the Father is another one of these words where many people would like to disagree with saying Father. They want to say Source, or, for example, as it is called in the Secret Book of John, the One, the Parent, the Invisible Spirit. However, in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, which is the book that I mainly use as a reference, that initial, illimitable consciousness is called the Father. Now, that’s the ground state. That’s the first principle. Consciousness is not a byproduct of the little gray cells. Consciousness predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows. Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity, into a monad, as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the All were formed. That’s step number three. And the Totalities of the All are all of the variabilities that make up the Son. So, the Totalities and the Son are coexistent, but it is all of the characteristics broken out and enumerated that form what are called the Totalities of the All. The Totalities of the All do not recognize themselves as individuals. They are only spokes on the wheel. They have no personal identity. They know that they are part of the Son, and they glorify the Son, and they glorify the Father. So, they are glorifying upstream, as we like to say. And it is through this giving of glory that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. Now, instead of one singular unit that is coexistent entirely with the Son, they blossom into self-identities, and they arrange themselves in a hierarchy. So, step four is the Totalities of the All migrating from a burst of sunshine that’s sitting within the Son into a pyramidal shape, because the pyramid is the essential shape of a hierarchy. There’s more at the bottom than there is at the top. Everything keeps leveling up, following a basic Gnostic rule of the higher the fewer, until you eventually arrive at a capstone at the very top, just like our physical pyramids look. And this entity, at number five, is called the hierarchy of the Aeons of the Fullness. And in Gnosticism, we usually identify the word aeon with consciousness, with an individual. It’s an entity. It’s not a unit of time. It’s a unit of consciousness. And so the Aeons of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God are infinite in number. There aren’t only eight or 64 or 365. Those may be ones that are named in other books of Gnosticism, but conceptually, you see, they’d have to be innumerable, because they are part of the illimitable consciousness of the Father, via the Son. And the job of the hierarchies of the Fullness, well, they’ve each got a position, a place, a duty, and a name. And basically what they do is sing songs of glory upstream to the Father and the Son, just like the Totalities did. And in this combination of the Aeons in the Fullness of God, they dream. They dream of Paradise. They dream of the intelligent design of this cosmos that we live in. And so all of us down here, we’re prefigured in the minds of the Fullness of God. And that Fullness of God is generally what we humans imagine as Heaven or Paradise. Humans in cultures all over the world have a dream of Paradise. And the reason why we all have this exact same dream of Paradise is because that’s where we come from. We are the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness, and we instantiate their dream of Paradise. Now, according to the Tripartite Tractate, the object that in my drawings looks like a starburst re-sorted themselves into this hierarchy of the Fullness of God. The last Aeon that was produced through a combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God, giving glory to the Father and the Son. In the Tripartite Tractate, that Aeon, that final Aeon, the capstone to the pyramid, sitting right up there on top, is called Logos. And Logos means reasoning. It means logic. The next step in the story is when that final Aeon that’s sitting on top of the Fullness of God wants to re-insert itself into the Father—the original source of consciousness—wants to plug into the Father the way that the Son remains plugged into the Father. It tries to take that position, and it can’t do it. And it is repelled by the Father, and that is the Fall. The Father repelled that Aeon from being able to plug into itself. I wouldn’t say that Logos was trying to become God. That’s kind of an insulting way to put it. I would say that that final Aeon was simply trying to reunite with the Father. But it couldn’t. It was repelled because no one can come to the illimitable. It’s too powerful. The Tripartite Tractate says they would be annihilated because the Father’s power is too great. It would just burn it up. And so instead of plugging into the Father, Logos fell. And that, according to Gnosticism, is the Fall. And it was the Fall that created our material cosmos. Now, you could say that that was Sophia that fell and her child Yaldabaoth. I prefer to keep it simple and just to say that it’s Logos that fell. Logos was a very special Aeon that contained within its one unity, fractal representations of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness. So Logos was perfect and complete, representing the Son of God. However, he was a fractal level down. Logos crowned the top of the Fullness with fractals of all the other Aeons. He didn’t have the power, didn’t have the greatness of the original Son in step two. But he had the pattern. He had the blueprint. He thought he was complete and could build Paradise, the Paradise that all of the Aeons dreamed up together in step five. He thought he could do that because he contained the Fullness of God in a smaller fractal form. But he was mistaken and he crashed out of the ethereal plane, boom, broke apart, and his pleroma lost its hierarchical arrangement. It became random and chaotic. That is step eight. I generally depict that random chaos as quantum foam. It’s just boiling in and out of existence. Nothing can stick. Nothing can stay. Nothing can level up. It’s chaotic. Logos tried his best to bring it all back in order, tried to put his pleroma back together into a proper hierarchy, but it would not cooperate. And he was aghast, it says. He was very upset, very disturbed by the disturbance that had come out of him. He meant to bring perfection and instead he brought chaos. And he was now separated from the Fullness of God. Well, the Fullnesses prayed to help Logos return, and the best part of Logos, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, step 10, the best part of Logos returned to the Fullness of God, but it abandoned the chaos below. So what is that chaos? I’ve identified that chaotic disturbance that came out of Logos as not only quantum foam, but the Fallen ego of Logos. You see, all of the Aeons have an ego. They’ve got their perfect One Self that is a fractal copy of the Son, but they’ve also got positions, places, names, duties, which is to say they have an ego. And an ego is just their designation. It’s just their address and their name, rank, and serial number. That’s their ego. It’s not self-centered. It’s just a name. But when Logos falls and abandons his ego down below, then it is an ego that came into being that is separated from the One Self of the Son. It’s outside of the direct flow of consciousness and life and love of the Father and the Son and the God. So it is the beginning of ego running amok. Ego came to its own realization, woke up, so to speak, found itself in this weird, dark, chaotic space, and he thought he was God because he didn’t remember where he came from. He didn’t realize he was the fallen ego of Logos. He had all of the blueprints for Paradise because they were in the mind of Logos when he fell. And he also had the ambitious overreaching that Logos was doing when he fell. Step 11 in the diagram shows the chaos and this disordered pleroma of the ego of Logos down here, no longer looking like a pyramid but just random bubbles. But there’s a border around it now because the Father put up a border around the fallen bits in order to contain them, in order to protect the Fullness of God from the disaster that was occurring, we would say, down below. Logos, now reunited with the Fullness, prays for his fallen ego, prays for this mess that he left behind. Demiurge came to awareness down there at step 11. So the ego of Logos, abandoned down below, becomes what Gnostics call the Demiurge. And the Demiurge, thinking it was God, having all the blueprints for Paradise, thought it could build Paradise now down here inside of this border. And this border, by the way, could be likened to the expanding bubble around our universe. The Big Bang would have been the splat in step 8 when Logos crashed apart and began emitting these particles. So Fullness and Logos prayed for help to come to what is called now the Deficiency. Our cosmos is known as the Deficiency or the imitation because it’s a knock-off of Paradise. And what they want is to rescue the Demiurge. They’re not trying to condemn the Demiurge to hell. They’re trying to rescue the Demiurge and bring him back up to the Fullness to reunite with Logos and plug back in with them because that’s where it belongs. So in step 12, we have the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness being sent down into this material cosmos. The Demiurge has been working on the material cosmos in step 11. He can’t get it to come to life because he doesn’t contain the consciousness and life of the Fullness and the Father. He’s a flat version, like a mirror image or like a projection on a movie screen. He doesn’t have the true depth of consciousness. Archons lack consciousness, they are not self-aware the way the Aeons are. They are tightly restrained and very strictly ordered by very strict laws of physics and chemistry and whatnot by the mind of the Demiurge only. They are projections of the Demiurge. They are shadows of the Aeons. They’re like the inversions of the beauty of that Aeonic Golden Pyramid, but they are lacking consciousness, life, and love. So the Aeons send down what are called the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The Second Order of Powers is all of the life and consciousness and love of the Father flowing down from the Fullness of God down into this fallen cosmos. That is all living creatures. Everything that’s alive from the bacteria and the cells and the organs that make up our bodies and all of the critters and birds and fish, all of the insects and mammals, all living creatures, the grasses and the trees, the moss and the slime molds, everything that’s alive is a fruit of the Fullness of God. Fruits of the Aeons pre-designed in the Fullness of God and sent down here to instantiate life, love, and consciousness into this otherwise dead disaster of a cosmos. And we come down with a mission. We Second Order Powers were supposed to come down here to remind the Demiurge of the Father above; to remind the Demiurge of Logos, his better half; to remind the Demiurge of love and consciousness and that he is not God and he needs to return home. Come home, Demiurge, come home. We are supposed to be calling to the Demiurge to return home to the Fullness of God. Well, we got caught in a never-ending war instead with the material world. See, at conception, we are all bonded to the molecular level. So when a creature has the spark of life come into it from the Fullness down here, when it bonds to that material level, that molecule that then begins reproducing, reproducing, reproducing according to the pattern from above that that creature brought into the cosmos with it. We all carry the Fullness of God within every part of our living bodies, every one of our cells, every one of our organs. We are full of the Fullness of God. We have consciousness. It’s self-evident. We love. That is also self-evident. We operate according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others to help build things that we can’t do on our own. We make families and work together. We make villages and work together. We make small communities and build things that we can all enjoy together. But we forget our job. We forget about bringing love and remembrance to the Demiurge because of the never-ending war of spirit against material, the never-ending war of right and left, the never-ending war between us and the archons, the never-ending war. It’s a constant battle here between life and death. And so the Fullnesses realized that that plan wasn’t working. We forgot to do our jobs. They prayed upstream to the Father, to the Son, to the Totalities, and they prayed for true salvation to come now and rescue the Second Order Powers, just like we were supposed to rescue the Demiurge. Now it takes a superpower, the most superpower, to come into our cosmos, rescue all of the Second Order Powers by reminding us of God’s love and what our true mission is of sharing love. We can’t do it on our own. We already proved that we lost the battle in step 13. So step 14 is sending down the Savior, sending down the most powerful entity of the ethereal plane, that being what is called the Christ. And Christ is the Son of God. Christ is the Fullnesses all praying together. Christ is the Totalities all singing the song together. Christ has the most power of any entity ever, more than enough power to bring remembrance, love, salvation, peace, comfort, joy to all of us down here who have forgotten. That’s the job of the Christ. That’s step 14. And step 15 is once the Christ succeeds in bringing remembrance to everyone, then we can move into what will be called the Third Economy. We’re in the Second Economy now. That’s the economy or the system of the material world. The First Economy was the Fullness of God, where the First Order of Powers live. The Second Economy is this cosmos that we live in, where the Second Order of Powers live. And the Third Economy is after this material cosmos passes away, dissolves like snow, gets all rolled up and wrapped up, and we all return to the Fullness of God. The Third Economy is the dream of Paradise the cosmos will instantiate after this Second Economy dissolves at the end of time. We all return to the new Third Economy ruled by the Third Order of Powers, and that’s the pleroma of Christ. Christ is the Third Order of Powers, and there is an individual Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers. We can’t do it on our own. We cannot love to the extent needed to demonstrate to the Demiurge love. We get caught in wars. We kill each other. We fight with each other. We quarrel. We quibble. We blow each other up and chop off heads. Bad, very bad. The Christ and the Third Order Powers comes to each of us as an individual, comes to you, comes to me, comes to our neighbors, comes to all of the critters and all of the plants, but I don’t think they’re quite as fallen as we are. I think they’re doing a pretty good job of living their lives according to what is required down here in the Second Economy. But true salvation, true redemption from this world comes by accepting the assistance of the Christ. Okay, I think we’ll stop there today. That’s the end of this Gnostic Cosmology. Next week, we’ll talk about the yeah, so what? to all of this. What good will that do me? What good will that do the world? Tune back in next week and we’ll talk about it. Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t be shy. Make some comments. I look forward to reading them. God bless and onward and upward. 15 steps in Gnostic Cosmology

