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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week I was listening to one of the radio preachers I like to listen to and I caught a sermon on the Pentecost, and I realized I had at that point a Gnostic insight that Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, when it infused the disciples in the upper room—that is the coming of the Third Order of Powers released by the Christ after his resurrection—that the Third Order Powers are the “anointing of the Holy Spirit.” So quickly, let’s look at the Acts of the Apostles book out of the New Testament, Chapter 2, which is what we now call Pentecost. And when the day arrived that completed the fifty days after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place, and suddenly there came a noise, like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now dwelling in Jerusalem, there were devout Judeans from every nation under the sky, and on the advent of this noise, the multitude gathered and were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying, look, are not all of those who speak Galileans? And how is it that each one of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised? And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, what does this portend? But others, ridiculing them, said, ah, they’re full of sweet new wine. But Peter, standing up along with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them all. Judean men and all of you staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and lend your ears to my words, for these men are not drunk, as you suppose, as it is the third hour of the day. Rather, this is what was declared through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall dream dreams.” [Hart's New Testament] Pentecost by el Greco Now, it’s a much longer passage, and it’s very thrilling and exciting, but we don’t have time today to go into it. Perhaps we’ll speak about this in more depth very soon. But that is the first Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. And I’m going to talk about that today to clear up that confusion, because I’ve always had a bit of a confusion over what we speak of as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us in a Christian manner, or the Holy Spirit coming like tongues of fire in the Pentecost story of the upper room in the book of Acts, yet we all have the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within every cell of our bodies and throughout our entire organism. All of the Second Order powers are infused with the power of God. So what is the Holy Spirit then? And now I understand the distinction between the infusion of the Third Order of Powers and the infusion of the Second Order of Powers. You see, we are Second Order Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are First Order Powers. They have their place Above. We are their fruit. We are their spores. (And I actually ran across a radio preacher, of all things, again last week, saying that the original word for fruit as used in the New Testament is spore. And I’m like, yes, that is exactly what I’ve been saying. So that was another cool Gnostic insight that came by way of a Christian radio preacher. So you can never tell what you’re going to hear on Christian radio.) So, we are the spores of the First Order of Powers. We are their fruit. We are their children. We are the Second Order of Powers, and that is all living things in the cosmos. Everything that moves around, everything that’s soft and squishy, the meat, as I like to say, as opposed to the mud, which is the realm of the Demiurge—the rocks and minerals, the molecules and atoms. But the Third Order of Powers is the army of the Christ. We’ve spoken of that often. We’ve had three recent episodes about the indwelling of the Christ. For example, The Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi from May 29th, 2026, Army of the Christ, May 16th, 2026, and Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge from May 9th, 2026. These all have to do with the coming of the Third Order of Powers. And the coming of the Third Order of Powers didn’t come to Earth until Christ walked the Earth in the form of a human, and that is Jesus the Christ. He’s the only one who has ever claimed that “I and my Father are One.” Jesus is not the same as Buddha. Jesus is not the same as Muhammad or any other prophet. Jesus is not simply a good teacher or an exemplar of morality and ethics. If you think that, as many modern theologians do—the postmodern theologians, the deconstructionists—they have reduced the power of Jesus to that of a prophet or a teacher. And even people I hear, strangely enough, out there on YouTube, claiming that Jesus was a fraud—that there is no such thing as anything that happened in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. That’s an absurdity that is being promulgated by non-believers. If you are a believer in the Father, then you are a believer in the Christ, because Christ was the emissary of the Father to Earth to bring the correcting algorithm, I like to call it, to Earth to patch up our Second Order Power that has been forgotten. We’re born with it. We fully instantiate it within our bodies, but we’ve overlaid it with all kinds of junk, karma and memes from our environment that cloud our gnosis, cloud our ability to perceive the power of the Aeons within us. Christ came, the Third Order of Powers, the army of the Christ, to help us to remember, to remind us of our Second Order power, to remind us of where we come from, to remind us of the Father and the Aeons above. I took notes from the Pentecost sermon I listened to, and I’m going to represent these notes as a Gnostic teaching for you, because once you have the gnosis working in you, once you’ve come to terms with Christ and the Father and the Aeons and the gnosis that you were born with, once you begin to remember your inherent transcendence, then you can read the New Testament with eyes wide open. You can understand the mysteries of the New Testament much better than typical Christians do, because they’re trapped in a formula that is derivative of the early Catholics that had stripped the gnosis out of the Bible in the first place. So we must free ourselves from the doctrine, but not free ourselves of the gnosis. Tricky. The occasion known as Pentecost was when Jesus had been crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then ascended back up above into the Fullness—above the Fullness, because he’s the king of all. And he had promised that he would send a helper—to not worry. He had told his disciples, don’t worry, I’m sending you a helper to help you bring the gnosis to the world, essentially is what he said. This was also promised in the Old Testament. And here I’m going to read you a very important verse out of the Old Testament and translate it for you into Gnostic terms. The verse is Ezekiel 36:24—28, where God promises to cleanse and put a new heart and a new spirit into believers. Now it’s tricky when going all the way back to the Old Testament, because the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, well, it’s pretty much equivalent to the Demiurge. And that’s very dicey, very tricky. The ego of the God of the Old Testament, the ego of Jehovah, is when Jehovah speaks in very egoistic terms about itself and about obedience and the law because, remember, Jehovah is law-bound. The Demiurge doesn’t remember; the Demiurge has forgotten its origins above. When this radio preacher referenced Ezekiel 36, I went to what’s called the online Bible Gateway. That’s a resource you can use. And you type in any phrase or any citation, such as Ezekiel 36:24—28, and it will give you all of the various translations. And you can choose which translation you read or you read them all. Well, since this was a Hebrew exhortation, I decided to use the Orthodox Jewish Bible, which does have a lot of Hebrew in it. So then we have to go into Hebrew translations, but that was a good exercise as well. Oh, to go back and clear up confusion about how to read the Old Testament—if the Old Testament is largely demiurgic, it’s basically when Jehovah is speaking that’s demiurgic. But the prophets were in touch with their gnosis. The prophets were talking to the God Above All Gods. They weren’t talking to Jehovah. They were talking to the God Above All Gods. So their prophecies are coming from above. That seems a pretty simple way to understand it. So the histories are one thing. That’s the histories of the of the Hebrews who were the people of Jehovah. Jehovah was their tribal god. And then there are the prophets who were speaking to the God Above All Gods and giving the Hebrews instructions from the God Above All Gods. These are higher instructions than Jehovah. You see, Jehovah doesn’t remember that it’s a fallen part of an Aeon. Here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about that Aeon as Logos. Many other Gnostics call it Sophia. I prefer Logos. That’s out of the Tripartite Tractate. Logos split apart when he fell and abandoned the chaos down below. And the Demiurge is part of that chaos. So the Demiurge put this world in order, formed the heavens and the Earth in a godlike manner, because he had all the blueprints. He had the remembrance of how things went together, but he didn’t have the remembrance of the Father or the remembrance of his better ascended Self, that being Logos, or the Aeons out of which he fell, the Fullness out of which he came. The Demiurge woke up down here in chaos and remembered that things should not be chaos, wanted them to go back into an orderly manner, had the blueprints of Paradise, essentially, that’s how you can put it, and formed this Earth. But this is an imitation. This is a deficiency of Paradise, and it’s especially deficient because there’s no love here. The minerals do not know love. The mud does not know love. Love doesn’t come from the bottom up, from the Demiurge up, from Jehovah up. Love, consciousness, comes from the God Above All Gods down to us in the form of a Second Order Powers. But we have forgotten, and the Demiurge forgot. So here is a word from one of the prophets who was in touch with the God Above All Gods, giving assurance that salvation would come, that remembrance would come. The Demiurge doesn’t block the prophets because it egotistically thinks that the prophets are speaking of it. You know, the Demiurge takes personally being God, but he’s mistaken in that. He’s a lesser god, the god of this cosmos, but the God Above All Gods is the one who speaks through the prophets. Here’s Ezekiel 36:24—26, from the New King James Version. For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Or as The Orthodox Jewish Bible puts it, A lev chadásh also will I give you, and a ruach chadasháh will I put within you; and I will take away the lev ha-éven (stony heart) out of your basár, and I will give you a lev basár. Now, when it speaks of I will give you a new heart, in Hebrew that is lev chadásh. Lev means inner self, the seat of will and moral character. Chadásh means anew, fresh, renewed, restored. So lev chadásh refers to a renewed inner disposition. A transformed moral center. A recreated will aligned with the Father rather than with stubbornness or idolatry. And when it speaks of and put a new spirit within you, in Hebrew that word, the new spirit, is ruach chadasháh. And it means a new spirit, an awakened pneuma. And pneuma is a Gnostic term. That is the spiritual part of us. Our One Self. So the ruach chadasháh is the spirit. Ruach is spirit, breath, animating force, inner vitality. That’s what it means. Chadasháh means fresh, new, renewed. So in Ezekiel, ruach chadasháh means a new animating principle. A renewed inner drive or spiritual vitality placed within the person. You see where I’m going with this? This is the Third Order of Powers. A new motivating force that empowers obedience and life. This cleansing of a new heart and putting a new spirit within you, ruach chadasháh. It means stripping away the meme shroud is how I generally refer to it in the Simple Explanation. Peeling off all those layers of confusion that obscure our originating Fullness. That’s the filthiness. It’s not the original sin. We aren’t born with original sin. We are born as Second Order Powers, much loved out of the first order powers of the Fullness of God. We forget when we come down here into this material world created by the Demiurge. And then we plug into this culture around us. Think of the media and the social media and all of the lies and confusions that are spread, both purposefully meant to mislead you and confuse you, and just accidentally because people make mistakes and people say the wrong things, even when they think they’re saying the right things. So that’s the filthiness. And the idols— these are the things that you cling to. Generally this narcissistic age we live in is an age of idols, but the idols that we worship aren’t little statues of gods. They are our exercise equipment and our bags of makeup and our, well, of course they can be influencers and they can be movie stars and television actors and musicians and sports figures and politicians. Those can be your idols if you treat them as idols, if you idolize them, if you go all weak in the knees and do anything they say. But we also have our own idols in the form of the things that we cling to and pile up around us that we buy, got to have this, got to have that, got to have this, got to have that. These are idols. So this is a promise to cleanse us from that. In other words, to strip away your meme shroud and let the Fullness shine forth from within you. But it goes beyond that, because it says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And that new heart is the lev chadásh, which is new spirit. And the new heart is lev basár, which literally means in Hebrew, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche. Oh, see, our psyche, that is not our pneuma—that's a Gnostic term as well. We have our pneuma, which is our spiritual Fullness. We have our psyche, which is our psychological aspect—our ego lives there. And we have our hylic, which is the material to which we are bonded in this material world. So this passage promises to put a new heart within us, a lev basár, a soft, receptive psyche; that is to soften our hearts, because they’re hardened by the world and by the memes we cling to. It says, furthermore, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh. And the heart of stone in Hebrew is lev ha-éven, meaning heart of stone, or a hardened psyche. Going to remove that heart of stone, which is very interesting, because of course, I say that the hard rocky places, the stones are demiurgic. That’s the material level, that’s the elemental level. So the heart of stone is the demiurgic heart that we have put inside of us, that we’re bonded to. But this passage wants to turn it into a new heart, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche, as we were originally born with—lev basár. So it says, I will give you that new heart and put a new spirit within you, and take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. The heart of stone, lev ha-éven. And the purifying waters are what do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you. In Hebrew, that was literally mayim tehorím, meaning clean, purifying waters. Jesus spoke of the purifying waters. In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus had sneaked out one night to speak privately with Jesus. He didn’t want anyone to know. And Nicodemus said to Jesus, Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform unless God is within him. And in reply, Jesus said to him, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless someone is born from Above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Jesus replied, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed, because I’ve told you it is necessary for you to be born from Above. [Hart's New Testament] Jesus is speaking of the same water, the water of the spirit, that cleanses us and allows us to be born again from Above. Later on in the book of John, Chapter 7, verse 37, Jesus stood up and said loudly, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts living streams of waters will flow. Now he said this in regard to the spirit, whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament] And this is speaking of the Holy Spirit—what we call the Holy Spirit—because of course we have spirit, we’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us, the First Order of Powers. But he’s talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that comes after Jesus is “glorified.” And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living Above, just as we will all be living Above, in a glorified body, in the presence of the Father. Now, the promise that Jesus referred to—he was quoting out of the Old Testament—something that all of the listeners in his audience already knew. And it’s from Isaiah 12:3 that says, Therefore with joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation. The water that is being drawn is this water that’s being referred to, that we’ve been discussing, out of Ezekiel 36:24—28. That is the living water, the mayim tehorím—the Holy Spirit that bathes us now within and without. We draw the living water of the Third Order Powers into us. This is why accepting the mission of the Christ into your innermost being is essential, because there’s no other way to wash away the memes, the obscurations of the world around us that confuses us and causes us to forget. We’re born with a noble nature. We’re born as Second Order Powers, directly from the Fullness above, but we get lost in the confusion of this world that is created and run by the Demiurge. We forget our ethereal origins. We forget about the Father. We forget about the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The spirit that we’re born with becomes smothered, smothered by the worldly memes we cling to and that cling to us. The living water that comes into our new softened heart can only come when you relinquish the ego that is causing you to hold on tightly to those memes, all those false promises that the world gives. They will not save you. They will not make you happy. They might give you a momentary piece of pleasure when something arrives in the box from Amazon on the front porch, but as soon as you’ve used it, it’s just another thing. But the living water never dies. It’s living waters from the Father flowing all the way downstream through the Son, through the Fullnesses, and only through Christ inside of us can we be washed, baptized from within to loosen the hold. So, the lev chadásh, renew your psychic heart, captures the same teaching that the Tripartite Tractate teaches—that the psyche must be reoriented and made stable. The ruach chadashá, awakening within you the spirit that is from Above, is the same as activating the pneumatic seed, as we say in Gnosticism, not a moral reform. The lev basár, a living heart, soft, able to receive the light, receptive, this is the Tripartite Tractate’s softened, harmonized psyche, that can receive the pneumatic imprint of Christ. And the divine seed will rise within you and rule in peace is what the Tripartite Tractate says of the pneuma ruling through the psyche once integration occurs. So, this is the Gnostic paraphrase then of Ezekiel 36:26—28: I will renew your ego's psychic heart, and I will awaken within you the pneumatic spirit—the One Self that flows from above. I will remove the heart hardened by the archons and the never-ending war, and I will restore your Second Order heart, soft, receptive, and able to receive the light. Through this new heart and new spirit, the divine seed of the Christ within you will rise and rule in peace. That’s just another way we could say the phrase in Ezekiel, in a more Gnostic way. It’s a bath, loosens the hold, washes away those memes, those sins, as the church likes to call it. But it’s more than just your mistakes and your problems. It’s all the stuff that we have around us. That is the job of the Christ, to open our eyes to our original Second Order power, to live within us, to correct our mistakes, to correct our faulty algorithms, to protect us from this demiurgic immersion that we find ourselves in, in this material world. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represents all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. Step aside. Take your ego off the throne. Take the Demiurge off the throne, if you’ve enthroned it. Put down your idols. Push away your possessions, at least long enough to allow the Third Order Powers to come in. Ask the Christ to come in and wash you with the Holy Spirit. Invite the Holy Spirit, the army of the Third Order of Powers, into your organism, literally, and it will cleanse you. It will wash you. Walk in the Spirit of God. Let your eyes be opened to the truth. We’ll talk more about this again. Until then, God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week I was listening to one of the radio preachers I like to listen to and I caught a sermon on the Pentecost, and I realized I had at that point a Gnostic insight that Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, when it infused the disciples in the upper room—that is the coming of the Third Order of Powers released by the Christ after his resurrection—that the Third Order Powers are the “anointing of the Holy Spirit.” So quickly, let’s look at the Acts of the Apostles book out of the New Testament, Chapter 2, which is what we now call Pentecost. And when the day arrived that completed the fifty days after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place, and suddenly there came a noise, like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now dwelling in Jerusalem, there were devout Judeans from every nation under the sky, and on the advent of this noise, the multitude gathered and were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying, look, are not all of those who speak Galileans? And how is it that each one of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised? And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, what does this portend? But others, ridiculing them, said, ah, they’re full of sweet new wine. But Peter, standing up along with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them all. Judean men and all of you staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and lend your ears to my words, for these men are not drunk, as you suppose, as it is the third hour of the day. Rather, this is what was declared through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall dream dreams.” [Hart's New Testament] Pentecost by el Greco Now, it’s a much longer passage, and it’s very thrilling and exciting, but we don’t have time today to go into it. Perhaps we’ll speak about this in more depth very soon. But that is the first Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. And I’m going to talk about that today to clear up that confusion, because I’ve always had a bit of a confusion over what we speak of as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us in a Christian manner, or the Holy Spirit coming like tongues of fire in the Pentecost story of the upper room in the book of Acts, yet we all have the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within every cell of our bodies and throughout our entire organism. All of the Second Order powers are infused with the power of God. So what is the Holy Spirit then? And now I understand the distinction between the infusion of the Third Order of Powers and the infusion of the Second Order of Powers. You see, we are Second Order Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are First Order Powers. They have their place Above. We are their fruit. We are their spores. (And I actually ran across a radio preacher, of all things, again last week, saying that the original word for fruit as used in the New Testament is spore. And I’m like, yes, that is exactly what I’ve been saying. So that was another cool Gnostic insight that came by way of a Christian radio preacher. So you can never tell what you’re going to hear on Christian radio.) So, we are the spores of the First Order of Powers. We are their fruit. We are their children. We are the Second Order of Powers, and that is all living things in the cosmos. Everything that moves around, everything that’s soft and squishy, the meat, as I like to say, as opposed to the mud, which is the realm of the Demiurge—the rocks and minerals, the molecules and atoms. But the Third Order of Powers is the army of the Christ. We’ve spoken of that often. We’ve had three recent episodes about the indwelling of the Christ. For example, The Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi from May 29th, 2026, Army of the Christ, May 16th, 2026, and Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge from May 9th, 2026. These all have to do with the coming of the Third Order of Powers. And the coming of the Third Order of Powers didn’t come to Earth until Christ walked the Earth in the form of a human, and that is Jesus the Christ. He’s the only one who has ever claimed that “I and my Father are One.” Jesus is not the same as Buddha. Jesus is not the same as Muhammad or any other prophet. Jesus is not simply a good teacher or an exemplar of morality and ethics. If you think that, as many modern theologians do—the postmodern theologians, the deconstructionists—they have reduced the power of Jesus to that of a prophet or a teacher. And even people I hear, strangely enough, out there on YouTube, claiming that Jesus was a fraud—that there is no such thing as anything that happened in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. That’s an absurdity that is being promulgated by non-believers. If you are a believer in the Father, then you are a believer in the Christ, because Christ was the emissary of the Father to Earth to bring the correcting algorithm, I like to call it, to Earth to patch up our Second Order Power that has been forgotten. We’re born with it. We fully instantiate it within our bodies, but we’ve overlaid it with all kinds of junk, karma and memes from our environment that cloud our gnosis, cloud our ability to perceive the power of the Aeons within us. Christ came, the Third Order of Powers, the army of the Christ, to help us to remember, to remind us of our Second Order power, to remind us of where we come from, to remind us of the Father and the Aeons above. I took notes from the Pentecost sermon I listened to, and I’m going to represent these notes as a Gnostic teaching for you, because once you have the gnosis working in you, once you’ve come to terms with Christ and the Father and the Aeons and the gnosis that you were born with, once you begin to remember your inherent transcendence, then you can read the New Testament with eyes wide open. You can understand the mysteries of the New Testament much better than typical Christians do, because they’re trapped in a formula that is derivative of the early Catholics that had stripped the gnosis out of the Bible in the first place. So we must free ourselves from the doctrine, but not free ourselves of the gnosis. Tricky. The occasion known as Pentecost was when Jesus had been crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then ascended back up above into the Fullness—above the Fullness, because he’s the king of all. And he had promised that he would send a helper—to not worry. He had told his disciples, don’t worry, I’m sending you a helper to help you bring the gnosis to the world, essentially is what he said. This was also promised in the Old Testament. And here I’m going to read you a very important verse out of the Old Testament and translate it for you into Gnostic terms. The verse is Ezekiel 36:24—28, where God promises to cleanse and put a new heart and a new spirit into believers. Now it’s tricky when going all the way back to the Old Testament, because the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, well, it’s pretty much equivalent to the Demiurge. And that’s very dicey, very tricky. The ego of the God of the Old Testament, the ego of Jehovah, is when Jehovah speaks in very egoistic terms about itself and about obedience and the law because, remember, Jehovah is law-bound. The Demiurge doesn’t remember; the Demiurge has forgotten its origins above. When this radio preacher referenced Ezekiel 36, I went to what’s called the online Bible Gateway. That’s a resource you can use. And you type in any phrase or any citation, such as Ezekiel 36:24—28, and it will give you all of the various translations. And you can choose which translation you read or you read them all. Well, since this was a Hebrew exhortation, I decided to use the Orthodox Jewish Bible, which does have a lot of Hebrew in it. So then we have to go into Hebrew translations, but that was a good exercise as well. Oh, to go back and clear up confusion about how to read the Old Testament—if the Old Testament is largely demiurgic, it’s basically when Jehovah is speaking that’s demiurgic. But the prophets were in touch with their gnosis. The prophets were talking to the God Above All Gods. They weren’t talking to Jehovah. They were talking to the God Above All Gods. So their prophecies are coming from above. That seems a pretty simple way to understand it. So the histories are one thing. That’s the histories of the of the Hebrews who were the people of Jehovah. Jehovah was their tribal god. And then there are the prophets who were speaking to the God Above All Gods and giving the Hebrews instructions from the God Above All Gods. These are higher instructions than Jehovah. You see, Jehovah doesn’t remember that it’s a fallen part of an Aeon. Here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about that Aeon as Logos. Many other Gnostics call it Sophia. I prefer Logos. That’s out of the Tripartite Tractate. Logos split apart when he fell and abandoned the chaos down below. And the Demiurge is part of that chaos. So the Demiurge put this world in order, formed the heavens and the Earth in a godlike manner, because he had all the blueprints. He had the remembrance of how things went together, but he didn’t have the remembrance of the Father or the remembrance of his better ascended Self, that being Logos, or the Aeons out of which he fell, the Fullness out of which he came. The Demiurge woke up down here in chaos and remembered that things should not be chaos, wanted them to go back into an orderly manner, had the blueprints of Paradise, essentially, that’s how you can put it, and formed this Earth. But this is an imitation. This is a deficiency of Paradise, and it’s especially deficient because there’s no love here. The minerals do not know love. The mud does not know love. Love doesn’t come from the bottom up, from the Demiurge up, from Jehovah up. Love, consciousness, comes from the God Above All Gods down to us in the form of a Second Order Powers. But we have forgotten, and the Demiurge forgot. So here is a word from one of the prophets who was in touch with the God Above All Gods, giving assurance that salvation would come, that remembrance would come. The Demiurge doesn’t block the prophets because it egotistically thinks that the prophets are speaking of it. You know, the Demiurge takes personally being God, but he’s mistaken in that. He’s a lesser god, the god of this cosmos, but the God Above All Gods is the one who speaks through the prophets. Here’s Ezekiel 36:24—26, from the New King James Version. For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Or as The Orthodox Jewish Bible puts it, A lev chadásh also will I give you, and a ruach chadasháh will I put within you; and I will take away the lev ha-éven (stony heart) out of your basár, and I will give you a lev basár. Now, when it speaks of I will give you a new heart, in Hebrew that is lev chadásh. Lev means inner self, the seat of will and moral character. Chadásh means anew, fresh, renewed, restored. So lev chadásh refers to a renewed inner disposition. A transformed moral center. A recreated will aligned with the Father rather than with stubbornness or idolatry. And when it speaks of and put a new spirit within you, in Hebrew that word, the new spirit, is ruach chadasháh. And it means a new spirit, an awakened pneuma. And pneuma is a Gnostic term. That is the spiritual part of us. Our One Self. So the ruach chadasháh is the spirit. Ruach is spirit, breath, animating force, inner vitality. That’s what it means. Chadasháh means fresh, new, renewed. So in Ezekiel, ruach chadasháh means a new animating principle. A renewed inner drive or spiritual vitality placed within the person. You see where I’m going with this? This is the Third Order of Powers. A new motivating force that empowers obedience and life. This cleansing of a new heart and putting a new spirit within you, ruach chadasháh. It means stripping away the meme shroud is how I generally refer to it in the Simple Explanation. Peeling off all those layers of confusion that obscure our originating Fullness. That’s the filthiness. It’s not the original sin. We aren’t born with original sin. We are born as Second Order Powers, much loved out of the first order powers of the Fullness of God. We forget when we come down here into this material world created by the Demiurge. And then we plug into this culture around us. Think of the media and the social media and all of the lies and confusions that are spread, both purposefully meant to mislead you and confuse you, and just accidentally because people make mistakes and people say the wrong things, even when they think they’re saying the right things. So that’s the filthiness. And the idols— these are the things that you cling to. Generally this narcissistic age we live in is an age of idols, but the idols that we worship aren’t little statues of gods. They are our exercise equipment and our bags of makeup and our, well, of course they can be influencers and they can be movie stars and television actors and musicians and sports figures and politicians. Those can be your idols if you treat them as idols, if you idolize them, if you go all weak in the knees and do anything they say. But we also have our own idols in the form of the things that we cling to and pile up around us that we buy, got to have this, got to have that, got to have this, got to have that. These are idols. So this is a promise to cleanse us from that. In other words, to strip away your meme shroud and let the Fullness shine forth from within you. But it goes beyond that, because it says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And that new heart is the lev chadásh, which is new spirit. And the new heart is lev basár, which literally means in Hebrew, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche. Oh, see, our psyche, that is not our pneuma—that's a Gnostic term as well. We have our pneuma, which is our spiritual Fullness. We have our psyche, which is our psychological aspect—our ego lives there. And we have our hylic, which is the material to which we are bonded in this material world. So this passage promises to put a new heart within us, a lev basár, a soft, receptive psyche; that is to soften our hearts, because they’re hardened by the world and by the memes we cling to. It says, furthermore, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh. And the heart of stone in Hebrew is lev ha-éven, meaning heart of stone, or a hardened psyche. Going to remove that heart of stone, which is very interesting, because of course, I say that the hard rocky places, the stones are demiurgic. That’s the material level, that’s the elemental level. So the heart of stone is the demiurgic heart that we have put inside of us, that we’re bonded to. But this passage wants to turn it into a new heart, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche, as we were originally born with—lev basár. So it says, I will give you that new heart and put a new spirit within you, and take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. The heart of stone, lev ha-éven. And the purifying waters are what do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you. In Hebrew, that was literally mayim tehorím, meaning clean, purifying waters. Jesus spoke of the purifying waters. In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus had sneaked out one night to speak privately with Jesus. He didn’t want anyone to know. And Nicodemus said to Jesus, Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform unless God is within him. And in reply, Jesus said to him, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless someone is born from Above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Jesus replied, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed, because I’ve told you it is necessary for you to be born from Above. [Hart's New Testament] Jesus is speaking of the same water, the water of the spirit, that cleanses us and allows us to be born again from Above. Later on in the book of John, Chapter 7, verse 37, Jesus stood up and said loudly, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts living streams of waters will flow. Now he said this in regard to the spirit, whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament] And this is speaking of the Holy Spirit—what we call the Holy Spirit—because of course we have spirit, we’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us, the First Order of Powers. But he’s talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that comes after Jesus is “glorified.” And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living Above, just as we will all be living Above, in a glorified body, in the presence of the Father. Now, the promise that Jesus referred to—he was quoting out of the Old Testament—something that all of the listeners in his audience already knew. And it’s from Isaiah 12:3 that says, Therefore with joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation. The water that is being drawn is this water that’s being referred to, that we’ve been discussing, out of Ezekiel 36:24—28. That is the living water, the mayim tehorím—the Holy Spirit that bathes us now within and without. We draw the living water of the Third Order Powers into us. This is why accepting the mission of the Christ into your innermost being is essential, because there’s no other way to wash away the memes, the obscurations of the world around us that confuses us and causes us to forget. We’re born with a noble nature. We’re born as Second Order Powers, directly from the Fullness above, but we get lost in the confusion of this world that is created and run by the Demiurge. We forget our ethereal origins. We forget about the Father. We forget about the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The spirit that we’re born with becomes smothered, smothered by the worldly memes we cling to and that cling to us. The living water that comes into our new softened heart can only come when you relinquish the ego that is causing you to hold on tightly to those memes, all those false promises that the world gives. They will not save you. They will not make you happy. They might give you a momentary piece of pleasure when something arrives in the box from Amazon on the front porch, but as soon as you’ve used it, it’s just another thing. But the living water never dies. It’s living waters from the Father flowing all the way downstream through the Son, through the Fullnesses, and only through Christ inside of us can we be washed, baptized from within to loosen the hold. So, the lev chadásh, renew your psychic heart, captures the same teaching that the Tripartite Tractate teaches—that the psyche must be reoriented and made stable. The ruach chadashá, awakening within you the spirit that is from Above, is the same as activating the pneumatic seed, as we say in Gnosticism, not a moral reform. The lev basár, a living heart, soft, able to receive the light, receptive, this is the Tripartite Tractate’s softened, harmonized psyche, that can receive the pneumatic imprint of Christ. And the divine seed will rise within you and rule in peace is what the Tripartite Tractate says of the pneuma ruling through the psyche once integration occurs. So, this is the Gnostic paraphrase then of Ezekiel 36:26—28: I will renew your ego's psychic heart, and I will awaken within you the pneumatic spirit—the One Self that flows from above. I will remove the heart hardened by the archons and the never-ending war, and I will restore your Second Order heart, soft, receptive, and able to receive the light. Through this new heart and new spirit, the divine seed of the Christ within you will rise and rule in peace. That’s just another way we could say the phrase in Ezekiel, in a more Gnostic way. It’s a bath, loosens the hold, washes away those memes, those sins, as the church likes to call it. But it’s more than just your mistakes and your problems. It’s all the stuff that we have around us. That is the job of the Christ, to open our eyes to our original Second Order power, to live within us, to correct our mistakes, to correct our faulty algorithms, to protect us from this demiurgic immersion that we find ourselves in, in this material world. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represents all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. Step aside. Take your ego off the throne. Take the Demiurge off the throne, if you’ve enthroned it. Put down your idols. Push away your possessions, at least long enough to allow the Third Order Powers to come in. Ask the Christ to come in and wash you with the Holy Spirit. Invite the Holy Spirit, the army of the Third Order of Powers, into your organism, literally, and it will cleanse you. It will wash you. Walk in the Spirit of God. Let your eyes be opened to the truth. We’ll talk more about this again. Until then, God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit
Jason Mehmel discusses his personal integration of Stoic practice and philosophy with Gnosticism in this discussion recorded with the Parish of Saint Joseph of Arimathea in Calgary, AB.
This episode is a breakdown of the 4th and final gospel known as John. It was written around the mid to late 90s where this evangelist finds himself defending Christianity on all fronts from doubting gentiles and Jews, Gnostics and Docetic circles, and other interpretations of scripture as well.