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week we started an episode called Gnostic Psychology Slideshow, Part One, and today we’re going to wrap that up. It’s a slideshow that I presented at my class at Southern Oregon University on the Simple Gnostic Gospel, and so I will be describing for you and posting the transcript on the GnosticInsights.com website and also at Substack. In the written transcripts, you’ll be able to see the PowerPoint slides, which really, I think, helps to clear things up, to clear up confusion, by the imagery. If you’re listening to the audio-only version, you might want to go to the websites, one or the other, and look at the slideshow too. Last week in Gnostic Psychology Part One, we talked about Who am I? Who is a human being? Who are you? And in my way of thinking, we are a combination of units of consciousness; memes and the memes we carry in our meme shroud; karma; and our One true Self, which is a replication of the One consciousness of the Father; the aeonic inheritance we have from our parents in the Fullness; and our body, our material body, which comprises our DNA and our human parents, our inheritance, as well as the units of consciousness of the 37 trillion cells in our body. There’s a therapeutic application for this Gnostic Psychology. And if you look at my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, or you go to my 20-year-old website and look up https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com you can find this particular explanation in depth. I think that would be a good bumper sticker or t-shirt. Gnosis you can trust. Again, if you’re following along with the slideshow, and this will be called Gnostic Psychology Part 2, the values on the left are egoic and they are demiurgic and they are from the deficiency, the imitation. The values on the right are from the true Self, from the Fullness of God, and they are traits of the Father. So, I don’t want to read through this whole list. It’s a very long list, but for example, a vice would be to be hateful, spiteful. The virtue that’s the flip side is to be loving, charitable. So, if you find yourself hating someone, it’s not virtuous, it’s not righteous, it’s demiurgic. We are called to love others, and indeed that is our Second Order task. We were sent here to remind the fallen demiurge that there is a Father above, that there is life and love, and that it comes from above. The Demiurge is a fractal of Aeonic ego, being the ego of fallen Logos. We are also fractals, so we want to dwell on the Aeonic Fullness side rather than the fallen demiurgic side. Another example would be hard-hearted, ruthless on the left, and the virtuous side is to be merciful. One of the vices is to be slothful, lazy. The virtue side is to be useful, to be part of the solution. The left is illogical, incoherent. It makes no sense because it’s built on lies. The right is logical. The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything theory of everything that I developed starts with a single premise that consciousness is the ground state of reality, and then everything derives from that first premise. The Gnostic gospel that I teach, or that I share with you, because I don’t have to teach you Gnosis, we’re all born with the Gnosis, so it’s inherent in us. We just need to be reminded because we’ve been caught in a never-ending war. So, for example, if a person has an eating disorder, and let’s say you eat uncontrollably, you eat far too much, and you eat the wrong things, and you know you should cut back, and you know you should eat better because it’s just not good, because you feel sluggish, and your health is suffering. That is because you’ve allowed your organ system of the digestive tract to rule. It’s an even further down fractal iteration than ego. Your ego wants to lose weight because you want to look good. You want to fit into that new outfit or whatever. You want to be attractive to the opposite sex, but you can’t control your eating. That’s because you have ceded your control to your digestive system. Willpower is difficult because that food is very attractive, and your digestive system is very powerful because you’ve given it so much authority, and it’s become accustomed to ruling you. You have to go a step to the right. You have to get on to the virtue side, and instead of being gluttonous, which is a vice, you want to be temperate. So, how do you get on the virtuous side? By turning your eyes upward to the Fullness of God, by asking for the Father’s assistance, or asking for the Son’s assistance to overcome this demiurgic slavery that you’ve found yourself in. This works for all vices, for all addictions. Now, if that’s too difficult, this is where the Christ comes in, because the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. So, it’s yet another pyramidal shape, like the Fullness, except it’s the most powerful force in the cosmos. And, if you jump from giving your control to your gluttonous digestive system, or to your Self-centered me-me-me ego, you can turn it directly over to the Third Order of Powers, and ask them to come over and take control. And, that is like a stencil. It’s going to overlay a Third Order Power on top of every one of your units of consciousness, and it’s got all the power to do anything. You borrow the willpower of the Fullness, the willpower of the Christ. And, that’s who Jesus was. He was our exemplar. He was the first human who ceded all authority to the Third Order Powers, to the Father. He was God incarnate that way. He did not have any vice, and he showed us, yeah, it can be done. Yeah, you might get crucified for it, and everybody’s going to hate you. You’re going to have very few friends. You’re going to look like a total goody two shoes. But, if it’s really the Third Order Powers working through you, it’s not a burden. It’s lifting the burden, because you always know what to do, because the Third Order of power is sitting on the throne of yourself. That’s just an example of something you could say, and that will bump the negative meme. Oh, there’s not enough. I’m going to lose you. I’m going to lose this. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. It just bumps it right out of the way, because you’ve displaced that demiurgic meme with a godly meme. They don’t work together, so one of them has got to go, and if you have set your willpower upon the Third Order of Powers, upon the Fullness of God, upon virtue, you don’t have to strain and sweat to get it done. You feel joy. You feel in alignment with the One. You are truly centered. This is what it means to be enlightened. Therapy may help you to identify which memes need dropping, and may assist in the process. You may not realize the reason you’re so insecure is because you think there’s not enough to go around, so a good therapist can help you identify that, and then you can drop that. There’s not enough to go around. I’m going to be left out. Nobody loves me. I’ll never amount to anything. You can drop those negative memes that you uncover during therapy, and then replace them with positive memes. And nowadays, since everything’s going so poorly out here in the world, if you spend a lot of time with the media, and with social media, you are absorbing all of that negativity, and all of that hatred, because social media is inherently demiurgic. It’s not alive. It comes from the bottom. You need to turn your eyes upward, turn off the phone, look upward, and plug into the Father, however you can do that. Some memes are easy to detach, because they don’t really fit in with your bundle of meme strings and cords, so if you stop reading those posts, if you get off of Facebook, well, maybe they will evaporate, because it turned out you were actually a very loving person, and you still love your old friends, even if you disagree with them now. But if you continually feed that negative meme, then you will continually feel horrid, because the demiurgic side of the ledger is designed to make you feel bad, to make you feel enslaved, to create division, despair, fear. That all comes from not living a godly life. But we don’t force ourselves to live a godly life. We run to it with joy. It’s coming home. It’s remembering. It’s remembering the joy. And suddenly all burdens are light enough to bear. Bad things can happen to you, but then you can trust in God that all things work together for good for those who love God. So I may have broken my leg and wound up in the hospital for a couple of days, but it turns out I needed to be in that hospital bed, because my roommate in the hospital was a lovely person that needed to hear what I had to say, and vice versa. And we made a new friend. This is how a bad thing can turn into a good thing, by having a godly attitude and trusting that God knows best. God does know better than you. You don’t have enough data to run your life and avoid all of the pitfalls. So you’re starting to get the idea this whole Gnostic psychology has to do with dropping unwanted memes and turning to the virtuous side. That’s what it boils down to. There’s only peace and joy and happiness on the side of virtue when you’re sincere. We’re not talking about hypocrisy. We’re not talking about forcing the issue. We’re not talking about whipping yourself with a flagellant whip to make yourself holy. That is not God’s will. God is entirely love, entirely acceptance, entirely forgiving, entirely compassionate, entirely charitable. And if you think you’re living a righteous life, yet you’re feeling anger, hatred, division, well then you’re not living a righteous life. Those are clues that you’re in the wrong set of memes, you see? So you want to get rid of those and turn your eyes upward. And you can either turn your eyes directly to Jesus as Christian true believers do, and I mean true believers, not hypocrites or pew warmers, or you can go this Gnostic route and turn your mind up to the Fullness of God, the Son, the Father, and the disincarnate Christ who pre-existed Jesus. You can take your choice, but it all is going to level you up to the Father. If you’re on the path, the glory beam, then you wind up with the Father. On a practical level, therapies such as the Emotional Freedom Technique can help with that. You can go to an EFT trainer, or you can look up EFT on YouTube and learn how to do the EFT technique. Then you just do this tapping. It takes about a minute, and it literally taps those unwanted memes right off of your meme shroud. I use it now and then, and it works. If you’ve got a thought you can’t dislodge, you do the EFT while thinking of the thought. You do the EFT a couple, maybe three times, and boom, it’s gone. Serenity is achieved as the memes are discarded. Of course, the whole point of traditional meditation is to clear your mind. What are you doing when you do that? You are quieting the memes. You’re turning them off so they can’t affect you and get in the way of you coming into contact with your true Self or with the Father. It’s important to realize that at any moment in time, you can choose to lay down an unwanted meme. You have that power. It is in your control. If you notice yourself carrying a meme around again that you thought you’d gotten rid of, but here you are again, well then stop. Lay it down again. You can lay it down as many times as it takes, but if you continue to do that meme, if you continue to activate that meme, think about it, or carry out this unwanted behavior, you’re not going to be able to get rid of it because activation causes it to stick to your meme bundle. That’s why you have to continue to lay it down, and you have to stop thinking about it. It doesn’t help to think about it. Regret, regret that never goes away, is also demiurgic because it makes you feel guilty. It wants you to feel like you have no willpower, like you can’t help yourself, and that’s a lie. It’s all lies. You can help yourself. You can be free in a moment, and from personal experience, I can tell you that that’s what the born again experience is. It’s inviting the Third Order of Powers to come into you and to take over, and the Christian prayer to Jesus, Jesus I’m a sinner, I repent, I ask you to come into my life, is a version of what I’m saying, and you can do that. I’m not against you asking Jesus to be your personal emissary. Jesus is my man. I’ve always been with Jesus, and I still am. Nothing wrong with Jesus. And if you don’t want to believe in the Christ, if you think that’s just hooey, you don’t need the Christ, well you’re going to have a hard reckoning when you pass away because we have to be pure to get to heaven. We have to be a hundred percent pure because heaven’s all good, all good. Sooner or later, everyone repents, but sooner or later everyone does repent, whether it’s in this lifetime or in the in-between place. Or you will keep coming back and getting reincarnated over and over again because you don’t want to let go of those memes that you’re holding on to. In order to stick the landing, as I say, which is a gymnastic term—you know how when a gymnast jumps off of that vault and then they land, that’s called sticking the landing. If they fumble the landing or they fall over, they didn’t stick the landing. So I think of getting to heaven and being able to stick the landing. That only happens if you repent and accept that you come from above and you want to return to above, and you don’t want to keep doing these activities that you love so much down here on the earth, or else you’re just going to keep getting pulled back onto the earth. In the case of PTSD, some sort of therapy is usually required to detach that meme from the person, unless of course you want to go full throttle and have a born-again experience, then it can all be gone in an instant. But if you don’t actively strive to detach that meme, it’s possible to be victimized by PTSD for the entirety of your life, and this causes much suffering, as Buddha would say, much needless suffering. And if you want to hear more about that, if you want to know more, please leave a comment below, and I’ll review that whole idea of Bill’s hypnotic method and give you some case histories. God bless us all, and onward and upward. If you find these Gnostic Insights beneficial and you would like to do your part to usher in a new Gnostic Reformation, please contribute to the cause. The Aeons will notice and be glad. 