Every once in a while I like to go back and share with you the original scriptures out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi from which I derive these teachings. So this week will be scripture-heavy. Don't worry if the language is unwieldy or unfamiliar. You'll get the hang of it. The original economy was that of the hierarchy of the Fullness, wherein every Aeon knew its place, position, and duties for cooperative overall functioning. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. Each of the Fullnesses lived in a state of joy, benevolence, and harmonious agreement, giving glory to the Father and never to each other or to themselves, according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, verse 86. The Second Order of Powers was created to establish a new economy to replace the deficiency that had arisen as a result of the Fall of Logos. Logos and the Fullness brought forth these little ones of the Second Order so they could receive the life-giving light born from the thought of brotherly love of the preexistent Fullnesses, in contrast to the phantoms that had arisen from the Fall. These powers of remembrance resembled the Aeons whose likenesses they were, and they were in harmony with themselves and with others of their kind. And as you know by now, the Second Order of Powers is every living thing that is on this planet Earth, and indeed, the entire cosmos—all of creation, all of the flora and fauna, all of the living things, including us humans. The restored pleroma of Logos and the Hierarchy of the Fullness conceive a new fruit called 2nd Order Powers. The Fullness is the 1st Order. The Second Order of Powers resembled their parents in the Fullness, each one of them being a small impress of one of the figures. These were no larger than those of the imitation, but they came into the world with a better disposition, reflecting the qualities and powers of the Fullnesses. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 83] The new economy of the Second Order of Powers reflected a different method of doing business from their parents in the Fullness. In the new economy, our cosmos, the powers vied for position and authority within a limited space known as the boundary. Here, those of the imitation who continued to wholeheartedly embrace the shadows left over from the Fall actively fought against those of the remembrance. Never-ending War For their part, those of the remembrance forgot all about the values of the Fullness, due to the law of mutual combat they were enacting. The new powers acquired the same lust for domination and all of the other passions of this sort, and wound up acting against itself on account of its rage. It was during this endless war that a myriad of various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers were mixed with one another, and in great number. [Tripartite Tractate, verses 84 and 85] Clearly another solution was required if peace were to enter the deficiency. Remember that none of this was due to an error of planning, rather these steps were all necessary to bring about an economy still to come. The new solution was the Christ. For this reason, then, it is wrong to condemn the movement of the Word as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass. The Aeons of the Fullness took upon themselves the Fall that had happened as if it were their own, with concern, goodness, and great kindness, for the one who had become deficient could be made perfect in no other way except by the Fullness of the Father. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 86] And so, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one individually and all of them collectively gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for help for the deficiency. They brought forth one that combined every attribute of the All manifested in the image of the Father of whom they had been thinking when they gave glory and prayed for help. This one was called the Son of His Will and of the Good Pleasure of the All. It is the knowledge of the Father who wished to become known. It is also described as holding authority vested in Him from the beginning and the power needed to execute it. [Tripartite Tractate, verses 87 and 88] The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of the Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help as well as the one who brought it to him. [verse 87] Those redeemed by the light were made whole and complete. Those who were now enlightened felt the power of the Redeemer inside themselves, being together with Him, sharing His suffering, relieving Him little by little, making Him grow, raising Him up. [verse 90] [The Redeemed] were produced as an army for Him, as for a king, in which those who belong to this thought share the command and are united in agreement. He also sowed in him, invisibly, a word designed for understanding, and gave him the power to detach and dispel from himself those who were disobedient to him. Those of the imitation, on the other hand, were unprepared for the light, for they had come into being out of darkness and could not comprehend it. To them the light came as a brief terrifying flash, a leap and a blow, that drove them deeper into the shadows of the abyss. To them this utter darkness was home. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 89] The Aeon, Logos, who had Fallen and then abandoned the deficiency he had created, decided to pray that the fixed economy might attain all those who had gone forth from him, including those still clinging to the imitation. In this manner Logos was also made right from the Fall, as those of the deficiency attained the economy of the ALL, and the Second Order of Powers united with the knowledge that had been given them. [verse 91] So those of the deficiency were found worthy of becoming rulers over the unspeakable darkness as their own property and the lot that fell to them. This is what he granted them, so that they too might become useful for the economy that was to be, and of which they were oblivious. And so it came to pass that every grace and food that was contemplated through prayer and the ALL came to be. For the word greatly increased mutual cooperation and expectant hope, and they experienced happiness, deep rest, and undefiled pleasures to the extent each was able to embrace them. [verse 92] Now what this is saying in Simple Explanation terms is that the fruit of the ALL and the Father becomes another fractal iteration of the ethereal Consciousness. The Christ Principle is a perfect fractal iteration of the Father's Consciousness that takes into account the new information arising from the goings-on in our bounded space. The Father, the Son, and the Aeons of the Fullness have just amended the primary algorithm of this universe to include up-to-date data specific to each individual unit of consciousness in our space-time continuum. This new code represents patches to the fragmentary error code of the deficiency in order to end the stalemate and re-establish harmony and proper functioning of the economy. When the Tripartite Tractate speaks of “forms consisting of many forms,” this refers to the nested fractal hierarchies that make up all of the life in of our universe. Our Universal Unit of Consciousness is continually pouring in information, values, love, and coherence. The Christ came into the world to redeem all of creation through His body and His blood, literally, because His body and His blood instantiate the entirely perfect Fullness of the All. The cross bridges Fullness to Earth, neighbor to neighbor. Salvation comes not only to those of us on Earth, but also to the Fullness above, and to Logos in particular, the Aeon whose Fall brought creation into existence. The face of the revealed Christ, quote, possessed the Word of the Son together with His essence, His power, and His form. He was the one He desired and delighted in. He was the one who had been prayed for in love. This Aeon was light and a desire to set aright, an openness for instruction and an eye designed for vision, qualities that it had from those above. Moreover, it was wisdom for His thought against the ones who were placed lower in the economy, a word for speech and other perfecting things of this kind. Those who are redeemed by the Christ are unshackled from the chains that bind the material and psychical orders to this world, so much so, in fact, that they form a new Third Order of Powers, the spiritual ones. The redeemed are also known as the Assembly of Salvation, the Bride, the Church, and the Elect, or the Election. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 93 and 94] The Tripartite Tractate mentions the name of Jesus only a couple of times, and the Savior and the Christ many more times than that. And, of course, the entire book begins with long discourses concerning the nature of the Father and the Son. Here is what it says about Jesus at this point in the story. Because the seed of the promise about Jesus Christ had been deposited, whose revelation and unification we have ministered to, this promise now enabled instruction and a return to that which they had been from the beginning, that of which they possessed a drop inciting them to return to it, which is what is called redemption. And that means to be released from captivity and to obtain freedom. The captivity is of those who were slaves of ignorance, which reigned in its own territories. [verse 117] So the Gnostic Gospel claims that we humans, and all of creation, are all children, or fruit, of the spiritual realm of the Fullness, redeemed by the body and the blood of Christ in the form of a drop of remembrance, a seed of the promise that now enabled instruction and a return to that which we had been from the beginning. Humans were endowed with reason so they could remember their true inheritance and repent of their tenacious claim to material life. This redemption comes easier to some than to others. The Tripartite describes this as humanity coming to exist as three different types with regard to its essence: a spiritual type, a psychological type, and a material type, reproducing the pattern of the three kinds of disposition of the Word from which sprung the material, the psychological, and spiritual beings. The spiritual kind of human is like light from light and like spirit from spirit. It received knowledge straight away from the revelation. When he remembered that which is superior and prayed for salvation, he has salvation without any uncertainty. And these are the prophets, the evangelists, the teachers of the word, whose job it is to help their brothers and sisters to remember the Father above. The psychological kind, however, being light from fire, they tarried before recognizing the one who had appeared to it, and still more before rushing to him in faith. This type is content to have a pledge of assurance of things to come. They’re content to have a promise of a future heaven. Those who rid themselves of the lust for domination that was given to them temporarily and for short periods, who give glory and abandon their rage, will be recompensed for their humility by being allowed to endure indefinitely. [verses 118 and 119] These are most of us folks who feel we’re doing just fine, leading a mostly moral and comparatively upright life, good family people, good citizens, realizing nobody’s perfect, we try to be helpful to neighbors. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that The material kind, however, is alien in every respect. It is like darkness that avoids the shining light because it is dissolved by its manifestation, for it did not accept his coming, and is even filled with hatred against the Lord because he revealed himself. They are those who arrogantly pride themselves in their vainglorious lust, who love temporary glory, who are oblivious to the fact that the power they have has been entrusted to them only for a limited time and period, and for that reason have not acknowledged that the Son of God is the Lord of the All and the Savior, and who have failed to rid themselves either of their fury or their way of imitating those who are evil. They will receive judgment for their ignorance and their senselessness, and that judgment is suffering. [verses 120 and 121] I would describe these material people as proud atheists with no fear of God because they reject sober contemplation of God. Others may proudly call themselves scientists, still others academics. Some may be politicians, industrialists, tech giants, entertainers, or philandering priests. They are successful materialists who have no inclination to replace their ego with God. They mock believers, believing themselves superior to those poor deluded fools. Through Christ and the Third Order Powers, restoration came to the deficiency below. Christ’s incarnation in the body of Jesus and the spilling of his blood onto the earth brought the ALL and the Aeons of the Fullness face to face with the material agony of life, suffering, and death. The final restoration, however, will take place after the ALL is manifested in him who is the Son, the one who is the redemption, who is the road toward the incomprehensible Father, who is the return to the preexistent, and after the members of the ALL have been manifested in him who is truly the inconceivable, ineffable, invisible, and ungraspable one, so that the ALL obtains its redemption. [verses 123-124] The most accurate interpretation of these verses is that the angels were literally inside the body of Jesus, forming a community in him, living and dying with him. Indeed, all of our karyotic cells work as an integrated community inside each of us, devoted to taking care of the needs of our bodies, and we are fractals of the ALL. As for the true baptism into which the members of the ALL descend, and where they come into being, there is no other baptism except the one, and that is the redemption, which takes place in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, after confession of faith has been made in those names, and after one has believed that the things one has been told are real. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 127] Where we Gnostics differ from conventional modern Christianity is that you will have the opportunity to repent and be redeemed during your judgment period, your life review, after this physical body passes away. For then you will come face to face with the truth of it all and there will be no denying it. But until then, until and unless one repents and acknowledges our ethereal origins and ultimate return, there will be suffering brought about by our own ignorance. The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise initially dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies, that paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In paradise there is nothing but life, and so all the grass is always green, the flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily with their family and their friends. Even those who are brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside themselves the seed that is the lust for domination, they will receive the recompense of good things if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things, and provided they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love of temporary glory so as to do the command of the Lord of glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the eternal kingdom. [verse 131] And in my opinion, this is like elected officials whose lust for dominion gets them elected into office, yet they work not just to keep themselves reelected and in power, but they're actually working toward the good of the ALL. So you can have a combination of domination and lust for power and yet work in conjunction with those who are redeemed and those who want only the good for the ALL. That's the way Congress ought to work. As for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision, so they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice that this is how things are. For the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration. Even if some are exalted because of this economy, having been set up as causes for the things that happened, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them, they, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. These too will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency, and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the pre-existent Aeon. [verse 133] The only forms banished to the outer darkness are those attributes of the deficiency that did not exist from the beginning, the shadows and phantoms of the imitation that bring nothing but death and destruction. These are shadows of the Aeons, so when the light comes, the light dispels the shadows and they vanish. And there you have the completion of Gnostic cosmology. Tell me what you think. Let's start a conversation. Onward and upward, and God bless us all.
Every once in a while I like to go back and share with you the original scriptures out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi from which I derive these teachings. So this week will be scripture-heavy. Don't worry if the language is unwieldy or unfamiliar. You'll get the hang of it. The original economy was that of the hierarchy of the Fullness, wherein every Aeon knew its place, position, and duties for cooperative overall functioning. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. Each of the Fullnesses lived in a state of joy, benevolence, and harmonious agreement, giving glory to the Father and never to each other or to themselves, according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, verse 86. The Second Order of Powers was created to establish a new economy to replace the deficiency that had arisen as a result of the Fall of Logos. Logos and the Fullness brought forth these little ones of the Second Order so they could receive the life-giving light born from the thought of brotherly love of the preexistent Fullnesses, in contrast to the phantoms that had arisen from the Fall. These powers of remembrance resembled the Aeons whose likenesses they were, and they were in harmony with themselves and with others of their kind. And as you know by now, the Second Order of Powers is every living thing that is on this planet Earth, and indeed, the entire cosmos—all of creation, all of the flora and fauna, all of the living things, including us humans. The restored pleroma of Logos and the Hierarchy of the Fullness conceive a new fruit called 2nd Order Powers. The Fullness is the 1st Order. The Second Order of Powers resembled their parents in the Fullness, each one of them being a small impress of one of the figures. These were no larger than those of the imitation, but they came into the world with a better disposition, reflecting the qualities and powers of the Fullnesses. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 83] The new economy of the Second Order of Powers reflected a different method of doing business from their parents in the Fullness. In the new economy, our cosmos, the powers vied for position and authority within a limited space known as the boundary. Here, those of the imitation who continued to wholeheartedly embrace the shadows left over from the Fall actively fought against those of the remembrance. Never-ending War For their part, those of the remembrance forgot all about the values of the Fullness, due to the law of mutual combat they were enacting. The new powers acquired the same lust for domination and all of the other passions of this sort, and wound up acting against itself on account of its rage. It was during this endless war that a myriad of various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers were mixed with one another, and in great number. [Tripartite Tractate, verses 84 and 85] Clearly another solution was required if peace were to enter the deficiency. Remember that none of this was due to an error of planning, rather these steps were all necessary to bring about an economy still to come. The new solution was the Christ. For this reason, then, it is wrong to condemn the movement of the Word as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass. The Aeons of the Fullness took upon themselves the Fall that had happened as if it were their own, with concern, goodness, and great kindness, for the one who had become deficient could be made perfect in no other way except by the Fullness of the Father. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 86] And so, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one individually and all of them collectively gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for help for the deficiency. They brought forth one that combined every attribute of the All manifested in the image of the Father of whom they had been thinking when they gave glory and prayed for help. This one was called the Son of His Will and of the Good Pleasure of the All. It is the knowledge of the Father who wished to become known. It is also described as holding authority vested in Him from the beginning and the power needed to execute it. [Tripartite Tractate, verses 87 and 88] The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of the Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help as well as the one who brought it to him. [verse 87] Those redeemed by the light were made whole and complete. Those who were now enlightened felt the power of the Redeemer inside themselves, being together with Him, sharing His suffering, relieving Him little by little, making Him grow, raising Him up. [verse 90] [The Redeemed] were produced as an army for Him, as for a king, in which those who belong to this thought share the command and are united in agreement. He also sowed in him, invisibly, a word designed for understanding, and gave him the power to detach and dispel from himself those who were disobedient to him. Those of the imitation, on the other hand, were unprepared for the light, for they had come into being out of darkness and could not comprehend it. To them the light came as a brief terrifying flash, a leap and a blow, that drove them deeper into the shadows of the abyss. To them this utter darkness was home. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 89] The Aeon, Logos, who had Fallen and then abandoned the deficiency he had created, decided to pray that the fixed economy might attain all those who had gone forth from him, including those still clinging to the imitation. In this manner Logos was also made right from the Fall, as those of the deficiency attained the economy of the ALL, and the Second Order of Powers united with the knowledge that had been given them. [verse 91] So those of the deficiency were found worthy of becoming rulers over the unspeakable darkness as their own property and the lot that fell to them. This is what he granted them, so that they too might become useful for the economy that was to be, and of which they were oblivious. And so it came to pass that every grace and food that was contemplated through prayer and the ALL came to be. For the word greatly increased mutual cooperation and expectant hope, and they experienced happiness, deep rest, and undefiled pleasures to the extent each was able to embrace them. [verse 92] Now what this is saying in Simple Explanation terms is that the fruit of the ALL and the Father becomes another fractal iteration of the ethereal Consciousness. The Christ Principle is a perfect fractal iteration of the Father's Consciousness that takes into account the new information arising from the goings-on in our bounded space. The Father, the Son, and the Aeons of the Fullness have just amended the primary algorithm of this universe to include up-to-date data specific to each individual unit of consciousness in our space-time continuum. This new code represents patches to the fragmentary error code of the deficiency in order to end the stalemate and re-establish harmony and proper functioning of the economy. When the Tripartite Tractate speaks of “forms consisting of many forms,” this refers to the nested fractal hierarchies that make up all of the life in of our universe. Our Universal Unit of Consciousness is continually pouring in information, values, love, and coherence. The Christ came into the world to redeem all of creation through His body and His blood, literally, because His body and His blood instantiate the entirely perfect Fullness of the All. The cross bridges Fullness to Earth, neighbor to neighbor. Salvation comes not only to those of us on Earth, but also to the Fullness above, and to Logos in particular, the Aeon whose Fall brought creation into existence. The face of the revealed Christ, quote, possessed the Word of the Son together with His essence, His power, and His form. He was the one He desired and delighted in. He was the one who had been prayed for in love. This Aeon was light and a desire to set aright, an openness for instruction and an eye designed for vision, qualities that it had from those above. Moreover, it was wisdom for His thought against the ones who were placed lower in the economy, a word for speech and other perfecting things of this kind. Those who are redeemed by the Christ are unshackled from the chains that bind the material and psychical orders to this world, so much so, in fact, that they form a new Third Order of Powers, the spiritual ones. The redeemed are also known as the Assembly of Salvation, the Bride, the Church, and the Elect, or the Election. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 93 and 94] The Tripartite Tractate mentions the name of Jesus only a couple of times, and the Savior and the Christ many more times than that. And, of course, the entire book begins with long discourses concerning the nature of the Father and the Son. Here is what it says about Jesus at this point in the story. Because the seed of the promise about Jesus Christ had been deposited, whose revelation and unification we have ministered to, this promise now enabled instruction and a return to that which they had been from the beginning, that of which they possessed a drop inciting them to return to it, which is what is called redemption. And that means to be released from captivity and to obtain freedom. The captivity is of those who were slaves of ignorance, which reigned in its own territories. [verse 117] So the Gnostic Gospel claims that we humans, and all of creation, are all children, or fruit, of the spiritual realm of the Fullness, redeemed by the body and the blood of Christ in the form of a drop of remembrance, a seed of the promise that now enabled instruction and a return to that which we had been from the beginning. Humans were endowed with reason so they could remember their true inheritance and repent of their tenacious claim to material life. This redemption comes easier to some than to others. The Tripartite describes this as humanity coming to exist as three different types with regard to its essence: a spiritual type, a psychological type, and a material type, reproducing the pattern of the three kinds of disposition of the Word from which sprung the material, the psychological, and spiritual beings. The spiritual kind of human is like light from light and like spirit from spirit. It received knowledge straight away from the revelation. When he remembered that which is superior and prayed for salvation, he has salvation without any uncertainty. And these are the prophets, the evangelists, the teachers of the word, whose job it is to help their brothers and sisters to remember the Father above. The psychological kind, however, being light from fire, they tarried before recognizing the one who had appeared to it, and still more before rushing to him in faith. This type is content to have a pledge of assurance of things to come. They’re content to have a promise of a future heaven. Those who rid themselves of the lust for domination that was given to them temporarily and for short periods, who give glory and abandon their rage, will be recompensed for their humility by being allowed to endure indefinitely. [verses 118 and 119] These are most of us folks who feel we’re doing just fine, leading a mostly moral and comparatively upright life, good family people, good citizens, realizing nobody’s perfect, we try to be helpful to neighbors. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that The material kind, however, is alien in every respect. It is like darkness that avoids the shining light because it is dissolved by its manifestation, for it did not accept his coming, and is even filled with hatred against the Lord because he revealed himself. They are those who arrogantly pride themselves in their vainglorious lust, who love temporary glory, who are oblivious to the fact that the power they have has been entrusted to them only for a limited time and period, and for that reason have not acknowledged that the Son of God is the Lord of the All and the Savior, and who have failed to rid themselves either of their fury or their way of imitating those who are evil. They will receive judgment for their ignorance and their senselessness, and that judgment is suffering. [verses 120 and 121] I would describe these material people as proud atheists with no fear of God because they reject sober contemplation of God. Others may proudly call themselves scientists, still others academics. Some may be politicians, industrialists, tech giants, entertainers, or philandering priests. They are successful materialists who have no inclination to replace their ego with God. They mock believers, believing themselves superior to those poor deluded fools. Through Christ and the Third Order Powers, restoration came to the deficiency below. Christ’s incarnation in the body of Jesus and the spilling of his blood onto the earth brought the ALL and the Aeons of the Fullness face to face with the material agony of life, suffering, and death. The final restoration, however, will take place after the ALL is manifested in him who is the Son, the one who is the redemption, who is the road toward the incomprehensible Father, who is the return to the preexistent, and after the members of the ALL have been manifested in him who is truly the inconceivable, ineffable, invisible, and ungraspable one, so that the ALL obtains its redemption. [verses 123-124] The most accurate interpretation of these verses is that the angels were literally inside the body of Jesus, forming a community in him, living and dying with him. Indeed, all of our karyotic cells work as an integrated community inside each of us, devoted to taking care of the needs of our bodies, and we are fractals of the ALL. As for the true baptism into which the members of the ALL descend, and where they come into being, there is no other baptism except the one, and that is the redemption, which takes place in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, after confession of faith has been made in those names, and after one has believed that the things one has been told are real. [Tripartite Tractate, verse 127] Where we Gnostics differ from conventional modern Christianity is that you will have the opportunity to repent and be redeemed during your judgment period, your life review, after this physical body passes away. For then you will come face to face with the truth of it all and there will be no denying it. But until then, until and unless one repents and acknowledges our ethereal origins and ultimate return, there will be suffering brought about by our own ignorance. The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise initially dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies, that paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In paradise there is nothing but life, and so all the grass is always green, the flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily with their family and their friends. Even those who are brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside themselves the seed that is the lust for domination, they will receive the recompense of good things if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things, and provided they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love of temporary glory so as to do the command of the Lord of glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the eternal kingdom. [verse 131] And in my opinion, this is like elected officials whose lust for dominion gets them elected into office, yet they work not just to keep themselves reelected and in power, but they're actually working toward the good of the ALL. So you can have a combination of domination and lust for power and yet work in conjunction with those who are redeemed and those who want only the good for the ALL. That's the way Congress ought to work. As for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision, so they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice that this is how things are. For the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration. Even if some are exalted because of this economy, having been set up as causes for the things that happened, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them, they, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. These too will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency, and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the pre-existent Aeon. [verse 133] The only forms banished to the outer darkness are those attributes of the deficiency that did not exist from the beginning, the shadows and phantoms of the imitation that bring nothing but death and destruction. These are shadows of the Aeons, so when the light comes, the light dispels the shadows and they vanish. And there you have the completion of Gnostic cosmology. Tell me what you think. Let's start a conversation. Onward and upward, and God bless us all.
We honored the life of one of history's great Gnostics. Dr. Stephan Hoeller recently embarked on his journey to the Treasury of Light, but his legacy will instill spiritual freedom for generations. He was and will always be one of the great modern Gnostics. It was a touching and celebratory group discussion, and that's all I have to say. Get The Occult Elvis: https://amzn.to/4jnTjE4 Virtual Alexandria Academy: https://thegodabovegod.com/virtual-alexandria-academy/ Gnostic Tarot Readings: https://thegodabovegod.com/gnostic-tarot-reading/ The Gnostic Tarot: https://www.makeplayingcards.com/sell/synkrasis Homepage: https://thegodabovegod.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aeonbyte AB Prime: https://thegodabovegod.com/members/subscription-levels/ Voice Over services: https://thegodabovegod.com/voice-talent/ Support with donation: https://buy.stripe.com/00g16Q8RK8D93mw288 Merch store: https://aeonbyte.creator-spring.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Sign up for the newsletter and see exclusives at sarahwestall.substack.comProtect your body, Remove Heavy Metals including Graphene Oxide and Plastics, and learn more about removing MAC IDs at masterpeacebyhcs.com/shop/?ref=11308 Jay Weidner joins the Sunday Night Thrive Hour—and this one flips the narrative.A former Director of Content at Gaia TV and filmmaker behind 15 works on sacred mysteries, Jay breaks down the Gnostics and the first 300 years of Christianity.We explore Sophia—her story, her meaning, and what the ancients believed. Then Jay shares a bold perspective: the suppression of Sophia wasn't just about diminishing the feminine—it was an attack on men.It's a different lens that challenges what you've been told and invites a deeper look at how these ideas shaped the world we live in today.You can learn more and follow Jay Weidner at https://jayweidner.comLinks and Offers Mentioned in the show:Buy quality at Quince.com/BusinessGame - get free shipping and 365-day returns! Now available in Canada too!Fund your online business and earn a decent living with Shopify. Go to shopify.com/BusinessGameReceive up to 45% Off Native Path Collagen: Head to explorenativepath.com/Sarah,To try it risk-free with a 365-day money-back guarantee.Protect your body, Remove Heavy Metals including Graphene Oxide and Plastics, and learn more about removing MAC IDs at masterpeacebyhcs.com/shop/?ref=11308 Support this show by supporting the shows sponsors at SarahWestall.com/ShopMUSIC CREDITS: Down to the Wire – Nonstop Producer Series: Broad Media Internet LicenseCopyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.Disclaimer: "As a journalist, I report what significant newsmakers are claiming. I do not have the resources or time to fully investigate all claims. Stories and people interviewed are selected based on relevance, listener requests, and by suggestions of those I highly respect. It is the responsibility of each viewer to evaluate the facts presented and then research each story furtherSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In this Monday reflection on Jude 5–16, the letter's central concern becomes clear: these false teachers are not being led by the Spirit but by their own unchecked desires — almost certainly the Gnostics encountered in Second and Third John, who believed the body was irrelevant and therefore lived however they pleased. Jude's devastating poetic description of them — waterless clouds, twice-dead trees, wild waves, wandering stars — paints the picture of lives completely unmoored. The deeper question Jude raises is one of captivity: we are all captive to something, and the only choice is whether we'll be captive to God and his Spirit or to our own desires. One leads to life; the other to destruction. Make me a captive, Lord — that's the prayer. The reflection also pauses on a fascinating detail: both the story of Michael disputing with Satan over Moses's body and the prophecy of Enoch come not from Scripture but from Jewish legend and extra-biblical texts. Jude quotes them not to canonize them, but because his audience knew them and they illustrated his point — a reminder that the Bible was written by real people in real cultural contexts, and knowing that context only helps us understand it better.Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he'll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God's Word.You can read today's passage here - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jude%205-16&version=NRSVUEClick here if you'd like to join our GroupMe and receive this each morning at 7:00 a.m. CST. - https://groupme.com/join_group/107837407/vtYqtb6CYou can watch this reflection in video form and subscribe to my Substack here - https://www.revandy.org
Why do some of us seek spiritual salvation from strangers? The Gnostics were aware that much of religion was to thwart individualism. Politics and spiritual cults use the model of creating an external savior and a contrived belief system to solicit adherence and create fear. On this provocative episode, Clyde Lewis breaks down THE 101010 INTENSITY. The original broadcast was from KUFO on October 10, 2010.
Sophia is honored as I am joined by Edward Dodge to discuss A History of the Goddess. We'll explore the ancient roots of the Feminine Divine and her systematic removal from religious history. Edward investigates how thousands of years of Goddess worship were eventually suppressed by the rise of monotheism and the metaphorical “divorce” of God from Mother Earth. We follow his detailed research into the hidden role of cannabis, which he argues was once a sacred plant integral to the temple rituals of the ancient Near East. He provides a provocative reinterpretation of familiar Biblical stories, suggesting that figures such as King Solomon and later Gnostics maintained secret connections to this repressed feminine wisdom. We'll examine how reclaiming this lost heritage might offer a path toward healing our relationship with nature in the modern era. Get the book: https://amzn.to/3P8ju8g More on Edward: https://edwarddodge.substack.com/ Get The Occult Elvis: https://amzn.to/4jnTjE4 Virtual Alexandria Academy: https://thegodabovegod.com/virtual-alexandria-academy/ Gnostic Tarot Readings: https://thegodabovegod.com/gnostic-tarot-reading/ The Gnostic Tarot: https://www.makeplayingcards.com/sell/synkrasis Homepage: https://thegodabovegod.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aeonbyte AB Prime: https://thegodabovegod.com/members/subscription-levels/ Voice Over services: https://thegodabovegod.com/voice-talent/ Support with donation: https://buy.stripe.com/00g16Q8RK8D93mw288 Merch store: https://aeonbyte.creator-spring.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this Wednesday reflection on Second John, the short letter is read in full and unpacked around its central warning: many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. John's call to love one another is clarified — love here is not emotion but obedience, commitment, and self-sacrifice — and his instruction not to welcome false teachers into the house is about guarding sound doctrine, not refusing hospitality to strangers. The heresy John is combating is Gnosticism, the earliest major challenge the church faced, which taught that the physical body was corrupt and irredeemable, and therefore that Jesus didn't really come in the flesh, die, or rise bodily. The reflection pushes back firmly: the post-resurrection accounts are full of physicality — touching wounds, eating meals, walking roads — because Jesus was fully human and fully divine, and both matter. Wrong theology about the body also produces wrong living, since Gnosticism's logical conclusion was that it doesn't matter how you live. And in a modern application, social media has made functional Gnostics of many of us — we forget that the person on the other side of the screen is a real human being made in the image of God, with a body and a soul. People matter. Physicality matters. Jesus came in the flesh, and so do we.Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he'll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God's Word.You can read today's passage here - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20John%201&version=NRSVUEClick here if you'd like to join our GroupMe and receive this each morning at 7:00 a.m. CST. - https://groupme.com/join_group/107837407/vtYqtb6CYou can watch this in video form here - https://www.revandy.org
After some ecstatic & triumphant kirtan (which you can watch in the last video here) at our second session at our second Denver retreat in April 2026, we take up our evening's lecture, an Easter special featuring some of my most inspired reflections on Tantra, gnostic Christianity and the politics of spirituality to answer the question:Who has the right to teach & practice Tantra? We reference some of Cynthia Bourgeault's and Elaine Pagel's academic work on the early history of Christianity to consider the politics around the resurrection of Christ (i.e Mary vs Peter, Gnostic Christianity vs Orthodox Christianity) which I'm going to argue mirrors the politics of Left-Hand Path vs Right Hand Path (read also: institutional) Tantra. Much of this lecture is my loving middle finger to those who say we should not be doing what we're doing. Whatever such people may say and however good their intentions, with love and respect we say to them, like the Gnostics before us: we're going to do it anyway. Support the showLectures happen live every Monday at 7pm PST and again at Friday 11am PST Use this link and I will see you there:https://www.zoom.us/j/7028380815For more videos, guided meditations and instruction and for access to our lecture library, visit me at:https://www.patreon.com/yogawithnishTo get in on the discussion and access various spiritual materials, join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/U8zKP8yMrM
Want more exclusive content?! http://prometheuslens.supercast.com to sign up for the "All Access Pass" and get early access to episodes, private community, members only episodes, private Q & A's, and coming documentaries. We also have a $4 dollar a month package that gets you early access and an ad free listening experience! ==================== Summary Join me and Nick from The Occult Rejects as he takes us through through his study on 2 of Christianity's heretics and what they believed and practiced. Enjoy!====================
Orthodox Easter this year was a week later than Western Christianity. I was able to take a unique journey into Orthodox Easter traditions and the historical resilience of early Christianity. https://youtu.be/h8xYSNU9e6o It was a fascinating experience to visit St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church in Clearfield, Utah, after meeting a California member named Daniel Michalski. Unlike Western traditions, the Coptic Easter service is held on Saturday night and can last up to four hours, featuring a blend of English, Coptic, and Arabic chanting. One of the most striking rituals is the procession of the icon of Christ, which is buried in roses during Holy Week and then “resurrected” as the lights are turned on, accompanied by the unique sound of cymbals. Beyond the personal experience, we dove into the history of the Coptic Church, which split from Western Christianity in 451 AD following the Council of Chalcedon over complex theological debates regarding the nature of Christ. This history is framed within a broader discussion of the early Christian era, moving from the movement’s roots as a persecuted sect to its establishment as the Roman state religion under Constantine. Most Mormons are familiar with the death and resurrection of Christ and Constatine's ascension in the 4th century, but know little about history of Christianity in the centuries in between. I discussed various early factions, such as the Gnostics, who prioritized secret wisdom over the physical resurrection, with the orthodox view that eventually triumphed. We also touched on the following key points: LDS Perspectives: We emphasized the physical resurrection of Jesus, citing recent General Conference messages regarding the victory of the empty tomb. Calendar Differences: The discrepancy between Western and Orthodox Easter dates were explained by the use of the Julian calendar versus the Gregorian calendar. Coptic Practices: Insights into infant baptism by immersion, the practice of closed communion, and the fact that Coptic priests can be married are also highlighted. Community Highlights: The episode concludes with a book giveaway of Holiness to the Lord and a teaser for a future discussion with Dr Matthew Bowman on the “Christian” roots of basketball. Part 1: Personal Experience and the Coptic Orthodox Easter Service 0:00 – Introduction and Book Giveaway: 2:00 – Meeting Daniel Michalski: 5:00 – Attending the Coptic Service in Clearfield: attending a four-hour Saturday night Easter service, including observations on the small congregation and the use of English, Coptic, and Arabic. 10:00 – The Resurrection Ritual: An explanation of the dramatic liturgical moment where an icon of Christ is “resurrected” from a bed of roses, accompanied by chanting and cymbals. Part 2: History of Early Christianity 15:00 – The Great Schism of 451: includes a discussion on the Council of Chalcedon and how a theological dispute over a preposition regarding the nature of Christ led the Coptic Church to split from Western Christianity. 19:00 – Historical Jesus and the Temple: The host analyzes the cleansing of the temple as a political act of subversion that directly led to Jesus’s execution. 23:00 – The Crucifixion and Gospel Narratives. 27:00 – Mechanics of Crucifixion. Part 3: Early Factions and the Rise of Orthodoxy 29:00 – The Gnostics and Secret Wisdom, including a mention of the Gospel of Judas. 32:00 – Marcionites and the Canon:. 34:00 – Bishop Irenaeus and “Straight Thinking”: The origins of the term “Orthodox” and the establishment of the four-gospel rule. 37:00 – Eras of Roman Persecution: Christian martyrs, including the story of Perpetua. Part 4: Constantine and the Modern Church 41:00 –Constantine Transformation. 45:00 – LDS Perspectives on Easter. 47:00 – Coptic Practices Explained. Part 5: Conclusion and Teasers 53:00 – Book Giveaway Results. 54:00 – The Future of “Church Ball”: Upcoming interview about the Christian roots of basketball and the role of Mormon missionaries in spreading the sport. 56:00 – Calendar Discrepancies: explanation of why Orthodox Easter often falls on a different date due to the Julian vs. Gregorian calendars.