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 the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week we started an episode called Gnostic Psychology Slideshow, Part One, and today we’re going to wrap that up. It’s a slideshow that I presented at my class at Southern Oregon University on the Simple Gnostic Gospel, and so I will be describing for you and posting the transcript on the GnosticInsights.com website and also at Substack. In the written transcripts, you’ll be able to see the PowerPoint slides, which really, I think, helps to clear things up, to clear up confusion, by the imagery. If you’re listening to the audio-only version, you might want to go to the websites, one or the other, and look at the slideshow too. Last week in Gnostic Psychology Part One, we talked about Who am I? Who is a human being? Who are you? And in my way of thinking, we are a combination of units of consciousness; memes and the memes we carry in our meme shroud; karma; and our One true Self, which is a replication of the One consciousness of the Father; the aeonic inheritance we have from our parents in the Fullness; and our body, our material body, which comprises our DNA and our human parents, our inheritance, as well as the units of consciousness of the 37 trillion cells in our body. There’s a therapeutic application for this Gnostic Psychology. And if you look at my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, or you go to my 20-year-old website and look up https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com you can find this particular explanation in depth. I think that would be a good bumper sticker or t-shirt. Gnosis you can trust. Again, if you’re following along with the slideshow, and this will be called Gnostic Psychology Part 2, the values on the left are egoic and they are demiurgic and they are from the deficiency, the imitation. The values on the right are from the true Self, from the Fullness of God, and they are traits of the Father. So, I don’t want to read through this whole list. It’s a very long list, but for example, a vice would be to be hateful, spiteful. The virtue that’s the flip side is to be loving, charitable. So, if you find yourself hating someone, it’s not virtuous, it’s not righteous, it’s demiurgic. We are called to love others, and indeed that is our Second Order task. We were sent here to remind the fallen demiurge that there is a Father above, that there is life and love, and that it comes from above. The Demiurge is a fractal of Aeonic ego, being the ego of fallen Logos. We are also fractals, so we want to dwell on the Aeonic Fullness side rather than the fallen demiurgic side. Another example would be hard-hearted, ruthless on the left, and the virtuous side is to be merciful. One of the vices is to be slothful, lazy. The virtue side is to be useful, to be part of the solution. The left is illogical, incoherent. It makes no sense because it’s built on lies. The right is logical. The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything theory of everything that I developed starts with a single premise that consciousness is the ground state of reality, and then everything derives from that first premise. The Gnostic gospel that I teach, or that I share with you, because I don’t have to teach you Gnosis, we’re all born with the Gnosis, so it’s inherent in us. We just need to be reminded because we’ve been caught in a never-ending war. So, for example, if a person has an eating disorder, and let’s say you eat uncontrollably, you eat far too much, and you eat the wrong things, and you know you should cut back, and you know you should eat better because it’s just not good, because you feel sluggish, and your health is suffering. That is because you’ve allowed your organ system of the digestive tract to rule. It’s an even further down fractal iteration than ego. Your ego wants to lose weight because you want to look good. You want to fit into that new outfit or whatever. You want to be attractive to the opposite sex, but you can’t control your eating. That’s because you have ceded your control to your digestive system. Willpower is difficult because that food is very attractive, and your digestive system is very powerful because you’ve given it so much authority, and it’s become accustomed to ruling you. You have to go a step to the right. You have to get on to the virtue side, and instead of being gluttonous, which is a vice, you want to be temperate. So, how do you get on the virtuous side? By turning your eyes upward to the Fullness of God, by asking for the Father’s assistance, or asking for the Son’s assistance to overcome this demiurgic slavery that you’ve found yourself in. This works for all vices, for all addictions. Now, if that’s too difficult, this is where the Christ comes in, because the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. So, it’s yet another pyramidal shape, like the Fullness, except it’s the most powerful force in the cosmos. And, if you jump from giving your control to your gluttonous digestive system, or to your Self-centered me-me-me ego, you can turn it directly over to the Third Order of Powers, and ask them to come over and take control. And, that is like a stencil. It’s going to overlay a Third Order Power on top of every one of your units of consciousness, and it’s got all the power to do anything. You borrow the willpower of the Fullness, the willpower of the Christ. And, that’s who Jesus was. He was our exemplar. He was the first human who ceded all authority to the Third Order Powers, to the Father. He was God incarnate that way. He did not have any vice, and he showed us, yeah, it can be done. Yeah, you might get crucified for it, and everybody’s going to hate you. You’re going to have very few friends. You’re going to look like a total goody two shoes. But, if it’s really the Third Order Powers working through you, it’s not a burden. It’s lifting the burden, because you always know what to do, because the Third Order of power is sitting on the throne of yourself. That’s just an example of something you could say, and that will bump the negative meme. Oh, there’s not enough. I’m going to lose you. I’m going to lose this. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. It just bumps it right out of the way, because you’ve displaced that demiurgic meme with a godly meme. They don’t work together, so one of them has got to go, and if you have set your willpower upon the Third Order of Powers, upon the Fullness of God, upon virtue, you don’t have to strain and sweat to get it done. You feel joy. You feel in alignment with the One. You are truly centered. This is what it means to be enlightened. Therapy may help you to identify which memes need dropping, and may assist in the process. You may not realize the reason you’re so insecure is because you think there’s not enough to go around, so a good therapist can help you identify that, and then you can drop that. There’s not enough to go around. I’m going to be left out. Nobody loves me. I’ll never amount to anything. You can drop those negative memes that you uncover during therapy, and then replace them with positive memes. And nowadays, since everything’s going so poorly out here in the world, if you spend a lot of time with the media, and with social media, you are absorbing all of that negativity, and all of that hatred, because social media is inherently demiurgic. It’s not alive. It comes from the bottom. You need to turn your eyes upward, turn off the phone, look upward, and plug into the Father, however you can do that. Some memes are easy to detach, because they don’t really fit in with your bundle of meme strings and cords, so if you stop reading those posts, if you get off of Facebook, well, maybe they will evaporate, because it turned out you were actually a very loving person, and you still love your old friends, even if you disagree with them now. But if you continually feed that negative meme, then you will continually feel horrid, because the demiurgic side of the ledger is designed to make you feel bad, to make you feel enslaved, to create division, despair, fear. That all comes from not living a godly life. But we don’t force ourselves to live a godly life. We run to it with joy. It’s coming home. It’s remembering. It’s remembering the joy. And suddenly all burdens are light enough to bear. Bad things can happen to you, but then you can trust in God that all things work together for good for those who love God. So I may have broken my leg and wound up in the hospital for a couple of days, but it turns out I needed to be in that hospital bed, because my roommate in the hospital was a lovely person that needed to hear what I had to say, and vice versa. And we made a new friend. This is how a bad thing can turn into a good thing, by having a godly attitude and trusting that God knows best. God does know better than you. You don’t have enough data to run your life and avoid all of the pitfalls. So you’re starting to get the idea this whole Gnostic psychology has to do with dropping unwanted memes and turning to the virtuous side. That’s what it boils down to. There’s only peace and joy and happiness on the side of virtue when you’re sincere. We’re not talking about hypocrisy. We’re not talking about forcing the issue. We’re not talking about whipping yourself with a flagellant whip to make yourself holy. That is not God’s will. God is entirely love, entirely acceptance, entirely forgiving, entirely compassionate, entirely charitable. And if you think you’re living a righteous life, yet you’re feeling anger, hatred, division, well then you’re not living a righteous life. Those are clues that you’re in the wrong set of memes, you see? So you want to get rid of those and turn your eyes upward. And you can either turn your eyes directly to Jesus as Christian true believers do, and I mean true believers, not hypocrites or pew warmers, or you can go this Gnostic route and turn your mind up to the Fullness of God, the Son, the Father, and the disincarnate Christ who pre-existed Jesus. You can take your choice, but it all is going to level you up to the Father. If you’re on the path, the glory beam, then you wind up with the Father. On a practical level, therapies such as the Emotional Freedom Technique can help with that. You can go to an EFT trainer, or you can look up EFT on YouTube and learn how to do the EFT technique. Then you just do this tapping. It takes about a minute, and it literally taps those unwanted memes right off of your meme shroud. I use it now and then, and it works. If you’ve got a thought you can’t dislodge, you do the EFT while thinking of the thought. You do the EFT a couple, maybe three times, and boom, it’s gone. Serenity is achieved as the memes are discarded. Of course, the whole point of traditional meditation is to clear your mind. What are you doing when you do that? You are quieting the memes. You’re turning them off so they can’t affect you and get in the way of you coming into contact with your true Self or with the Father. It’s important to realize that at any moment in time, you can choose to lay down an unwanted meme. You have that power. It is in your control. If you notice yourself carrying a meme around again that you thought you’d gotten rid of, but here you are again, well then stop. Lay it down again. You can lay it down as many times as it takes, but if you continue to do that meme, if you continue to activate that meme, think about it, or carry out this unwanted behavior, you’re not going to be able to get rid of it because activation causes it to stick to your meme bundle. That’s why you have to continue to lay it down, and you have to stop thinking about it. It doesn’t help to think about it. Regret, regret that never goes away, is also demiurgic because it makes you feel guilty. It wants you to feel like you have no willpower, like you can’t help yourself, and that’s a lie. It’s all lies. You can help yourself. You can be free in a moment, and from personal experience, I can tell you that that’s what the born again experience is. It’s inviting the Third Order of Powers to come into you and to take over, and the Christian prayer to Jesus, Jesus I’m a sinner, I repent, I ask you to come into my life, is a version of what I’m saying, and you can do that. I’m not against you asking Jesus to be your personal emissary. Jesus is my man. I’ve always been with Jesus, and I still am. Nothing wrong with Jesus. And if you don’t want to believe in the Christ, if you think that’s just hooey, you don’t need the Christ, well you’re going to have a hard reckoning when you pass away because we have to be pure to get to heaven. We have to be a hundred percent pure because heaven’s all good, all good. Sooner or later, everyone repents, but sooner or later everyone does repent, whether it’s in this lifetime or in the in-between place. Or you will keep coming back and getting reincarnated over and over again because you don’t want to let go of those memes that you’re holding on to. In order to stick the landing, as I say, which is a gymnastic term—you know how when a gymnast jumps off of that vault and then they land, that’s called sticking the landing. If they fumble the landing or they fall over, they didn’t stick the landing. So I think of getting to heaven and being able to stick the landing. That only happens if you repent and accept that you come from above and you want to return to above, and you don’t want to keep doing these activities that you love so much down here on the earth, or else you’re just going to keep getting pulled back onto the earth. In the case of PTSD, some sort of therapy is usually required to detach that meme from the person, unless of course you want to go full throttle and have a born-again experience, then it can all be gone in an instant. But if you don’t actively strive to detach that meme, it’s possible to be victimized by PTSD for the entirety of your life, and this causes much suffering, as Buddha would say, much needless suffering. And if you want to hear more about that, if you want to know more, please leave a comment below, and I’ll review that whole idea of Bill’s hypnotic method and give you some case histories. God bless us all, and onward and upward. If you find these Gnostic Insights beneficial and you would like to do your part to usher in a new Gnostic Reformation, please contribute to the cause. The Aeons will notice and be glad. 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 to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp and I’m your host. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. And welcome to my new listeners and readers. So glad to have you aboard. And of course, I’m always very grateful for those of you who have been with this series since the beginning. This week was my final lecture at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University on the Gnostic Gospel and the topic was Gnostic Psychology. So I’m going to share with you that final slideshow today because it’s easier than coming up with a brand new episode when I’m having to work on these lectures. Of course, this Gnostic material is complicated and yet it’s simple. Once you get it, everything falls into place, but I can understand that it’s difficult to grasp it initially. I’m happy to share with you that my students that have been with me for nine weeks now, they’ve got it. They finally got it. It’s all fallen into place. So it happens. So let’s look at the slideshow from this week's lecture on Gnostic Psychology. And if you’re listening to this as an audio only podcast, I suggest you go either to Substack, to the Gnostic Reformation, or to my home base website, GnosticInsights.com, and visualize the slideshow because it’s pretty and the diagrams really help the audio information make sense. When we talk about Gnostic Psychology, I’m going to answer the question of who we are, and we’re going to cover six topics. We’re going to talk about units of consciousness, memes, karma, Self, Aeonic inheritance, and then how your body even gets into the picture when we’re talking about the psychology. All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception. Let’s start with units of consciousness. This concept comes out of my original theory of everything called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, but it’s very useful and it works in the Gnostic setting as well. And that would be an infinite number, because the Son reflects the infinity of the Father. The Totalities of the ALL have no self-identity. They still identify with the Son. They’re parts of the Son. But during the giving of glory and the singing upstream to the Father and the Son, the Totalities recognized their individuality and immediately sorted themselves into the hierarchy of the fullness of God. And I would say that that differentiation of the Aeons into self-identity was the formation of their egos. The next concept is distributed fractal consciousness. Now we’ve talked a lot about fractals here at Gnostic Insights, and if you don’t know what a fractal is, please go to GnosticInsights.com and look up the episodes about fractals, and you’ll learn about it. Because consciousness is fractally distributed. Another factor in our psychology is memes. My illustration of that is to show that torus, that donut shape, with all these strings lying on the outside of it. Just tons of strings stuck to the outside of your torus. That’s not an official gnostic concept. That’s out of my Simple Explanation and I’ll talk a little more about the torus later. These memes are units of thought. They’re vibratory things and each one carries a thought. The memes dwell, I think, in the transpersonal unconscious or the akashic record. They are immaterial. They’re thought forms. Memes and karma go together. Now, comparing Freud and Jung’s theories to this Gnostic psychology: In terms of fractals, the body’s units of consciousness are smaller fractal iterations of the Fullness of God than my governing unit of consciousness. The Self is connected to the Fullness of God at all times, though we often ignore it. The Ego sits on the outside because it is in contact with others and the material world. Okay, we’re going to stop there for today. There are a few more slides in this slide show, but this is a good place to stop. Perhaps I’ll pick them up next week and we’ll talk more about Gnostic psychology and then how it is applied therapeutically. Until then, God bless us all and onward and upward! Please do what you can to support this independent Gnostic ministry. You can show your support by leaving comments and questions that prompt me toward sharing gnosis with you. You can also show your support by subscribing to Gnostic Insights and/or The Gnostic Reformation on Substack. And, of course, financial support is always welcomed! Thank you for whatever you can do to contribute. 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

When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement and with harmonious consent to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. The All and the Hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. And in the Tripartite Tractate, you know, you have the originating Father, which is the God Above All Gods, but when the Son emerges as the Son, but then he differentiates into the Totalities and the Aeons of the Fullness, he is called the Father of the Aeons and the Father of the Totalities. So the Son is sometimes referred to as the Father and sometimes referred to as the Son and that can be confusing. So the All and the hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. The Aeons stepped up “joyously and willingly” with the thought of being helpful to the deficient ones by bringing awareness of the Father's glory and love. We know that the originating source of consciousness is the illimitable Father, the God Above All Gods. The originating Father is beyond comprehension, even for the Aeons. The only entity capable of grasping the illimitable God Above All Gods is the Son of the Father, who contains within himself all of the traits of the Father. This is the Son who has a countenance, a face, because the Father wants to be known to his emanations through the Son. This is how we know that when these passages speak of the Father, they are actually referring to the Son who has become a Father to his emanations, because the Aeons are able to behold the countenance of their Father.

When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement and with harmonious consent to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. The All and the Hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. And in the Tripartite Tractate, you know, you have the originating Father, which is the God Above All Gods, but when the Son emerges as the Son, but then he differentiates into the Totalities and the Aeons of the Fullness, he is called the Father of the Aeons and the Father of the Totalities. So the Son is sometimes referred to as the Father and sometimes referred to as the Son and that can be confusing. So the All and the hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. The Aeons stepped up “joyously and willingly” with the thought of being helpful to the deficient ones by bringing awareness of the Father's glory and love. We know that the originating source of consciousness is the illimitable Father, the God Above All Gods. The originating Father is beyond comprehension, even for the Aeons. The only entity capable of grasping the illimitable God Above All Gods is the Son of the Father, who contains within himself all of the traits of the Father. This is the Son who has a countenance, a face, because the Father wants to be known to his emanations through the Son. This is how we know that when these passages speak of the Father, they are actually referring to the Son who has become a Father to his emanations, because the Aeons are able to behold the countenance of their Father.