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. And Happy Easter, everybody! This is the time of year when Christians all over the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. Holy Week leading up to the resurrection is a rough one because it’s the passion of the Christ where the scriptures talk about and people reenact the trial of Christ, his walk with the cross to the hill of Calvary, and then his agony on the cross. We all know that story. But what does it mean? Why is there such a story? Many people who doubt the veracity of the early Christian histories think it’s all made up, think it’s a fairy tale. But I’ve got a couple of ways to talk about that. One way is this. If the story of Jesus is nothing but a made-up story, who made it up? And how did they know exactly how to make up the story to create this gigantic movement that is called Christianity? You can’t accidentally bumble into the salvation story. People aren’t that clever. And if someone was that clever to write a believable salvation story that wasn’t true, to what end? Why would they want to do that—making up a gigantic lie that is going to hoodwink millions and millions of people, do such a thing and get away with it and be so successful at it? And why would they do that? Because the salvation story I’m telling you does save people, does pull people out of their traps and their desperation and their addictions. You may be saying to yourself, hey, wait a minute, I thought this was a Gnostic podcast. What’s all this talk about Christ and Easter? Well, there is a branch of Gnosticism that’s referred to as Christian Gnosticism or Valentinian Gnosticism, and that happens to be what I believe in. And Christ is a central salvific figure in that form of Gnosticism. The conventional Christian church desperately needs Gnostics. They need us to bring them the depth of understanding of the Gospels, the depth of understanding of the writings that have been admitted into the New Testament, as well as the writings that were excluded from the New Testament, such as those found in the Nag Hammadi books and the Tripartite Tractate in particular. These are as Christian as Christian can be, more so than most conventional Christians’ understanding of their role and the role of Jesus and the role of Christ and the nature of the Father, the understanding of virtue and vice. We Gnostics carry that knowledge with us. We remember. That’s the process of Gnosticism, is remembering. That’s called anamnesis. You might have run across that word before. You know, amnesia means don’t remember, anamnesia means I remember. Just like agnostic means I don’t know, but gnostic means I know. Now, why do I say that the Christian church needs Gnostics? You know, they don’t want us there. They think we’re misleading people, taking them away from the cross, taking them away from heaven and salvation. But it couldn’t be more incorrect. Gnostic Christians are true Christians, because in order to consider yourself a Gnostic, you need to be in touch with the Holy Spirit. You need to have a relationship and an understanding of the Father and the Son and the Fullness of God. Almost by definition, if you are Gnostic, you carry the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Now, these things are very important to Christians, but they have excluded the means to get there. They have excluded the books from the same period as the books of the New Testament. They’ve excluded the ones that speak of Gnosis and speak of the way things are and who the nature of the Father is and how the Christ came about and who is the Son. Is the Son the same as Christ? Not exactly. The Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. And by the way, the Holy Spirit, that’s what we Gnostics call the Fullness of God. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God as an aggregate, as a place, as an entity, is what is called the Holy Spirit in conventional Christianity. You have the Father, the original, illimitable, omnipotent, omniscient consciousness that predates everything. And the Father conceives in his own mind or in its own mind, because obviously the Father is not an old man with a beard, even though we tend to represent him that way. That’s more of a metaphorical expression. Even in my children’s book, Children of the Fullness, I picture the Father as the old man in the beard and the Son as his small child being held in his arms. But it’s not really that. That’s a metaphor. The Father is consciousness, pure consciousness, without form. The Son is all of the Father’s consciousness and omniscience and omnipotence, but in a place, in a form. He’s a monad, or it’s a monad, because again, there’s no sex, there’s no gender, there’s no DNA. So, we shouldn’t be getting all hung up with the pronouns for the entities of the ethereal plane. Now, in the other form of Gnosticism, the Phoenician, Egyptian-derived mythologies that make up Sethian Gnosticism, they do have genders, but I think that’s because they are adopting the gendered pantheon of ancient gods that were written about. But in the purest philosophical form, there is no gender, because the Aeons do not procreate through sex, the way second-order powers do down here on earth. You know the way the Aeons procreate? By giving glory together to the Father, by singing. It’s vibrational. And in various combinations, the Aeons sing together, like a choir here and a choir there and a choir over there. And those various combinations of giving glory give birth to more and more Aeons. That’s the way Aeons multiply. Where conventional Christianity differs from Gnostic Christianity is that we have a different Genesis story. We have a different backstory to how we all came to be here. Now, it doesn’t seem to me that that should be enough to separate us as brothers and sisters in Christ, because we all agree on the importance of the Christ. The Christ, the Christ as we Gnostics say, Christ as conventional Christians say, and it irritates them to hear the in front of the word Christ. The Christ was conceived by all of the Aeons praying as one for salvation to come to the cosmos and all of the second-order powers that populate the cosmos. The Aeons are the first order of powers. Everyone that was conceived by the Aeons and sent out of the ethereal plane into this material plane are the second order of powers. That’s all of us. It’s the humans, but it’s everything that’s alive on the planet. The Christ is the third order of powers. The Aeons were the first order of powers. We living creatures here in the cosmos are the second order of powers. And Christ is the third order of powers. And it comes with the entirety of the Fullness and the blessings of the Son and the Father. The backstory where we disagree is the idea of who the fallen angel is, because the Christians also believe in fallen angels, and they often say that Lucifer was the most beautiful and highest of the angels who fell to Earth and became Satan. Well, it’s a version of the Gnostic tale. In the Gnostic mythology, the highest Aeon wanted to go out and create paradise on its own, and in the Sethian Gnosticism, that’s Sophia. In the Valentinian or Christian Gnosticism, that character is known as Logos. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I study, the name of that Aeon is Logos. And this Aeon overreaches, takes more upon itself than it was assigned. It wasn’t supposed to go out and build paradise on its own, and so when that Aeon, Sophia or Logos, attempted to do that, it fell from the ethereal plane, and it is the brokenness of that attempt that is our material plane. That’s what materiality is. It’s the shadows of the effort of the fallen Aeon. That’s why our material existence is solid, dark, heavy, full of confusion and forgetfulness, full of ego overreaching—because ego is what characterizes that Aeon who fell. And the character who stays down here and becomes the god of this world and puts it all back together is the shadow of that fallen Aeon. Sethians call it Yaldabaoth. We Gnostic Christians call it the Demiurge, as did Plato. Plato used this word Demiurge as architect–what it means. So the Aeon who overreached had all the plans in mind, knew all the blueprints. The Aeon who overreached, Logos, carried within itself a little copy of all the knowledge of all the other Aeons. We are children of the Elohim of Adonai Elohim The Aeon who fell was a fractal level down from the entirety of the Fullness of God, you see? So whatever you picture the Fullness of God to be, and I always picture it to be a pyramidal stack because it’s a hierarchy and that’s the shape of hierarchies, not because I am a worshiper of ancient Egyptian traditions or Phoenician or whoever came before them and actually built the pyramids. The pyramids themselves are replicas of the hierarchy of God. That’s the nature of the pyramidal shape. The mountain of God is a hierarchy representing the Fullness of God. So the Aeon that was sitting at the very top overreached, fell, and split off from its overreaching ego. That stayed down below and became the God of this universe, of the cosmos, that we call the Demiurge, even though that’s a Greek name. Same concept—the architect of the universe. And we second order powers were sent into the cosmos to bring the life, consciousness, love, knowledge, and remembrance of the Father down into this shadowy place that we live in. However—same catch as happened to the Aeon who fell—we forget. When we become melded to the materiality of this thick and slow cosmos, we forget our primary mission. And our primary mission is to bring life, consciousness of the Father, love, knowledge, remembrance into this cosmos, primarily to remind the Demiurge, the piece of the fallen Aeon that’s stuck down here, of where it comes from, that it is not the highest power, that it is not the ultimate God. And in Christian Gnosticism, the Demiurge, when it remembers, this entire physical, material space will disappear, and everything will roll back up into the ethereal plane from whence we all came. So that’s our mission, to bring remembrance to the Demiurge, and remembrance to each other, because it takes all of us working together to bring remembrance and demonstration of love to the Demiurge. We’re not doing a very good job, are we? All of the hatred, all of the violence, the wars, the fighting, even just the quibbling inside of families and friends, this is not a demonstration of love. It’s about power and control. And that’s what rules the cosmos, power and control, and at the godly (small g) plane that is wielded by the Demiurge. And the archons of the Demiurge are extensions of the Demiurge, they are not in themselves self-aware, conscious entities, because the Demiurge forgets where it all comes from. The Demiurge doesn’t realize consciousness itself. It’s the shadow of the consciousness of the fallen Aeon, who is no longer down here, by the way, who went back up. So that fallen Aeon who went back up and abandoned the mess down here below, that Aeon, the entirety of the Fullness of God, and the Son, pray together to the Father to bring stability and order, remembrance, love, and salvation to this earth, to the cosmos as a whole. And that is the Christ. So the Christ is not exactly the same as the Son, although the Christ embodies all of the power and remembrance of the Son. But he came a bit downstream, although frankly there is no such thing as time in eternity. But there are steps, there are places, and the Christ embodies the entirety of the Fullness of God that includes the Son and the full knowledge and presence of the Father. And in that sense, Christ is the Son of the Father. So when Christ says, I and my Father are one, that’s true. Why do we even need Christ? Because we can’t do it on our own. And you know that whenever you fall, whenever we have our mistakes, our forgetfulness, when we fight with someone, when we make big mistakes and hurt ourselves, when we find ourselves in some terrible situation of our own doing, or someone else’s doing, you can’t pull yourself out. You know that. All you want to do is lie down and cry. You feel weak. You feel burdened. It is the job of the Christ to lift that burden, to bring remembrance, love, and the consciousness of the Father to you, to remind you that you’re not abandoned. You are not a motherless child, a fatherless, child. You are a much-loved, designed, desired child of the Fullness of God who has lost its way. We second-order powers, particularly the humans, become confused down here, forgetful, just like the Demiurge. And most of us latch on to the leading of the Demiurge, mistaking the Demiurge for God. But the Demiurge is not God the Father. Our Father lives in eternity above, and Christ is the emissary of that Father. And Christ came to earth in human form so that we would identify with Him, so that we would recognize Him, so that we would believe Him when He says, I have come to save you. So it’s not a foolishness. It’s not a fairy tale. It’s the truth incarnate. And whether or not you happen to believe in the historicity of Jesus the Christ is really very immaterial to your salvation, because it is possible to believe in God the Father directly. It is possible to feel the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within you directly. And that’s where the gnosis comes in. The cross of Jesus bridges the gap between the Fullness and the Demiurge and overcomes the never-ending war we second order powers are trapped in. Gnostics commune with their aeonic parents, the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And through the Aeons, we commune directly with the Son of God. And by communing with the Son of God who loves us, who knows us, we were known and pre-designed by the Son and the Aeons before we came down to populate this earth. We were supposed to bring their love and consciousness down here and make everything nice and right, but we have failed. That’s our failure. It’s a failure to remember. It’s amnesia. And what the Christ does is bring us anamnesia. We remember. And when you accept the Christ into your heart, whether you call yourself a Christian, whether you call yourself a Gnostic, or whether you are in some other tradition, when you accept the salvation of the Christ directly into your heart, and you open yourself up and you pray for help, salvation, remembrance, forgiveness, take this burden off of me—that’s the job of the Christ. And that’s why all Gnostics need Christ, and everyone, all second-order powers need Christ. I think the flowers and the dogs and the cows and all the other animals, they’re not as fallen, if you want to use that term, as we humans are, because we get all balled up with the Demiurge. But the other second-order powers, they seem to be more true. They seem to be more in touch with the love of paradise and the consciousness of paradise, as they bask in the sunshine, doing their jobs of bringing life and love. And there will be a tipping point when all of us second-order powers believe in the mission of the Christ, which brings us the salvation and remembrance of the Fullness and the Son and the Father. The Christ comes to us all. Jesus, the Christ, was the first incarnation of Christ here on the Earth. But whenever one of us accepts the Christ, it comes into us the same way it inhabited Jesus, although the Christ inhabited Jesus to perfection, because Jesus never erred. He was born with the Christ and he lived his entire life embodying the Christ. We all embody the Christ when we accept the Christ into our hearts. That is where we get the true power to overcome the Demiurge and the problems and confusion of this world. And when we have that realization, we’re able to exit this material plane. And when we exit this material plane and all of us start sticking our landing up above, the Demiurge is going to look around and go, What? Where’d everybody go? And he’s going to remember. And then everything rolls up and it’s all ethereal once again. The Tripartite Tractate refers to “heaven” as the Third Economy. The First Economy was the ethereal plane and the Fullness of the God. The Second Economy is the material cosmos. The Third Economy is coming and it’s all good. We will live with the Aeons above. No shadows, no Demiurge, no archons, no strife. Only joy. And as my Greek mother taught me to say, Ο Χριστός ανέστη. Αληθώς ανέστη. O Christos anesti. Alithos anesti, which means Christ has risen. Truly He is risen. Happy Easter. Remember the Christ. Remember the Son and the Father. Remember your Aeonic parents above. God bless us all and onward and upward. 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
Send us a Positive Review!Hey Latter Day Struggles! Due to your many requests—we are dropping a Latter Day Struggles series in “audiobook” format. You can enjoy the entire narrative arc in a single, uninterrupted format! Enjoy the experience as things 'click' into place as you take in this 'audiobook'! Please let us know what is happening within you as you transcend and include Mormonism one series at a time! As a bonus drop, we have prepared one of our favorite series titled, "Community Healing: How our Greatest Wounds & our Greatest Healing Happens through Human Relationship" for you! Enjoy this deep dive.Timestamps:00:00 Welcome and Reset 10:32 Faith Crisis Isolation 16:00 Shunning and Going Underground 27:53 Finding Support Groups 36:38 Quotes on Group Healing 48:56 Trust the Healing Process 56:17 Roadmap Out of Chaos 01:01:19 Witnessed Healing in Relationship 01:13:25 Beyond All In or Out 01:21:22 Curriculum True Self to Rebirth 01:27:37 Relationships and Patriarchy Work 01:35:08 Hope Through Community 01:42:07 Introducing the True Self 01:59:37 Gnostics and Inner Authority 02:16:18 Love Over Fear 02:26:10 Sharing True Self Statements 02:45:22 Grief and Identity Shift 02:56:20 Writing the True Self Statement 03:03:02 Love Based Spiritual Growth 03:16:25 A Healthier Faith Relationship 03:23:23 Men Patriarchy and Identity 03:31:52 Reclaiming the Core Self 03:39:51 True Self Statement Practice 03:44:26 Welcome to Eden Poem 03:54:16 Community Stories Begin 04:11:37 Community and Belonging 04:46:17 Seeing Pain Not Ideas04:53:18 Final Invitation to Heal Support the showSupport the showListen, Share, Rate & Review EPISODESFriday Episodes Annual Access $89Friday Episodes Monthly Access $10Valerie's Support & Processing GroupsGift a ScholarshipDownload Free ResourcesVisit our Website
Jerome and the Septuagint? Early Church and the cannon? Gnostics and Mary? This and more on Open Line Wednesday with Fr. Mitch Pacwa.
In this episode we explore the foundations of Gnostic theology and the idea of gnosis, or direct knowledge of reality beyond belief or doctrine. The discussion contrasts orthodox religious traditions with esoteric paths that emphasize inner realization, hidden teachings, and the pursuit of deeper insight, We examine the Gnostic concept of the demiurge, the distinction between the apparent world and the true source, and the role of mystery schools, occult traditions, and ritual practices in transmitting esoteric knowledge. The conversation also looks at the sociological side of belief and how institutions shape what people accept as truth, and whether systems of belief function as stabilizing forces within society.Rather than advocating a single position, the episode investigates multiple interpretations of knowledge, myth, and power. We ask whether or not Gnostic traditions reveal hidden structures of reality or whether they offer an alternative symbolic framework for understanding the human condition.