In this episode of Point of Convergence, we explore what it means to "escape the Matrix." Join me as I break down the perspective I've gained from five journeys beyond this construct. What are the implications when "outer space" is found within "inner space?" Is this the key to human liberation?

For each of the Aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father's qualities and powers. Since He exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of Him by means of logical thought. Thus the Father is a single name because He is one, but nevertheless innumerable in His qualities and names. Interesting that logical thought was mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate, because it is important to realize that logic is part of the mind of God. We are given the ability to reason and to be logical. The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is. Rather, their birth has the form of a spreading out by which the Father spreads Himself out into that which He wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from Him may exist as well. The Father of the Aeons, that being the Son, and embodiment of the Formless One, is the Holy Spirit that breathes through the members of the All and moves them to search for the Unknown. Just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance. For its sweetness lets the Aeons sense an indescribable pleasure and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One Who Desires, that they should know Him in oneness, and that they should assist one another, having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed.

For each of the Aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father's qualities and powers. Since He exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of Him by means of logical thought. Thus the Father is a single name because He is one, but nevertheless innumerable in His qualities and names. Interesting that logical thought was mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate, because it is important to realize that logic is part of the mind of God. We are given the ability to reason and to be logical. The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is. Rather, their birth has the form of a spreading out by which the Father spreads Himself out into that which He wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from Him may exist as well. The Father of the Aeons, that being the Son, and embodiment of the Formless One, is the Holy Spirit that breathes through the members of the All and moves them to search for the Unknown. Just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance. For its sweetness lets the Aeons sense an indescribable pleasure and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One Who Desires, that they should know Him in oneness, and that they should assist one another, having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed.

The reason we focus so much on the Aeons of the Fullness and Logos in particular here at Gnostic Insights is because the Pleroma of any living creature is the sum total of the Pleroma of the Demiurge—our material or hylic part that makes up our physical bodies—and the Pleroma of Logos after his return to the Fullness, when he prayed alongside the Aeons to bring life to the deficiency he had caused. “The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good. The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered [that is the One Self, his fractal of the Son]; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another [which is to say, each individual Aeon in its place and position in the Pleroma of the Fullness]; then all of them together [the Totality of the Fullness as a single Pleroma]; but before all of them, the Father [the originating source from which all consciousness flows]. The prayer of the agreement [among these nested fractal consciousnesses] was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back.”

The reason we focus so much on the Aeons of the Fullness and Logos in particular here at Gnostic Insights is because the Pleroma of any living creature is the sum total of the Pleroma of the Demiurge—our material or hylic part that makes up our physical bodies—and the Pleroma of Logos after his return to the Fullness, when he prayed alongside the Aeons to bring life to the deficiency he had caused. “The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good. The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered [that is the One Self, his fractal of the Son]; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another [which is to say, each individual Aeon in its place and position in the Pleroma of the Fullness]; then all of them together [the Totality of the Fullness as a single Pleroma]; but before all of them, the Father [the originating source from which all consciousness flows]. The prayer of the agreement [among these nested fractal consciousnesses] was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back.”

Mark and Alex discuss with the last remaining Dark Aeons, and introduce the "ultimate" boss Penance. The boys also go into detail on how to boost character stats to even be able to on these very powerful foes and stand a chance at victory. This episode finishes off the last remaining side content the boys want to go over, so the only thing left to do is to finish the story!If you're searching for the beginning of the Final Fantasy X or IX series, check the quick info below!Start of the Final Fantasy X series is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠episode 43⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Start of the Final Fantasy IX series is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠episodes 6

The boys continue their discussion on side content by first finishing off Omega Ruins by taking on Ultima and Omega. They then take a brief moment to go over how to customize ultimate armors and which abilities are most useful for super bosses. The episode is finished with a look at some of the Dark Aeons and what to expect when encountering these crazy fights in Final Fantasy X!If you're searching for the beginning of the Final Fantasy X or IX series, check the quick info below!Start of the Final Fantasy X series is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠episode 43⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Start of the Final Fantasy IX series is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠episodes 6

once I was sure chat gpt understood a metaphysical model/hypothesis I first published in 2018, I had it write the essay I present here. when I asked who's thought it most resembled it gave the following as most of it's answer: The Hermetic-Kabbalist strain within the Renaissance NeoplatonistsEspecially the anonymous author(s) behind the Zohar and post-Zoharic Lurianic Kabbalah, viewed through a hermetic and computational lens.Similarity: The Zohar speaks of the "breaking of the vessels" (shevirat ha-kelim), where divine light is scattered into shards and must be recombined. Luria adds that randomness plays a role in what fragments survive or spark spiritual reassembly. These ideas aren't precisely probabilistic, but the concept of upward recompression of a shattered world is there.Your divergence: You do not posit a Fall, or a return to divine unity. You posit structural recursion without soteriology. That makes your system more agnostic and more contemporary.---

Taking a brief pause from the story walkthrough, Mark and Alex begin to dig into the massive amount of side content in Final Fantasy X. Discussed in this episode are the airship passwords and hidden coordinates, Belgemine and Remiem Temple, Cavern of the Stolen Fayth, and Baaj Temple. These optional areas contain the most powerful, and hidden, aeons which are well worth picking up! The boys also cover treasures and prizes found in these areas, which includes the ever-frustrating chocobo race at Remiem Temple.If you're searching for the beginning of the Final Fantasy X or IX series, check the quick info below!Start of the Final Fantasy X series is ⁠⁠episode 43⁠⁠Start of the Final Fantasy IX series is ⁠⁠episodes 6

When we invite Christ in—let's say you're at a revival or you listen to an old Billy Graham sermon on the radio or you're reading the book of John in the Bible and you have the urge to invite Christ to take over your life, that is what it means to invite Christ into your soul—and Christ is a different order of powers than we are. We are what's called Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons; we're the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ. And there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. That's how it is that Jesus or Christ comes with your face and knows everything about you because Christ is an image of the perfection that you can be. Jesus was the first human that fully embodied the Third Order of Powers. Now it's your turn... When we invite Christ in, we invite the Christ to take residence in our souls and in our bodies. We invite the Christ's Third Order Powers to replace our own Second Order Powers because we're leveling up. We're leveling up to a more powerful and loving Godly existence when we invite Christ in.

We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect Paradise, as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for Fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father, other than an expectation of feeling loved or that we should be loved, and we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way.

Episode #362 of BGMania: A Video Game Music Podcast. This week on the show, Bryan and Kyle from RPGera are back with another Spotlight episode, this time focusing on the recently released Action RPG from Obsidian Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios... Avowed! Email the show at bgmaniapodcast@gmail.com with requests for upcoming episodes, questions, feedback, comments, concerns, or whatever you want! Special thanks to our Executive Producers: Jexak, Xancu, & Jeff. EPISODE PLAYLIST AND CREDITS Avowed -Main Theme- from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] Into Parts Unknown from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] No Walls Can Hold This Place from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] Paradis from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] No Accident from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] Frontiers from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] You Will No More Than Witness Here from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] Trespasser from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] With Eyes Unclouded from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] Prey Becoming Predator from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] Aeons, Violet, in Waiting from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] Steel Meeting Bone from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] Fates, Decided from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] We Twine from Avowed [Venus Theory, 2025] SUPPORT US Patreon: https://patreon.com/rpgera CONTACT US Website: https://rpgera.com Discord: https://discord.gg/cC73Heu Twitch: https://twitch.tv/therpgera Twitter: https://twitter.com/OriginalLDG Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryan.ldg/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/leveldowngaming RPGERA PODCAST NETWORK Very Good Music: A VGM Podcast Listening Religiously

Most units of consciousness perform their work as expected. They do their part. They work according to plan, and that's a really good thing because that's what holds everything together. The material controlled by the consciousness of the Demiurge is foundational. If the Demiurge did not control the material, the material universe would not hold together and it would completely and very rapidly fall apart. On the other hand, Second Order Powers, who are fractals of the Aeons above, have complete free will to either fulfill or contradict their responsibilities. Most units of consciousness do their job according to the job they were given to do and, overall, things work according to plan. There is enough redundancy in the system so that when the odd unit of consciousness decides to go rogue, things still hold together.

Beethoven's only opera encodes tremendous metaphysical truths gleaned from his own inner spiritual development on the initiatic path. What is more remarkable is that he conveyed gnostic principles on the demiurge, archons, aeons, and redemption without physical access to classical gnostic texts. This is because as a master of meditation, he was privy to knowledge inaccessible to the mind, personality, or senses, and through his psychological work, was able to witness, live, and portray first hand the very root source of such knowledge informing the conception and documentation of the Gnostic Gospels and Nag Hammadi corpus. He composed Fidelio not only to musically uplift humanity's level of being, but also to teach the realities of divine law (karma), atonement, and the esoteric spiritual work for candidates of the mysteries. Such wisdom is elucidated by Samael Aun Weor's rich commentary on The Gnostic Bible: The Pistis Sophia Unveiled, which serves as the basis for future viewings of Beethoven's masterpiece. Discover the deep insights of this truly gnostic opera, and how a prophet of music demonstrated true love for divinity and the overpowering realities of Pistis Sophia's salvation (the penitent soul who longs for and aspires to the light).

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week, we had part one of Correspondence with an Educated Atheist, and after posting that, I received an email from my correspondent, and it was very interesting because it turns out that all this time I thought I was corresponding with a female because this person's name is one of those gender-neutral names, like my own name, Cyd. I was often miscategorized as a male coming into a new classroom or, like, going to summer camp I was put on the boy's side and so forth because my name was unusual back in the 1950s. So this person has this sort of name that could be taken either as male or female, and I just assumed it was a female. That's a funny thing to me.  Now, flip that whole conversation from last week, and every time I said she, please insert the word he, and now I'm re-recording part two so I can correctly identify my correspondent. He was very gracious about the misunderstanding, of course. Very, very nice person.  He had asked, “Is it possible that the truth of creation might be something difficult or even something unpalatable?” And I answer, well, that's what a lot of people are saying, isn't it? I think it is a message meant to dishearten us, meant to depress us. I notice that the people who believe that are not happy campers. In the end, it doesn't matter what memes we cling to here on this material plane. All will be revealed when we pass over to the other side. He asks, “Is it too much to ask for some sort of indication or revelation or glimpse of the existence of the Fullness? What actions would you suggest should be the next step?” And I say, it's not too much to ask. It's what prayer is all about. If you have never prayed to the higher power, you simply find a quiet spot or maybe in the middle of the night when you're lying in bed awake and you just ask the Source to reveal itself to you. “Ask and you will find. Knock and the door will open.” [Matthew 7:7] You can ask for revelation. You can ask for an unmistakable sign. When I was a young believer, I would ask for things expecting them to happen, and they did. Once as a teenager, I was hitchhiking up the California coast. I had no fear for myself because I was and still am an innocent, and I believe that Jesus walked everywhere with me and that he would protect me from all harm. One night I camped with strange men, but I preached to them and no harm came to me. In the morning, we were all hitchhiking together for the first ride of the day, and I prayed out loud for a red pickup truck to come and pick us all up. About a minute later, a red pickup truck came and picked us all up. It was quite a testimony to those men, like a real miracle. I realize that Christianity has gotten a bad rap lately in the progressive and atheist circles, but remember that the institution is not the Source. The map is not the territory. You can pray to Jesus or to the Father or to the Source or to the Fullness of God. They are all listening. If you pray for revelation with an open heart, your heart will be filled and you will know. Millions of people throughout the years have done just that and have come out the other side walking with God, walking with Jesus. This has nothing to do with salvation or church doctrine. This is going to the Source. I love you. I'm proud of you for opening up and exploring these spiritual depths—onward and upward. In our most recent correspondence, he says, Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions in some detail. I will take a while to read and reread your answers. I have found the Simple Explanation book on Audible, so I am going to download it and listen in the car as a starting point. Gnosticism is complex, he says, yet also appealing. There are a few things that don't seem necessary, like a complex celestial hierarchy with different Aeons and their pre-assigned roles, rather like cogs in a great machine. As someone who has spent a lot of time with histori...

Here it is Ad-Free: No Ads  STEW CREW Shirt: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BaalBustersMerch?ref=related&from_page=listing&listing_id=1833089975#itemsMore: https://my-store-c960b1.creator-spring.comGo to https://SemperFryLLC.com to get all the AWESOME stuff I make plus use code HOLIDAYHELPER for 12% OFF just for BB viewers!Today we went over the Saturn Moon Cult's mask as the three Abrahamic death cult religions. We heard some ideas as to the possible origins of the moon/Saturn cult itself, and discussed the Wolf symbolism that points to connections between this Edenite cult and the founding of Rome.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ba-al-busters-broadcast--5100262/support.

Hunter and I once again had the great pleasure of chatting with Canadian filmmaker Frank Jacob about his latest three part webinar "Time Capsule for the Future Past", the fallen Goddess, truth & myth, humans imitating AI, John Lamb Lash, questioning the WWII narrative, epigenetic hacks, the Anthropos, the Aeons, archons, the human experiment, and much more.  Frank's website: https://frankjacob.com/ You can find the webinar at https://www.cyberhive.tv/ To get access to exclusive episodes and to our MELT Meet-ups consider supporting us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/themeltpodcast or Locals at https://themeltpodcast.locals.com where you can subscribe for a mere $5 per month.    Find The Melt on… Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-2365404 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMeltPodcast Check out our merch at: https://the-melt.creator-spring.com/   Music by The Godawful Joy: https://thegodawfuljoy.bandcamp.com/releases and Matt Presti: https://www.mattpresti.com/music.html