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. First I have to tell you, what was lost has been found. I went back to White City VA yesterday and had an acupuncture treatment. And on my way out of the building, I saw a maintenance man, a custodian at his cart with his broom. I thought to myself, well, if anybody should be able to find something, it would be this guy. I told him I lost a book two weeks ago, somewhere between 201 and 209 in a lady’s room on a windowsill. And he says, “Well, what was the name of the book?” And I said, “Culpability.” And indeed, the recognition went across his face. He said, “I have seen that book. I have dusted that book every day for two weeks.” And I said, “Why didn’t you turn it into lost and found?” He goes, “Well, it’s not my book. It belongs to somebody. So I just left it there.” So then we had to look for the restroom that he had found it in, because he cleans a lot of ladies rooms in that big span of buildings. I told him it was on the second floor, that it was somewhere between 201 and on my way to the chiropractor in building 209. And so we went upstairs together and he took me right to the bathroom. And there was the book where I had laid it down. I was absolutely overjoyed. I thanked him profusely for his assistance. And I asked him if I could give him a hug. And he said, yeah, sure. So I gave him a big hug and it was wonderful. It was just wonderful. We went back downstairs together. I proceeded out the door and he proceeded with his cart down the hall. I was ecstatic. I should mention that his name was Lester. That way we can all give a blessing for Lester. Thank you, Lester! ***************************** Now, the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked about this Gnostic Reformation here at Gnostic Insights. My Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you is not different than classical Gnosticism, but it is a further refinement. It’s a proceeding onward. We don’t go back into history. We go forward into the future. Today, we’re going to talk about the Demiurge and how this view of the Demiurge that I have is slightly different than the view that a lot of people have. See, most people think of the Demiurge as malicious, as an evil being. And when I first was studying Gnosticism, I was pretty much along those lines as well. I thought that the Demiurge was a very bad guy. But over the past few years, I’ve come to see that the Demiurge isn’t a bad guy. That he’s doing his best. He is the, as I like to say, he is the god of this world. So he’s done a pretty darn good job. He’s done better than you and I could do building a world. But how did he do that? Why is he thought to be malicious? I mean, I often speak of him—and again, I say him, but it’s really an it. Because first off, let’s remember, the Demiurge is not a stand-alone entity. The Demiurge is the separated ego or identity—the presenting face of the Aeon known as Logos, the Aeon who fell. And when Logos fell because he overreached, his ego overreached and thought it could become plugged back into the Father the way the Son is plugged into the Father. Logos mistook himself for the Son, you could say. You could also say he mistook himself for the Fullness. Because there he is sitting right there at the very tippy top of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God–the very top. He was the final Aeon to be produced by the commingling of all of the Aeons giving glory to the Father and the Son. Logos mistakes himself for the Fullness. So Logos was sitting way up there at the tippy top. He didn’t have any neighbors to his left and right because he was the capstone. He didn’t have anybody over above him other than the Father. And the rest of the Pleroma was down there beneath him because he’s sitting as a capstone on the hierarchy of the Fullness of God, which looks like a pyramid. So I think that Logos simply mistook himself for the Son or mistook that he could go ahead and plug in to the Father. He’s right there. He’s so close. You know, we have echoes of that same Fall in the story of the Tower of Babel where the humans built this incredibly tall tower reaching to the heavens, reaching to God. And God, [and in this case it was probably Jehovah, probably the Demiurge because we’re downstream here in the cosmos], thought that was not a good idea. And so he cast them into confusion by a proliferation of languages that they couldn’t understand each other and they stopped building and the tower fell. Italian humanist manuscript late 15th century It’s also the story of Icarus where he made wings and he flew too close to the sun, S-U-N in that case. And when he flew too close to the sun, it melted the wax that was holding his wings together and Icarus fell. These are other examples of falling. 18th century engraving by Bernard Picart So in this case with Logos, Logos wanted to go up to the Father with his Pleroma, which was perfect because the Pleroma of Logos is a fractal of the Fullness of God. It’s a fractal copy of the entire hierarchy. Logos had within its Pleroma a fractal, one level down, of all of the other Aeons. He had a full and complete Pleroma. He had the entire plans. He knew everything to put together paradise, to put together the cosmos. But that wasn’t his job and so he overreached. His ego got out of control and it was his ego that impelled him to overreach, which caused the Fall. The Father couldn’t allow Logos to plug back into him because, well, that space is taken by the Son. But not only that, the Father is too immense, is too illimitable, is too powerful for a lowly Aeon to be able to plug directly in. No one can control that much power. No one can hold that much energy except the Son. So Logos was repelled by the Father to save him from becoming cinders in the light of his immensity. And he fell and he broke apart down here outside of the Pleroma of the Fullness. And it was his broken bits that became the quantum foam of this cosmos. Logos couldn’t get it back together. He couldn’t stuff it all back in. He couldn’t contain the chaos that erupted from him once his ego took over. Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory. And I hope, as I talk about the Demiurge, that you can hear the parallels to our egos when our own egos get out of control. That’s when all hell breaks loose. The Aeons were designed to stay in the glory beam of the Father and the Son. They each had their position, place, duty, name in the hierarchy. And Logos overreached his position, place, duty, name. His ego took over. That’s why he fell. And then it was nothing but ego down here. The best part of Logos, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, was horrified. And it abandoned the chaos below and returned to the Aeons in the Fullness. But he was broken. He left half of himself behind. So let’s look at this Demiurge that was left behind. The Demiurge is not a character that stands alone. The Demiurge is the shadow of the Fallen Aeon. The Demiurge is the shadow of Logos. Because when his ego took over and separated, all that was left was the shadows. So the Pleroma of the Demiurge is a shadow of the Pleroma of Logos. We know that the Pleroma of Logos is a fractal level down from the hierarchy of the Fullness. What does it mean to be the shadow of that Pleroma? That’s what makes up the body and energy of the Demiurge. So there’s two questions that Gnostics have often wrestled with over the years, particularly the Sethians and then the Platonists in the Greek strain of thought. And these were the questions. How can the Demiurge be ignorant without being evil? And how can the cosmos be orderly yet spiritually deficient? This is answered by thinking of the Demiurge as the shadow of the Fallen Aeon. This means that the Demiurge is not malicious; he’s not autonomous either. He is not the source of being. The Demiurge is a distorted reflection of the higher principle that was Logos. When we think of the Demiurge this way, we can preserve the goodness of the Father and the integrity of the Son and the cooperative nature of the Aeons. Evil didn’t fall from the Father. Evil is nothing but another word for chaos and shadow—lack of goodness. So falling out of the pleroma of the hierarchy of the Fullness created our material cosmos as a shadow place. There is a cosmic deficiency hard-baked into this material universe. And that is, by definition, separation from the Father and the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Ignorance is a shadow. It’s not a substance. It’s a lack. Again, ignorance is part of the shadow. It’s the ignorance of not knowing God. It’s the ignorance of not remembering where you came from. My Gnostic insight is that the role of the Demiurge is to bring order to chaos, bring order to the quantum foam that was bubbling in and out in and out of existence down here. This is a way different place than the ethereal space. And in order to impose control upon the quantum foam, the Demiurge imposes strict physical laws like a puppet master. He controls physics through laws of physics. Strictly, there can be no deviation or there would be no material universe. That’s a principle that comes right out of physics. The laws of our universe are strictly precise and any deviation causes catastrophic failure. So it was necessary for the Demiurge to impose strict physical laws on both physics and then higher up on the chemistry of how things go together. Bonds, chemical bonds. The Demiurge controls through strings of power. And the Demiurge knows how to do this because it is the shadow of all of that fractal knowledge of Logos. So it has the pattern, but it’s a dead pattern. It’s like he has the blueprints but he doesn’t have the life. He has a little small shadowy model of the way things ought to be. So he knows how things go. He creates structure, but doesn’t understand the meaning or the wisdom behind it. Now, after we second order powers came to Earth to try to remind the Demiurge of love and the Father and the Son and the Fullness above and his better half Logos up there with the Aeons begging for him to come home, praying for him to come home, we second order powers were sent down to try to bring that remembrance to the Demiurge. But we have failed because we get caught up in this never-ending war down here. Never-ending War And you know, it’s not just a never-ending war against the other political party. It’s not just a never-ending war against other people that frustrate our desires. It’s a never-ending war between entropy and creation. It’s a never-ending war between life and death, between material and ethereal. We get lost in the battle and we forget to stand within that beam of glory that comes directly down on us from the hierarchy above. So the Demiurge tries to also impose laws and strict order upon us second order creatures, thinking that we are just wayward molecules because it doesn’t remember where we came from. It doesn’t remember where it came from. The Demiurge does not understand free will. Free will is not allowed in the Demiurgic universe because if the Demiurge allowed any free will in the material, things would fly apart. Things would not hold. So the Demiurge is trying to impose order upon us second order creatures and we are very unruly because of the free will that we inherited from the Aeonic realm and we just do not obey. That’s why the laws in the Old Testament and the Quran are so strict. There’s no deviation allowed because the Demiurge is trying its best to impose order upon us, thinking of us as simply disobedient pieces of material. So in this Gnosticism that I am sharing with you, the Demiurge is cut off from the first principle of knowledge, wisdom, love, consciousness, life. And it’s down here all on its own in this dark and dreary place. The Demiurge is competent. He created this world that we live in. He created the stars in the heavens. He’s doing his best. He’s earnest, but he is spiritually amnesiac which limits his power and understanding. He’s not just a tyrant. In the Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you, the goal has always been to restore the Demiurge back to the Pleroma and slap it back onto Logos, restoring his ego and making Logos whole. Because until the Demiurge returns to the hierarchy of God, there is an Aeon in that hierarchy who is not whole. And that diminishes the Fullness of God. We are actually joining in with the prayer of the Aeons to restore the Demiurge back to the Fullness, to restore the Demiurge back to Logos, which will then restore Logos, which then restores the Aeons of the Fullness. The Demiurge cannot bring life and consciousness to the mud. So we don’t discard the Demiurge but seek to heal the Demiurge. We are not merely trying to escape this material cosmos but we are part of the plan of redemption for the cosmos. The Aeons are not isolated from this universe but they become reconciled with the universe when the Demiurge is restored to Logos. And as I was telling you for the last couple of weeks, humanity isn’t divided into those who are elect and therefore saved and those who are not elect in any of the religions that want to say that only their believers are the elect. Everyone is restored when the Demiurge is restored. And when everyone is restored, then the Demiurge is restored. Now we can’t be restored—we second-order powers already fell when our ego is in control and it is usually in control down here. It’s all a fractal system. It’s all resonating downward. So we resemble the Demiurge when our big S Self is not in control, our Self being a fractal representation of the pleroma of Logos. We failed in that and that is the purpose of the third order of powers which is Christ because we can’t do it on our own. We’ve tried. We’ve tried for millennia. We can’t seem to climb out of that egoic trap that we find ourselves in and therefore the Christ came to redeem us and to redeem the Demiurge. The Christ is a later solution to the Fall. Second-order power was not enough. Send in the third-order powers and the Christ does have all the power necessary. The Christ has all the mojo of the ethereal plane. Nothing’s missing and it has the full blessing of the Father. We are all elect within the pleroma of Christ. So Christ is the restorative agent to the Demiurge, to us, to all of creation. Christ is the harmonizer. Christ is the healer of the Fallen Aeon and the revealer of the Father and the awakener of the Demiurge and the teacher of humanity. Christ didn’t create the cosmos. Christ restores the cosmos. Christ does not impose law. Christ said he came to replace the law. He takes the law away from the hands of the Demiurge and instead rules through meaning and love. The Christ didn’t come to dominate the Demiurge, to kill the Demiurge. Christ came to enlighten the Demiurge. I have come of late to feel more compassion for the Demiurge. The Demiurge is an innocent victim of the Fall. He’s a limited being that can only rule through strict control. He’s redeemable through the power of Christ, who restores the cosmos. So let’s go through this again real quick. The Son is the primal image of the Father, the first expression of the Father, the first emanation of the Father. As soon as the Son was formed, his component parts were identified and those component parts—those are the Totalities, who then became Self-aware and now we call them the Aeons. They express the Fullness of divine life. See, the Son is one big entity, but the Aeons are all of the Son in smaller approachable forms. It’s like thinking of all of the humans on the planet as one giant mass and trying to relate to humanity as one thought, one thing. Well, that’s not true. We’re each individuals. We’re each a part of humanity and it’s that kind of relationship that the Aeons have to the Son. You see, one Aeon falls and in this Gnosticism, we call that Aeon Logos and his shadow emerged, which is the Demiurge. The Demiurge orders chaos through strict laws, but lacks any spiritual memory and the Christ then, formed cooperatively by the Son, Logos and the Aeons, descends into our cosmic space to heal the Fallen Aeon, to enlighten the Demiurge, to awaken humanity and to restore cosmic harmony. Here is a chart that very neatly displays today’s Gnostic Insights. God bless us all and onward and upward. THE FATHER (Transcendent Source • Beyond Being • Silent Origin) │ Emanation flows downward (pure gift) ▼ THE SON (First Emanation • Direct Image • Perfect Intelligible Form) │ Expression flows outward (intelligibility) ▼ LOGOS (Articulate Intellect • Pattern of Order • Fractal Pleroma) │ Differentiation flows into multiplicity ▼ THE FULLNESS OF AEONS (Harmonic Community • Modalities of Divine Life • Stable Radiance) │ (One aeon turns inward (self‑regarding Ego) Logos/Sophia) ▼ THE FALL SEPARATION FROM THE FATHER AEONIC DEFICIENCY ARISES (Ignorance • Misalignment • Loss of Orientation toward the Son) │ Shadow flows from the deficient Aeon Logos ▼ THE DEMIURGE – EGO PERSONIFIED (Shadow‑Image • Earnest but Amnesiac • Competent yet Unillumined) │ Hidden influence flows from the LOGOS (quiet guidance, unrecognized by the Demiurge, shaping his ordering activity) │ Ordering flows from Logos into the pre‑cosmic chaos/quantum foam ▼ COSMOS ORDERED BY THE DEMIURGE ALONE (Physical Laws • Chemical Necessity • Biological Imperatives • Governmental Structures • Order without Meaning) │ Human souls do NOT arise here. They descend from the Aeons above. ▼ DESCENT OF HUMAN SOULS FROM AEONS (Soul-stream flows downward • Each soul carries a spark of the aeonic harmony • Enters the cosmos under conditions of amnesia due to bonding with the Demiurgic material.) ▼ HUMANITY (Divine Origin • Cosmic Conditioning • Spiritual Amnesia • Longing) │ Compassion flows from the higher Aeons ▼ CHRIST (Restorative Agent • Cooperative Emanation of Son + Logos + Aeons • Bridge Between Realms • Physician of Ignorance) │ Healing flows upward and downward ▼ CHRIST'S RESTORATIVE ACTIVITY • Heals the fallen Aeon • Illuminates the Demiurge (reveals the Logos behind his work) • Reveals the Father to humanity • Softens strict law with mercy and wisdom • Restores harmony among the Aeons • Awakens the soul's memory of its aeonic origin • Opens the path of universal return │ Reconciliation flows back toward the Source ▼ UNIVERSAL RESTORATION (Demiurge Enlightened • Aeons Reharmonized • Humanity Awakened • Cosmos Transfigured • All Return Through the Son to the Father)
The Rev. Dr. Siobhan Houston, Author of "Priests, Gnostics and Magicians: European Roots of Esoteric Independent Catholicism", takes us through a look at the Gnostic Restoration of Jules Doinel.
In the latest Black Iron Intercept, I take you on a bold, three-part exploration of one of history's most subversive spiritual traditions. Part One dismantles the mythological world the Gnostics inherited — exposing the Archons, soulless cosmic rulers who keep humanity trapped through materialism, ignorance, and manufactured desire. Part Two dives into the Book of Enoch, tracing how its fallen angels became Yaldabaoth's archons, and how figures like Norea and Simon Magus emerged as unlikely champions of divine resistance. Part Three turns the lens inward to examine the Gnostic view of sin, drawing on the Gnostic gospels and thinkers such as C.G. Jung. This is ancient wisdom with the gloves off. Get The Occult Elvis: https://amzn.to/4jnTjE4 Virtual Alexandria Academy: https://thegodabovegod.com/virtual-alexandria-academy/ Gnostic Tarot Readings: https://thegodabovegod.com/gnostic-tarot-reading/ The Gnostic Tarot: https://www.makeplayingcards.com/sell/synkrasis Homepage: https://thegodabovegod.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aeonbyte AB Prime: https://thegodabovegod.com/members/subscription-levels/ Voice Over services: https://thegodabovegod.com/voice-talent/ Support with donation: https://buy.stripe.com/00g16Q8RK8D93mw288 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Last week, I started talking about the nature of this Gnostic Reformation that I’m describing here. It turns out that the approach to Gnosticism that I am sharing with you here at Gnostic Insights is a reformation of what is understood to be Gnosticism. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode yet, it would be really good for you to start there. Go back and listen to or read the episode called, This Gnostic Reformation. I didn’t read any books about Gnosticism; I actually read the Nag Hammadi itself. I used my own method of discernment, my own model building method called A Simple Explanation to understand what I was reading. We all do that. We all have internal structures that help us to interpret what we understand about the world around us–what we understand about the nature of anything, whether it’s God or people or oneself. I had already previously come up with a very coherent system for understanding the things around me. That’s what I call A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That book is available. You can check it out. I’ll put the link here in the transcript. When people say, “My goodness, your Gnosticism is so different than what I have come to understand Gnosticism to be,” that’s because I didn’t take it from secondary sources. I took it from the original sources. Then of course, Valentinian Gnosticism is an early form of what has come to be called Christianity. Christianity diverged immensely from the original message around the 300's and on up, when the gnostic books were taken out of Orthodoxy. Those folks that are called heresiologists are the people that went around slapping heresy labels on the early Christianity—the early Valentinian Gnosticism. They weeded it out of the official sacred texts that made their way into the New Testament. The main book of the Nag Hammadi that I relate to is called the Tripartite Tractate. I believe it to be the purest form of gnosis. It has very little in the way of mythologies, of extraneous characters, of the names of things and the numbers of things and the astrology of it all. Valentinian Gnosticism from the Tripartite Tractate is unique in that the fallen Aeon is not called Sophia, a female character. In the Sethian mythology, the female character—and by the way, that presupposes that there are genders among the Aeons in the Fullness of God, but that really doesn’t make much sense because there’s no sex. That is not the way that Aeons procreate. Aeons procreate by giving glory to the Father in various combinations, and it’s those various combinations of giving glory that produce amalgamations of those combinations. It’s a logarithmic progression of Aeons. It keeps growing as various Aeons recombine with one another and give glory to the Father and the Son—upstream, as I like to call it. That has nothing to do with gender. It has to do with giving glory to God with your friends and neighbors. See, we have gender because it has to do with procreation, and this is what is causing all of the gender confusion going around now. Differences among us—what we typically call masculine or feminine—these are personality traits. They don’t have to have anything to do with your sex. So the idea that you have to change your physical sex to reconceive of your gender or reconceive of who you are or your personality—this is a false teaching. You are who you are. You are a combination of various Aeons. You are the fruit of those Aeons, and it really has nothing to do with gender. The Father is not a male figure. Barbelo is not the mother. These are gendered identifications, but they are not truly gender because they’re not sexed. Does that make any sense? So last week we talked about the first emanation. In Sethianism, it’s Barbelo, the mother figure, the womb of all, the matrix of divine life. In Valentinian Gnosticism, that first figure is the Son, and in most of the Valentinian texts, the Son is conflated with the Christ. Oh, by the way, Christians get very bent out of shape about calling Christ the Christ. They say, if anybody—and I heard this from a radio preacher not long ago—“If anyone says ‘the'Christ, you know right off they’re not saved. You know right off