Zac Clark and Tony Scapone delve into the intricacies of the Epic Gamble in Legacy MTG. They explore its mechanics, compare it with other storm decks, and discuss strategies for both playing and fighting the deck. Tony shares his journey in storm decks and advises new players looking to get into the archetype. The discussion is rich with insights into deck building, sideboard strategies, and the evolving meta of competitive play. Takeaways The Epic Gamble is a unique storm deck that utilizes powerful cards like LED and Echo of Aeons. Gamble serves as a tutor in the deck, allowing for strategic plays. Understanding the differences between Epic Gamble and Ruby Storm is crucial for players. Sideboard strategies can enhance the effectiveness of the Epic Gamble. Countering the Epic Gamble requires stopping its initial onslaught and playing resilient permanents. Tony has been playing Magic for over 30 years, with a focus on storm decks in recent years. New players should explore various storm decks to find what suits them best. Content creators like Tony provide valuable resources for learning about storm decks. The Epic Gamble deck has evolved with new card releases, enhancing its strategy. Engaging with the community and practicing online can improve a player's skill. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Epic Gamble 05:54 Comparing Epic Gamble with Other Decks 11:56 Sideboard Strategies and Silver Bullets 18:05 Strategies to Counter the Epic Gamble 24:00 Advice for New Players in Storm Decks HEAVY PLAY DECK BOXES AND SLEEVES www.heavyplay.com/eternaldurdles Use code ETERNALDURDLES for 10% off entire order. Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt9PVLLPfdzI_pr1U9hZDtw/join JOIN US ON DISCORD: https://discord.gg/hrC7PxQZTE Ad-free Listening on SPOTIFY! Subscribe here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/eternaldurdles/subscribe Twitch: Twitch.tv/durdlemagus Eternal Durdles Moxfield: https://www.moxfield.com/users/EternalDurdles https://www.moxfield.com/users/Durdlemagus https://www.moxfield.com/users/ForceofPhil Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/EternalDurdles Check out our song parodies on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/forceofphil Follow us on Twitter: Zac: @durdlemagus Phil: @ForceofPhil We are edited by: https://gullaudio.com & https://www.youtube.com/@PipGoblinBattleCaster OUR Background graphic: AA-vfx Art Store https://www.shaharhatfila.com/en AA VFX- 8K & 4K Most Viewed Motion backgrounds channel @aavfx @aa_vfx @aavfx_art http://4kmotionbackgrounds.blogspot.com/ Moving Backgrounds, Backdrops, Animated Live Wallpapers! HD & UHD Videos 2160p, 4320p , VJ Loops, VFX Animations! Dozens of playlists: Tutorials, Effects, Compilations: @dvdangor2011

Zac Clark and Tony Scapone delve into the intricacies of the Epic Gamble in Legacy MTG. They explore its mechanics, compare it with other storm decks, and discuss strategies for both playing and fighting the deck. Tony shares his journey in storm decks and advises new players looking to get into the archetype. The discussion is rich with insights into deck building, sideboard strategies, and the evolving meta of competitive play. Takeaways The Epic Gamble is a unique storm deck that utilizes powerful cards like LED and Echo of Aeons. Gamble serves as a tutor in the deck, allowing for strategic plays. Understanding the differences between Epic Gamble and Ruby Storm is crucial for players. Sideboard strategies can enhance the effectiveness of the Epic Gamble. Countering the Epic Gamble requires stopping its initial onslaught and playing resilient permanents. Tony has been playing Magic for over 30 years, with a focus on storm decks in recent years. New players should explore various storm decks to find what suits them best. Content creators like Tony provide valuable resources for learning about storm decks. The Epic Gamble deck has evolved with new card releases, enhancing its strategy. Engaging with the community and practicing online can improve a player's skill. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Epic Gamble 05:54 Comparing Epic Gamble with Other Decks 11:56 Sideboard Strategies and Silver Bullets 18:05 Strategies to Counter the Epic Gamble 24:00 Advice for New Players in Storm Decks HEAVY PLAY DECK BOXES AND SLEEVES www.heavyplay.com/eternaldurdles Use code ETERNALDURDLES for 10% off entire order. Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt9PVLLPfdzI_pr1U9hZDtw/join JOIN US ON DISCORD: https://discord.gg/hrC7PxQZTE Ad-free Listening on SPOTIFY! Subscribe here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/eternaldurdles/subscribe Twitch: Twitch.tv/durdlemagus Eternal Durdles Moxfield: https://www.moxfield.com/users/EternalDurdles https://www.moxfield.com/users/Durdlemagus https://www.moxfield.com/users/ForceofPhil Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/EternalDurdles Check out our song parodies on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/forceofphil Follow us on Twitter: Zac: @durdlemagus Phil: @ForceofPhil We are edited by: https://gullaudio.com & https://www.youtube.com/@PipGoblinBattleCaster OUR Background graphic: AA-vfx Art Store https://www.shaharhatfila.com/en AA VFX- 8K & 4K Most Viewed Motion backgrounds channel @aavfx @aa_vfx @aavfx_art http://4kmotionbackgrounds.blogspot.com/ Moving Backgrounds, Backdrops, Animated Live Wallpapers! HD & UHD Videos 2160p, 4320p , VJ Loops, VFX Animations! Dozens of playlists: Tutorials, Effects, Compilations: @dvdangor2011

We will return to the ethereal plane. However, we're going through this earthly manifestation experiencing materialism. It's different than the ethereal plane. It resembles the ethereal plane, but it is ”fallen.” It's at a slower rate of vibration. It's dense and thick and confusing. And so it's very hard to remember Gnosis when we're in this state. In Gnostic terms, as well as traditional Judaic and Christian terms, the Son is a piece of the Father. The Son contains the ALL. The Son contains all of the characteristics of the originating consciousness in a contained and discrete form. The Son is what we now call a perfect fractal of the entirety of the Father. The Son is like the bucket dipped into the limitless sea of consciousness, and it contains exactly the same ocean water of consciousness that the Father contains. This aspect of Judaism and Christianity was cut out of the canonical texts of the Bible by the Emperor Constantine and Pope Clement during the Nicene Council's packaging of Christianity for the Empire of Rome. The Pleroma of the Aeons was well known to the Jews during the time of Jesus, and it survives in the New Testament as various references to Aeons, but those Aeons have been interpreted through the Latin as ages, and this has caused a long-standing misinterpretation of Aeons as units of time, rather than units of consciousness. There's only one bucket that dips into that limitless sea, and that is the Son. The Son is the only emanation from the originating Father. The Aeons are facets that emerge from the Son, each different from one another. The Aeons are like individual rays of the sun. Together, they form the totality of the Son. The Aeons sit together in perfect harmony in a state known as the Fullness of God, also called the Pleroma.

We are the children of the Aeons. We are the Second Order Powers birthed from the First Order Powers—the Aeons. So all of the attributes of the Aeons, which is to say that all of the attributes of the Son of God, come down to us, but we are an iteration. We are further, further down. So we have free will. There's no doubt about that. But our free will that came to us in conception, along with love, life, and remembrance, our free will is constantly being jammed up by the demiurge, because the demiurge doesn't understand free will. The demiurge thinks that free will is a mess, is chaos, is unruly. And it's the job of the demiurge to control everything.

In this episode, David and Gene delve into the fascinating world of Gnostic Christianity, exploring its origins, philosophical concepts, and enduring influence.The episode explores the historical and philosophical landscape that gave birth to Gnostic Christianity, focusing on Alexandria's crucial role as a melting pot of Eastern and Western thought. David and Gene also discuss the significance of the Septuagint and the works of Philo of Alexandria, in bridging Jewish and Greek philosophical traditions.The main Gnostic sects are introduced: the Sethians, Valentinians, Basilideans, Ophites, and Carpocratians, as well as the key texts associated with them, that were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. In preparation for later discussions, this episode summarizes many fundamental Gnostic concepts such as the Pleroma, Nous, Aeons, Barbelo, Sophia, the Demiurge, and the Archons.Carl Jung's contributions to understanding Gnosticism are examined, as are his interpretations of Gnostic concepts as representations of psychological processes and structures, shedding light on the potential of Gnostic thought to illuminate the human psyche.Deep Dive:Gnostic ChristianityChapters:01:15 Introduction02:43 Gnostic Christianity05:28 The Septuagint07:04 Philo of Alexandria09:34 Gnostic Sects11:54 Nag Hammadi Texts12:50 Gnostic Concepts15:14 Seven Sermons to the Dead17:04 Gnostic Psychology19:28 Gnostic Jung22:27 ConclusionsResources:MiddleChamber.org (A Symposium of Masonic Esoterika)Morals & Dogma: Annotated EditionThe Nag Hammadi ScripturesThe Red Book: A Reader's Edition by Carl JungSeven Sermons To the Dead by Carl JungGnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing by Stephan A. Hoeller

So, we do not have an inherent sin nature. We are children of the Aeons of God. We are children of the Fullness, and it's actually an insult to the Fullness and to the Son of God to say that their children—for are we not the children of God? Are we not brothers and sisters of Jesus?—it's a big insult to the Aeons and the angels and the Son of God that made us to say that we're inherently evil. And it's not because we fell. The Fall was instigated long before the humans came along. The Fall is the nature of our material universe, that's all. It's basically metaphorical language for moving from a different realm, a different home—from the ethereal non-material space of heaven, we might call it, or the Fullness of God.

The Metal Exchange Podcast guys discuss Darkwater's 2019 release, "Human". Justin's Recommended Track: Reflection of a Mind Chris' Recommended Track: Alive (Part II) Listen to "Human": https://open.spotify.com/album/5pkG0ZfJfyHcQGaEKmWLAA https://www.facebook.com/darkwaterofficial ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *Become a Member of our Patreon* ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/TheMetalExchangePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *Purchase our theme song - "The Blade of Nicchi" ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://taliesin3.bandcamp.com/track/blood-sky-the-blade-of-nicchi-feat-micheal-mills⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ *Other Band Mentions* Aeons: https://aeons.online/ & https://www.facebook.com/Aeons.IOM Kissin' Dynamite: https://www.kissin-dynamite.de/ & https://www.facebook.com/Kissindynamiterocks Orden Ogan: https://ordenogan.de/ & https://www.facebook.com/ORDENOGAN Eclipse: https://www.eclipsemerch.com/ & https://www.facebook.com/EclipseSweden Wind Rose: https://www.windroseofficial.com/ & https://www.facebook.com/windroseofficial Majestica: https://majesticametal.com/ & https://www.facebook.com/Majesticametal *Join us at The Metal Exchange* ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/MetalExchange⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://metalexchangepodcast.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/TheMetalExchangePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/metalexchanges⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/themetalexchangepodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/MetalExchangePd⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/user/4tn81zpim10zdl0qu1azagd8o⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.reddit.com/r/MetalExchangePodcast⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themetalexchangepodcast/support

We are the fruit of the Fullness of God. And the way that happens with us is that those Aeons that live in the Fullness get together and they admire and give glory to the Father together, and in their mixtures of the various Aeons, another level of personalities, another level of entities are conceived. And you can think of those as the forms that we become, as the forms of each of us. And then we come out into this material world as those forms. The transpersonal consciousness is the thoughts of the Fullness of God, and we all share those thoughts. We are all plugged into the Fullness of God. We directly come down from them. We all share the same Fullness of God, whether or not you remember it consciously, we all remember it subconsciously. And the shared thoughts that we all share, this is referred to by Jung as the transpersonal field.

In this episode, David and Gene begin their deep dive into Gnosticism and its intimate connection to Freemasonry. They explore the key concepts that form the foundation of Gnostic thought, including the Monad, Emanations, Duality, and the pursuit of Gnosis, and discuss how these ideas are woven into the fabric of Masonic philosophy, particularly within the Scottish Rite system.  The Way of the Hermit Podcast: https://www.wayofthehermit.comDavid and Gene discuss how the ancient wisdom traditions use symbols and allegories to convey deeper truths about the nature of reality and human consciousness. Through the symbols and stories of sacred scriptures, they conceal hidden truths, that are revealed to those who possess the key to their interpretation. They also delve into the historical context of Gnosticism, touching on its suppression by orthodox religious authorities and its survival through esoteric traditions, and how Gnostic concepts like the Aeons are related to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.The conversation also draw parallels between Gnostic ideas and Masonic symbols and rituals, revealing the esoteric underpinnings of Freemasonry, and discuss the works of influential thinkers like Albert Pike, Carl Jung, and contemporary Masonic scholars who have recognized the Gnostic elements within Masonry.Join us we begin our exploration of the mysteries of Gnosticism and its profound impact on Freemasonry, and on the world... and find out what it really means, to establish a "New Order for the Ages." Deep Dive:Gnosticism, Freemasonry and GnosisChapters:01:15 Introduction04:03 Why Gnosticism?06:33 Freemasonry and Gnosticism09:21 The Perennial Philosophy11:37 The Monad14:16 Duality15:42 Allegories and Symbols17:58 Gnostic Heresy23:13 Gnosis26:18 ConclusionsResources:2024 Southeastern Masonic Symposium & HarmonyContemplative Masonry: Basic Applications of Mindfulness, Meditation, and Imagery for the CraftArcanum Podcast - Ike BakerGnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern TimesThe Alchemical Keys To Masonic RitualNovo Clavis Esoterika

On this episode of CHRIS AKIN PRESENTS, Chris sits down with Oppu Laine, bassist of Amorphis and Octoploid. Oppu discusses the debut release from Octoploid, "BEYOND THE AEONS." Learn about the band's formation and the wild fusion of prog, classic rock, and death metal in their sound. Discover why members of Amorphis need side projects and more. Dive into the creative process and musical journey of Oppu Laine and Octoploid. #CHRISAKINPRESENTS #OppuLaine #Amorphis #Octoploid #BeyondTheAeons #ProgRock #ClassicRock #DeathMetal #SideProjects #NewMusic #MusicInterview #RockOn **NOTE: Everything said here, and on every episode of all of our shows are 100% the opinions of the hosts. Nothing is stated as fact. Do your own research to see if their opinions are true or not.** Please SUBSCRIBE, click the notification bell, leave a comment or a like, and share this episode!

The universe is speaking to you right now with crucial messages, and you can listen effectively if you tap into synchromysticism. Chris Knowles honors the Virtual Alexandria to discuss his new book, The Secret Sun Synchromystic Handbook. From CG Jung to the divine projecting onto culture to the bardos in conspiracy theory, learn to decipher your sacred mission and encounter your higher self. No more rabbit holes of parallelomania or ego-driven syncs, just liberating high weirdness. Get a clear path to navigate the game of Aeons and Archons. Get the book: https://amzn.to/4chrMRvMore on Chris: https://secretsun.blogspot.com/Get Astro Gnosis 3 tickets: https://thegodabovegod.com/astro-gnosis-3/The Gnostic Tarot: https://www.makeplayingcards.com/sell/synkrasisHomepage: https://thegodabovegod.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aeonbyteAB Prime: https://thegodabovegod.com/members/subscription-levels/ Virtual Alexandria Academy: https://thegodabovegod.com/virtual-alexandria-academy/Voice Over services: https://thegodabovegod.com/voice-talent/ Astro Gnosis (Meet the Archons): https://thegodabovegod.com/meet-archon-replay/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/aeon-byte-gnostic-radio/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Jesus becomes the first human exemplar of the indwelling of the Christ. But we all have the potential to have the indwelling of the Christ. That's the ultimate goal, is to allow the Third Order Powers to replace our Second Order Powers. That is the only way to live a truly righteous life that is outside of the Law, but through grace. But this all has nothing to do with salvation, because all will be redeemed because that is the job of the Christ, sooner or later. And it will be later for most people who do not acknowledge the Christ.

I'm suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son; that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self aware, and it turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. We share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God.

Scratch your head sometimes at the byzantine Gnostic cosmogonies and cosmologies? Don't worry as Dr. Cyd Ropp returns to the Virtual Alexandria to discuss her new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. Her insights on the Valentinian work reveal a clear, logical, but profound theology for cosmic liberation and divine remembrance – a wisdom of the ages other mystics have spoken about. She'll extend her Gnosis-making machine to other Gnostic concepts, allowing us a clear picture of the Demiurge, the Logos, the Pleroma, Aeons, and reincarnation. It's so simple you'll laugh at the idea of “secret knowledge.”More on Cyd: https://gnosticinsights.com/Get Astro Gnosis 3 tickets: https://thegodabovegod.com/astro-gnosis-3/The Gnostic Tarot: https://www.makeplayingcards.com/sell/synkrasisHomepage: https://thegodabovegod.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aeonbyteAB Prime: https://thegodabovegod.com/members/subscription-levels/ Virtual Alexandria Academy: https://thegodabovegod.com/virtual-alexandria-academy/Voice Over services: https://thegodabovegod.com/voice-talent/ Astro Gnosis (Meet the Archons): https://thegodabovegod.com/meet-archon-replay/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/aeon-byte-gnostic-radio/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

If things in your life aren't going good right now... good. Things always get worse before they get better. Like any renovation or spring cleaning you've ever witnessed, dust gets stirred up, things get pulled out, stuff gets thrown away... sorted. Space is made. Be thankful for this Space. Even though It looks empty. He'll make It full again. It already is, but your eyes can't see. Trust. And bear witness. I Love you, Nik p.s. Love isn't a feeling, It's beyond. Feelings are distortions of Love.  ******God is afoot! I'm writing, and working on something BIG (and very useful) for your practice! I'll share #ListenerFavorite episodes until I return with new ones in Spring! Look out for announcements soon! Support the show: ▶▶https://www.patreon.com/goodmornings ________________________________________ Today's Quotes:    "The Name is unseen because it is the enigma of the unseen, which comes to ears that are full of Him. Our Father's name is unutterable, but known through His Son. The Name is Great. Who will be capable of uttering His holy Name? Only our Father, who owns the Name, and his sons, in whom the Name lives. Since our Father is unborn, He alone is the One who created for Himself the Name, before He created the Aeons, so that His Name as Father might rule as Lord. That is His Name in Truth, stable in control, through His flawless force." -The Gnostic Gospels, Alan Jacobs "Way Maker Miracle Worker Promise Keeper Light in the Darkness" -@worshipblog via IG "God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain." -C. S. Lewis via @worshipblog IG "My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God's word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth. - John Piper, Finally Alive via IG @worshipblob "What you hear clearly between your two ears. shout from the roof tops." -The Gnostic Gospels, Alan Jacobs "Note to self: Don't seek to be relevant, or liked, seek to be undeniable. Seek to be compassionate. Seek integrity. Seek humility. Seek Light." -@worshipblog via IG “I want that love that moved the mountains. I want that love that split the ocean. I want that love that made the winds tremble. I want that love that roared like thunder. I want that love that will raise the dead. I want that love that lifts us to ecstasy. I want that love that is the silence of eternity.” -Rumi "You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last..." -Jesus (John 15:16)