they’re not Christians, because ‘the' Christ is a made-up figure, whereas Jesus is Christ, and Jesus is the Son of God.” Well, Jesus is a human being, so we know that Jesus is not the originating Son of God, which an ethereal figure. The Son, in Valentinian Christianity, was the immediate self-expression of the Father. The Father emanated the Son, and the Son entirely represents the Father. Jesus is way downstream here, along with the rest of us humans. He was called the perfect human because he expressed the Father and the Son in his human personality. Jesus came to be well downstream, along with the rest of us humans. In Sethianism, the Barbelo, the first expression, isn’t the Savior. She’s the source of the Savior. She’s the mother of Autogenes, whom they call the Christ. In Valentinianism, the Son is the immediate self-expression of the Father. There’s no Barbelo figure, and the Son is the primary mediator of divine knowledge. The Son is fully expressive and representative of the Father, and he stays plugged into the Father—or it stays. It’s difficult when speaking English not to use gendered pronouns, because that’s the way our grammar works. So, forgive me for saying “he” when I speak of the Son or the Father, but “it” just seems so impersonal. And the Son is personal to us. The Son is our Father, our Abba. In Sethianism, Christ, also known as Autogenes, is not the initial revelation of the Father. He’s the restorative agent who repairs the damage caused by the fall of the Aeon. And in Sethianism, the Aeon who fell was a female figure, Sophia. Christ is often paired with Seth, and Seth is a character out of the mythology of Sethianism that is the heavenly archetype of the Gnostic race. Sethianism has distinctions amongst humans. There are the elect and there are those who are not elect. There are those who are called hylic-only, which is material only. And so, if you’re a Sethian Gnostic, you don’t believe that all of the people that you see around here are carriers of divinity. You believe that only Gnostics are carriers of divinity, much like Christians only believe that those who have come forward and professed belief in Jesus Christ are the elect, and they’re the only ones who are saved. Gnostics have the same type of distinction, only they think only the Sethians are those who are saved. And that really doesn’t have to do with Jesus. It has to do with Christ and Seth—that Christ’s role is to descend and rescue the elect, and the elect would be Sethians. Now, in Valentinian Christianity, you don’t have that kind of distinction. Christ is the direct image of the Father. Most of the books of the Nag Hammadi, the Valentinian as well as the Sethian, still identify Sophia as the fallen Aeon; they still have a gendered pleroma of the Fullness of God. This is one of the big, big differences between the Gnosticism that I share with you and these more ancient Gnostic strains of thought. I do not think that Aeons are gendered. It’s an unnecessary step of confusion, the idea of syzygies and marriages and pair bonds. No, that’s not necessary. At least in the Tripartite Tractate, if you read it, nowhere is anything like that mentioned. There’s no gender identification mentioned at all. In Valentinian Christology, [which is what it’s called when you study Christ], outside of the Tripartite Tractate the rest of the books that talk about Christ say that Christ is the direct image of the Father. His incarnation is intentional, therapeutic, and as a teacher, and he brings knowledge of the Father, not merely rescue from the Fall. Christians generally believe that Christ brings knowledge of the Father because he talked about the Father, or he taught—that he’s a pedagogical character. He’s a teacher, but that his actual salvation came from dying on the cross, from death and then overcoming death. He brings everyone who believes in him forward in overcoming death. Now, the Tripartite Tractate doesn’t put it that way. The Tripartite Tractate explains how Christ came not to die and not only to teach, but salvation lies in the very fact that Christ came to Earth in the perfection of the Father. Jesus said, “If you see me, you see the Father. He who loves me loves the Father, and he who loves the Father loves me.” That was Jesus speaking as the embodiment of the Christ. Jesus embodied the Fullness of the Christ in his human body walking around on the Earth, and so he built a bridge between the ethereal plane and the material plane. He brought them back together for the first time since Logos fell out of the pleroma. He brings them back together, and he brings restoration in that manner. There’s another primary difference between Sethian Gnosticism and Valentinian Gnosticism, other than Barbelo being the first emanation or the Son being the first emanation. In Sethianism, Christ’s role is as a cosmic rescuer, and in the Valentinian tradition, he is the revealer of truth and the healer. Sethians tend to think of the world as completely hostile and alien. This material world is a prison. It’s a trap. Everything’s wrong down here. Now, in the Valentinian system, it is also thought that the world is wrong. It’s fallen, but it is redeemable, and so salvation comes through transformation of what is around us, whereas in the Sethian system, salvation comes by escaping the trap. The goal in Sethianism is to return to Barbelo, and the goal in the Valentinian system is to return to the Father. So, Sethianism is much more apocalyptic. It’s about crashing the world and getting out because there’s nothing good down here. Valentinian is more therapeutic because it believes in transformation through love and spreading the gospel–the good news. That’s what gospel means. The good news of Christ, the good news of the Father, the good news of eternal life beyond materiality. In the Gnostic Reformation that I am proposing here, we can combine somewhat the two schools of thought. This is a bridge Gnosticism between Sethianism, Valentinianism, and Christianity, although churchgoers aren’t going to like any of this, right? Because they’re fine in the system that they believe it to be, and I think that’s okay. If you’re a non-hypocritical Christian who goes to church and prays, and you’re in touch with the Father, and you embody the Christ, that’s great. No problem with that. And did you know that Valentinian Christians were accepted as full Christians for the first 300 years? They were side by side, sitting in the same churches, giving the same prayers, sharing in the same rituals. It was only after the Nicene Council and the takeover by the Catholic Church that Valentinians were excluded from Christianity. So I’m not trying to crash Christianity. I’m only trying to bring a correction to the hypocrisy and misunderstandings of Christianity. Well, we know there’s a ton of hypocrites. I’m an idealist. That’s my nature. So when I discuss these things, it’s in their ideal form. It’s the way they ought to be. It’s the way they’re described. It’s the way they were designed by God and the Aeons. If you take your knowledge from what you see around here in this fallen world, then you have got a very poor idea of what it is. And you may sit in a Christian church, and you may go through the motions of being a cultural Christian. But unless you are in touch with the Father, and unless you are embodying the Christ, you’re taking your guidance from the world. And this is how it is that many people nowadays think they’re doing good, when actually they’re doing bad. And even worse than that, people who say they’re doing good, and they know they’re not doing good, they know they’re doing bad. That’s hypocrisy. That’s what hypocrisy is. So when I describe these systems, or I describe the nature of the Christ, the nature of the body of believers, the nature of love, the nature of the Father, the nature of our aeonic or heavenly home in the pleroma of the Fullness of God, I’m describing it in an idealistic manner, in the way it’s designed to be. And that’s what we aim for. We aim for the ideal. You cannot take your cues from this earthly realm. And make sure that you don’t take your cues from teachers who are themselves fallen and not embodying Christ. In this Gnostic Reformation that I’m sharing with you, the Son is the primal emanation, the direct image of the Father. He stays fully plugged into the Father. He has all of the direct knowledge, wisdom, love, consciousness of the Father–life. While Christ is a later restorative agent, formed through the prayers of the aeons, the Son, and the Logos after Logos returned back to the Fullness. They prayed for help to come to the mess that Logos made down below when he fell. They pray for help to rescue the Demiurge, which is part of Logos—it's his ego. It’s his presenting face. They want the Demiurge to come out of its amnesic state and remember the Father, remember the Fullness, remember Logos, its better half. And when that happens, that is when the big roll-up can occur—when all of the shadows will disappear. Because when the Demiurge comes to awareness, to Self-awareness, as being part of the Logos, as being part of the Son, then all of the shadows that have come out of the Demiurge—all of this material construction—will just vanish. Dissolve like snow, as the old hymn says. There’s nothing in the Nag Hammadi like Armageddon. Christian theology culminates with a great bloody battle called Armageddon, where all the sinners are killed and only the elect remain. And only the elect are up there in heaven then. And that’s why it’s all good, because they killed all the bad people, and they all went to hell, and they’re locked down there in eternal torture. Well, that does not sound like the Father Jesus spoke of. And that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Nag Hammadi. The way we Valentinian Gnostics do battle is not with swords and bullets and fists. We are to do battle with love. We love them. That’s what we’re supposed to do. We demonstrate love. We are called the second order powers. All creatures on the earth are second order powers. The Aeons above are the first order of powers. We are their descendants. We are their children. We are their fruit. And we are called the second order of powers. We were sent here to remind the Demiurge of love and life and consciousness. See, the Aeons and the Logos–this was their plan. They cooked it up. We were sent here to bring love and remembrance to the Demiurge. Restoration in that way. It didn’t work out, because we get caught up in this material life; because we get caught up in the never-ending war. You can’t remind people of good through evil. You cannot remind people of love through hatred. Only love breeds love. Now let’s look at how all of this affects Christology, the study of Christ. In the Gnosticism that I am sharing with you, the Son is the primal emanation. He’s the direct image of the Father. He represents divine Self-knowledge, and he is stable, he is eternal, and he is not fallen. The Christ is a later emanation. He’s a third order power. He’s generated for the purpose of restoration. He is shaped by the Son, Logos, and the Aeons, praying together to the Father for help to come to the Fall. He is the agent of healing, reconciliation, and revelation. So we have a Son, which is the first emanation, and we have a Christ, which is the restorative agent that comes after the first and second order of powers. Christ teaches the soul to recognize the Son. Christ repairs the cosmic imbalance caused by ignorance, and salvation flows from the Father, through the Son, through Christ, and into our souls and the Demiurge's soul—his ego. You see, we all have a perfect Self that is an embodiment of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. All of the first order powers are within us as they were with Logos, within him in a fractal manner, and then we are further fractals of Logos. It’s a nested hierarchy. We are children of the Elohim of Adonai Elohim So when the Christ comes into the cosmos to bring perfection and healing to the Demiurge and to us, it’s very similar, because the reason we feel less than perfect is because we have both an ego and that perfect Self, as did Logos. And it was the ego of Logos that became the Demiurge. Well, our fractal version of that same exact phenomenon is when our ego is not in alignment with our Self. And when the ego is not in alignment with the Self, when the ego has forgotten its origin, like happened to the Demiurge, when the ego has forgotten that it’s not the boss—our boss is our big S Self because that has the direct connection to the emanations of the Father and the Aeons above. Consciousness, life, love, all come from above, and that comes through our Self. The Self at the center of our souls is a fractal of the Fullness of God Then when we are melded onto this material world, to the molecules of the egg, the zygote that is now splitting, splitting, splitting, and leveling up to become the organism, we become lost in the materiality of this cosmic space. And it’s harder for our Self to shine forth through the material. And our egos are more than willing to identify with the material, with the Demiurge, because the Demiurge is pure ego. And so our egos come to resonate with the Demiurge. Even the Aeons have egos. Even the Son has an ego. Ego is merely your address. It’s your name, your rank, your function in the overall hierarchical pleroma of the Fullness of God. That’s what your ego is—it's your ID. The Aeons in the Fullness all have their position, place, power, function. So ego in and of itself is not a bad thing. It is easily led astray once we are in these material bodies down here on the earth. The pleroma of the Christ is the 3rd Order of Powers And so Christ’s function is to remind us of the purity of God, the purity of the soul, the purity of our Self, where we come from, and where we will be returning to, and what our job is down here. Because it’s only then, through the Christ, that we can feel the love, that we can embody the love, in order to share it with others and with the Demiurge. Consciousness and life only comes from above. The computers come from below. Life cannot jump into the molecular level. Okay, we’ll come back around to all of this one more time next week. Please leave me your thoughts. Let’s have a discussion on these things. We’ll pick it up again next week. God bless us all, and onward and upward! A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel puts it all together for you. Please purchase the book and don’t forget to leave a review! 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If you’ve ever had a moment where, for a split second, you remembered who you really are? That’s the divine spark. Not your “to-do list self”, nor the roles you play, but the part of you that feels ancient, luminous, and plugged into everything? I just had one of those flashes, so let me tell you the story. The Divine Spark People use the word spark in all kinds of ways, energy, life force, soul fire. Many meditations invite you to picture a divine spark in the heart. Recently I found myself wondering, where did that image even come from? Who started talking about the spark like that? Minutes later I flopped onto the couch, opened YouTube, and clicked a video from Ellie Dreams Down Under, who has a fabulous playlist on the Gnostic gospels. And what was she talking about? The spark. What it means and how it shows up in the Gnostic texts. The timing made me laugh. (For more about Gospels, check out this episode about the Gospel of Mary -it’s about Mary Magdelene) When things line up like that, I take it as a wink from the Universe. For me, that's a moment of plugging into something bigger than my personality. It feels like a reminder that I'm part of something larger. Sometimes those reminders are gentle, like a video. Other times they're not subtle at all. A health crisis, an accident, a loss. Something cracks open ordinary life and there's a fierce knowing, I am more than this physical form. Buried Wisdom You can trace the idea of a spark through many traditions, but today I want to focus on one text, the Gospel of Truth. It's a mystical early Christian writing with a lot to say about forgetting, remembering, and that flash of recognition we're calling the spark. This isn't a sermon but an esoteric deep dive into what the spark means and how it might be moving in your life. The text was discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, part of a buried library of early Christian writings sealed in jars for centuries. It's usually connected to the Valentinians, a 2nd century mystical Christian group who cared less about believing the right thing and more about remembering where you come from. When I first read it, I'll be honest, some of the biblical language felt dense. Some of it made me roll my eyes. So I’m going to switch out modern words for what I consider the offensive words. I’ll explain as I go. Belief Vs. Knowing Belief is information you've been told. Gnosis, the word the Gnostics used, means inner knowing. It's that moment when something wakes up and you think, “Oh. I know this. I've always known this.” One scholar sums it up like this, “I come from God, I share God's essence, I will return to God.” That's the heartbeat of this text. According to this story, humanity has fallen into ignorance and forgetfulness of the Divine Source. The gospel uses the word Father. I prefer Source or Universe. Ignorance is personified as Error. Error is described like a fog, even a nightmare we're living inside. Then Christ appears. He’s not someone balancing a cosmic spreadsheet of sins, but a teacher and revealer. His role is to dissolve ignorance through direct knowing of Source. From this perspective, salvation isn't about punishment. It's about awakening and remembering where you came from and what's real. That flash of, “Oh. I remember.” That's the spark. It's the instant your everyday personality glimpses the deeper self that has never been separated from the Divine. You could even think of intuition as one way the spark activates. That persistent inner knowing that recognizes truth when it hears it. Suffering and Liberation The text says ignorance is the mother of all evils. As a modern woman, you can imagine my reaction. But we need to remember this was written in an ancient patriarchal culture. So, I’ve switched out “gives birth” for what a word I prefer – “creating”. Now you can understand that the gospel says ignorance creates suffering and awakening creates liberation. When you forget who you are, fear and confusion step in. You start building your life around a mistaken identity. Gnosis isn't trivial information. It's a direct inner knowing of Source and of your own divine nature. Living in Fog Error refers to the fog. You can recognize it when you cling tightly to your roles such as mother, partner, caregiver, professional, helper. None of those are wrong. They're beautiful. But when you believe that's the entirety of who you are, the bigger picture disappears. The spark is the moment something inside you says, “This can't be the whole story.” It feels expansive. A remembering that you are more than your résumé, more than your relationship status, and more than your current problems. Intuition tugs at your sleeve when you falsely shrink to fit those roles. It refuses to let you live only inside the fog and encourages you to remember the truth of who you are. Human beings carry a piece of the Divine, a spark that has fallen into the material world and forgotten its origin. That's us. We didn't fall because we were bad. We fell because we forget. You see versions of this story elsewhere. In Kabbalah there's a teaching about a divine vessel filled with sparks of light. The vessel shatters, the sparks scatter, and each spark forgets it once belonged to a radiant whole. The Gospel of Truth says Christ reminds you that you are still that spark. You never stopped being it. While you're here in a body, the deeper work is remembering your true essence as divine presence. That's what the Gnostics refer to as liberation. Most of us have had at least one moment like that. Something cracks open and you realize you're more than your physical form. Fear and Misinformation Error is described almost like a hostile force built out of misinformation, which feels very modern. We're not strangers to misinformation – just think about the nonsense you see in social media. The text says once truth appears, Error is exposed as hollow. It also talks about fear and terror come from ignorance. If you’re a midlife woman, you’re already familiar with how you start to ignore fear based scripts like: If they don't like me, I won't be safe. If I'm alone, I'm a failure. If I disappoint someone, I'll lose everything. At some point something in you says, “That is not true.” You drop those scripts not because someone convinced you, but because you feel their falseness in your body. In this framework, ignorance of your own divinity allowed those fears to be in charge earlier in life. The spark is your moment of sanity. The flash where you realize you don't have to live under those old stories anymore. That's liberation. Modern Reflection Some modern thinkers explore similar ideas from a different angle. In The Divine Spark, an anthology edited by Graham Hancock, several writers suggest psychedelics may temporarily dissolve the brain's filter, allowing people to experience unity consciousness. They use different language, but are talking about the same idea. The fog thins and remembering happens, this time through psychedelic journeys. I'm not suggesting you do plant medicine, though I know people who have had powerful insights through it. I'm simply pointing out that this question of remembering is still being explored two thousand years later. The Gospel of Truth says humanity fell into ignorance and fear. Christ appeared as a messenger of joy and remembrance, calling you back to who you've always been. Whether you believe in Christ or not, the idea is beautiful. The spark is the part of you that recognizes that truth instantly. As a spiritual framework, remembering your own divine nature resonates with me. Not in a grandiose way, but in a calming, grounded way. You are part of the Universe. Which means you are not separate from anything. When I guide meditations and invite you to expand your energy field until you blend into everything around you, this is what you're touching. That sense of oneness. Some describe it as agape, universal love, a steady belonging. There's something powerful about exploring this in your ordinary life, not as theology but as lived experience. That's where gnosis begins. Right in the middle of your actual life. The post What Does The Divine Spark Really Mean? appeared first on Intuitive Edge.
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"We built institutions that were supposed to reflect reality. But the windows became mirrors." In the second century, the Gnostics believed our world was a false reality created by a confused lesser god known as the Demiurge. Today, we are trapped in a modern equivalent: a labyrinth of metrics, models, and algorithms that dictate our lives while entirely missing our humanity. In Part 7 of The Mirror World, we dissect the collapse of institutional sense-making and the profound psychological toll of living inside the "fake world." Drawing on the histories of standardized testing, the DSM, and economic modeling, we explore how disciplines retreated behind "mechanical objectivity" to defend against insecurity—and how the profit motive locked us inside these models. Ultimately, we confront the modern pinnacle of this trap: Large Language Models (LLMs). We examine why AI is not the solution, but rather the ultimate simulacrum—the ghost of the human archive that performs the gesture of understanding while severing us from the real. To escape the mirror, we turn to the late psychologist James Hillman. Reclaiming our soul's calling—our daimon—requires more than just new metrics or better prompts. It requires us to do the one thing the algorithm cannot: grieve.
Here is part two of Church History 101! Tonight we look at the Gnostics, Polycarp, and everyone's favorite heretic, Marcion!
Colossians 2:18-19 and the Danger of Being Beguiled The message focuses on Colossians 2:18-19, warning against being beguiled and losing one’s reward. Colossians 2:18-19: “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshiping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding the head from which all the body, by joints and bands having nourishment, ministered and knit together, increases with the increase of God.” Being beguiled is likened to Eve being deceived by the serpent in Genesis. The serpent beguiled Eve, leading to consequences. The reward at stake is salvation. Matthew 10:22: Enduring to the end is necessary for salvation. “And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved.” Endurance is crucial, like in an Enduro motorcycle race, requiring persistence to reach the destination. Enduring means continuing to do what one should, even when facing opposition. Example: Continuing to profess Jesus even when facing opposition. The Colossian church faced various theories about God and worship, including Gnosticism. Gnostics believed Jesus was not truly a man but a spirit. Many churches today are not focused on the blood of Jesus, salvation, sanctification, or separation from the world. Instead, they seek worldly things. If there is no discernible difference between the behavior of the world and that of church members, something is wrong. Those walking with God should hate what they once loved and love what they once hated, with Jesus being central. Revelation 2 and the Church of Ephesus Revelation 2:1-7 is referenced, focusing on God’s potential “awe” (displeasure) against the church. Revelation 2:1-7: Addresses the church in Ephesus, acknowledging their works, labor, and patience, but noting they have forsaken their first love. The church in Ephesus is commended for not tolerating evil and for exposing false apostles as liars. Many who start strong in faith eventually fade away, leaving behind only the faithful members who were already committed. Example: Some television ministries and churches initially appear to have revivals but later prove to be superficial. It’s important to make the Bible personal, as if God is speaking directly to the individual. This involves recognizing God’s word, mind, and character and assessing whether one is aligned with them. Works alone are not enough; faith with works is essential. Being “washed in the blood” makes one a “first draft pick” and puts them on the front line. Being on God’s team requires prioritizing His business and what He considers important. It’s not comfortable when the world hates you for your faith. One must endure and be found faithful, not compromising with worldly influences. Attending church should be a purposeful act of seeking heavenly manna to sustain the soul. Heavenly food (God’s word) clears the mind and encourages one to persevere in prayer, even when the world is discouraging. Jesus cleansed the temple, driving out the money changers and declaring it a house of prayer. He then healed and ministered in the temple, and children praised Him. Those who didn’t leave or get run out questioned Jesus about the children’s praise, but He did not answer, acknowledging their praise. Revelation warns to “let him that hath an ear hear what the spirit saith unto the churches.” Overcoming leads to eating from the tree of life in paradise. One must surrender to God as their master and not be beguiled by the world. The remedy for losing one’s first love is to repent and return to it. If one has not been born again, these concepts may be a mystery. Born-again believers need to return to their initial zeal and get right with God. Remembering one’s former state helps one appreciate the transformation God has made. The Example of Eli and His Sons The story of Eli and his sons in 1 Samuel 4 is used as a cautionary tale. Eli was beguiled and profited from his position, while his sons were ungodly. God will intervene if people do not address unrighteousness. Eli’s sons took the Ark of the Covenant into battle, thinking it would solve their problems, but they were defeated and died. Relying on religious rituals or leaders without personal righteousness is futile. One must personally repent and get right with God. The news of the defeat and the death of his sons led to Eli’s death. Eli’s daughter-in-law named her son Ichabod, meaning “the glory has departed.” It’s a dire situation when God’s glory departs from someone. One needs to rekindle the fire of their initial salvation experience. David prayed, “Restore to me the joy of my salvation.”
In this episode we explore the foundations of Gnostic theology and the idea of gnosis, or direct knowledge of reality beyond belief or doctrine. The discussion contrasts orthodox religious traditions with esoteric paths that emphasize inner realization, hidden teachings, and the pursuit of deeper insight, We examine the Gnostic concept of the demiurge, the distinction between the apparent world and the true source, and the role of mystery schools, occult traditions, and ritual practices in transmitting esoteric knowledge. The conversation also looks at the sociological side of belief and how institutions shape what people accept as truth, and whether systems of belief function as stabilizing forces within society.Rather than advocating a single position, the episode investigates multiple interpretations of knowledge, myth, and power. We ask whether or not Gnostic traditions reveal hidden structures of reality or whether they offer an alternative symbolic framework for understanding the human condition.
Universal Salvation, part 4 Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I'm going to do my best to wrap up this review of David Bentley Hart's book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It's not to tear down Christianity. It's to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity. And so this talk of universal salvation is a necessary component of believing in the glory of God. Because universal salvation of all souls, not only all humans, but the dogs, the cats, the birds, the grasses, all living things, have to return to the Father, or else the Anointed loses power. The Father loses parts of himself. Okay, let's get back to David Bentley Hart. So we're going to run through these four meditations that are the body of his book. The first meditation is, Who is God? He says, The New Testament, to a great degree, consists in the eschatological interpretation of Hebrew Scripture's story of creation, finding in Christ as eternal Logos and risen Lord, the unifying term of beginning and end. There's no more magnificent meditation on this vision than Gregory of Nyssa's description of the progress of all persons towards union with God in the one pleroma, the one fullness of the whole Christ. All spiritual wills moving, to use this loving image, from outside the temple walls to the temple precincts, and finally beyond the ages into the very sanctuary of the glory as one. Okay, let me jump in here to say, do you notice that the New Testament words, when you use the correct translations, are the same as the translations in our Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi? Logos is the eternal spirit of humanity and the risen Lord. The Fullness is the one pleroma, the whole Christ. And in this statement, it's saying that all that is spiritual, which includes the spirits that reside within each of us, will all move as one into the pleroma of the Christ. That's who Christ is to us. He's the head of our pleroma. And when I speak of pleromas, I always picture that pyramidal shape, that hierarchical shape, and the capstone is the head. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us. When Paul spoke of this, he was applying it literally to the temple in Jerusalem, where there were the walls of the temple, and most of the people were outside of the walls, and some of the people were in the temple precincts. And finally, the very sanctuary of the glory, where only the priests were allowed. These are the three parts that were mentioned, and these are archetypal of the movement of humanity, Hart is saying, from the outside of the pleroma of the Christ, into the pleroma of the Christ, and then into the very glory of God through the Christ. On page 90, Hart says, If one truly believes that traditional Christian language about God's goodness and the theological grammar to which it belongs are not empty, then the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not and cannot possibly be the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ. If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him. And that's the end of the chapter, Who is God? And that pretty much states my basic belief on why everyone is going to heaven, because we all come from the Father, and therefore we all must return to the Father because the Father cannot be diminished in any way. And if he lost us, he'd be diminished. Do you see? The second meditation is, What is Judgment? And the subtitle is A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology. And eschatology, that's one of those big theological words that just means the end times, the end of time. On page 93, Hart says, There's a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament. And yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus as even the thinnest shadow of a hint, nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts. There is one verse in the Gospels, Matthew 25-46 that, traditionally understood, offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea, but then now Hart's going to explain how that can't be true. And then he says there are also perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation, and he says nothing's clear in Revelation, so he's not going to go there. But, What in fact the New Testament provides us with are a number of fragmentary and fantastic images that can be taken in any number of ways, arranged according to our prejudices and expectations, and declared literal or figural or hyperbolic as our desires dictate. It's why people can make the case for eternal damnation, but you can also make the case for not eternal damnation, because it's so metaphorical. On page 94, Hart says, Nowhere is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were some kind of Chthonian god. On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul's writings, that appear instead to promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms. How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination, while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality? If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous. And then he lists a number of verses from the New Testament that speak of universal salvation, over 20 of them at least, and I'll give you just a couple. Romans 5.18 says, So then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings. And jumping in from the Gnostic sense, he doesn't say the fall of one human, he doesn't say through Adam, he says one transgression—and we would call that one transgression the Fall of Logos, the fall of the Aeon, which is a higher order being than we are. Or Corinthians 15.22 says, For just as in Adam all die, so also in the anointed Christ all will be given life. I would say where it says for just as in Adam all die, it's not because Adam ate the apple, it's that we humans who are outside of the Christ, we're outside of the walls of the temple, we are in the pleroma of Adam—we are in the pleroma of human beings. When you accept the anointed, then you move into the pleroma, or you nest up higher into the pleroma of the Christ. That would be the Gnostic way of saying that. Second Corinthians 5.14 says, For the love of the anointed constrains us, having reached this judgment, that one died on behalf of all, all then have died. And of course that one is the Anointed, and He died on behalf of everyone. Or even Romans 11:32, For God shut up everyone in obstinacy, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And there's a long discussion in the chapter about how God's chosen—the original elect, that being the Hebrew nation—has been obstinate about accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the Anointed. And so he's saying that everyone is shut up in obstinacy, that's the Hebrews, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And that is, they're temporarily set up in obstinacy so that the message of the Anointed can be preached far and wide, before death and after death, we Gnostics would say, and not be just constrained to only the Hebrews. That's why the Hebrews are set aside for the moment, so that those outside the temple walls can also come to Christ. And then there are 19 more verses after this, and he lists them all between pages 96 and page 102. And if you are a theological scholar or a concerned Christian that wants to know if this is heresy or not, I really suggest you buy the book, That All Shall Be Saved, by David Bentley Hart, and read it carefully from cover to cover. Jumping to page 116, Hart says, There are those metaphors used by Jesus that seem to imply that the punishment of the world to come will be of only limited duration. For example, “if remanded to prison, you shall most certainly not emerge until you pay the very last pittance.” Or, “the unmerciful slave is delivered to the torturers until he should repay everything he owes.” And Hart says it seems as if this until should be taken with some seriousness. Some wicked slaves, moreover, “will be beaten with many blows, while others will be beaten with few blows.” Hart says, of course, everyone will be “salted with fire.” This fire is explicitly that of the Gehenna. But salting here is an image of purification and preservation, for salt is good. Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom from the Old Testament, and that is where, outside of the city of Jerusalem, the refuse was burned, and even carrion and bodies were burned. And that is why it is considered to be a hellish place. And it has become a metaphor in the time of Jesus for the purging fire, the Aeonian chastening for the good. Hart says we might even find some support for the purgatorial view of the Gehenna from the Greek of Matthew 25:46, which is the supposedly conclusive verse on the side of the Infernalist Orthodoxy, where the word used for the punishment of the last day is kolasis, which most properly refers to remedial chastisement, rather than timoria, which more properly refers to retributive justice. So, the fire of the judgment. What is judgment? The fire is the chastening fire, the fire of personal guilt and remorse over the sins one has done, that causes one to repent and turn to redemption. Hart says, It is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel, [and the fourth gospel, that's the gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], it is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel foretells any “last judgment,” in the sense of a real additional judgment that accomplishes more than has already happened in Christ. To see His words as pointing toward and fulfilled within his own crucifixion and resurrection, wherein all things were judged and all things redeemed. The kingdom has indeed drawn very near, and even now is being revealed. The hour indeed has come. The judge who is judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days. . . Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest, for being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to. And he attributes that concept of hell being only a shadow to Gregory of Nyssa, although we would attribute it to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi which came before Gregory of Nyssa. Hell exists so long as it exists only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation's enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul. This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to Come, [and that's capital A, Age, which we would interpret as the Aeons to Come, the Aeonian Pleroma to Come], and beyond all ages, all shall come to the kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world. And that's the chapter, What is Judgment? The third meditation or chapter of Hart is called What is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image. It says over and over in the Bible that we are made in the image of God. Man is made in the image of God. That is the divine image. On page 131, Hart says, Christians down the centuries have excelled at converting the good tidings of God's love in Christ into something dreadful, irrational, and morally horrid. [And we covered that in depth in the previous three episodes, if you want to go back there.] On page 132, Hart says, I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace, starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say, that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the Gospel. Aboriginal guilt, predestination, (ante praevisa merita), the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of vessels of wrath, and so on. All of these odious and incoherent dogmatic motifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have been ascribed to Paul. And yet, each and every one of them, not only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul's proclamation of Christ's triumph and of God's purpose in election, but is something like their perfect inversion. Well, isn't that interesting? Because we already know that the archons represent the inversions of the Aeons of the Pleroma. And so, although Hart doesn't realize he's implying this, to say that what has come down to us in Christian tradition through Augustine is the perfect inversion of what Paul was actually saying about universal salvation, which means, by definition, that it's the demiurgic or the archonic version of salvation. Isn't that interesting? I mean, that is what I have been implying, that what has been taken to be Christian tradition for the last couple of thousand years is actually a diminishment of the power of Christ and the power and love of the Father. By saying that people can be lost and condemned to eternal torture, that is sacrilegious to me. That is the heresy. And that is what Hart is saying here. He goes on to say on page 133, This is all fairly odd, really. Paul's argument in those chapters is not difficult to follow. What preoccupies him from beginning to end is the agonizing mystery that the Messiah of Israel has come, and yet so few of the children of the house of Israel have accepted the fact, even while so many from outside the covenant have. And Paul wonders, how is the promised Messiah rejected by so many, yet so many outside the temple walls have accepted the Messiah? There are far more Christians than there are Jews at the moment. Why is that? Paul was wondering. Hart says, Paul's is not an abstract question regarding which individual human beings are the saved and which are the damned. In fact, by the end of the argument, the former category, [that is the saved], proves to be vastly larger than that of the elect or the called, while the latter category, [that is the damned], makes no appearance at all. Jumping down the page, he says, “so then what if,” so now he's going to go ahead and quote Paul here, Romans 9:19, Paul says, So then what if God should show his power by preserving vessels suitable only for wrath, keeping them solely for destruction, in order to provide an instructive counterpoint to the riches of the glory he lavishes on vessels prepared for mercy, whom he has called from among the Jews and the Gentiles alike. For as it happens, rather than offering a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form, at the very brink of despair. He does not stop there, however, because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It is so obviously preposterous, in fact, that a wholly different solution must be sought, one that makes sense and that will not require the surrender either of Paul's reason or of his confidence in God's righteousness. Hence, contrary to his own warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God's justice, and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the provisional answer, the vessels of wrath hypothesis, altogether, so as to reach a completely different and far more glorious conclusion—God blesses everyone. Romans 10: 11, 12. And by the way, in Gnostic gospel, we would say the law is actually the Demiurge's rules for human behavior, because our self-will makes us otherwise uncontrollable. Because to the Father above, the only law is love. When we act out of love, all else follows. Going on, Hart says, As for the believing remnant of Israel, [Romans 11:5], it turns out that they have been elected not as the limited number of the saved within Israel, but as the earnest through which all of Israel will be saved. They are waiting for the Anointed to come and take the place of the King of Israel, King of the Jews. King of the Jews is one of the titles of the Messiah. That means the capstone of their pleroma. You see? It's all of these pyramidal shapes that are first designed up there in the Fullness of God, the pleroma. What Paul is saying is that the Jews that are in the pleroma of Israel, it's their remnant that makes them holy. It's their remnant that is the spiritual part, the higher part, the called part, the elect part of the pleroma of the nation of the Hebrews. And it is through those elect that all of the Jews will be saved, ultimately. Hart says, For the time being, true, a part of Israel is hardened, but this will remain the case only until the ”full entirety” [that is the pleroma] of the Gentiles enter in. The unbelievers among the children of Israel may have been allowed to stumble, but God will never allow them to fall. Hart's just saying that Israel's reluctance or slowness to believing that Jesus is the Messiah is just slowing down the progress of history to give everyone else a chance to catch up to it. Quoting Hart again, We're in Romans now, 11:11. This then is the radiant answer dispelling the shadows of Paul's grim what if in the ninth chapter of Romans. It's clarion negative. It turns out that there is no final illustrative division between the vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy. That was a grotesque, all too human thought that can now be chased away for good. God's wisdom far surpasses ours, and his love can accomplish all that it intends. “He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone.” [That's Romans 11:32.] All are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy. . . That Paul's great attempt to demonstrate that God's election is not some arbitrary act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons, has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite literally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths explicitly to reject. . . Yet this is still not my principal point. I want to say something far more radical. I want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim, but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that make us who and what we are. Oh, this is a very interesting portion. Okay, listen to this. Jumping to page 149. No soul is who or what it is in isolation, and no soul's sufferings can be ignored without the sufferings of a potentially limitless number of other souls being ignored as well. And so it seems if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell. But Christians are obliged, it seems clear, to take seriously the eschatological imagery of scripture. And there all talk of salvation involves the promise of a corporate beatitude, a kingdom of love and knowledge, a wedding feast, a city of the redeemed, the body of Christ, which means that the hope Christians cherish must in some way involve the preservation of whatever is deepest in and most essential to personality rather than a perfect escape from personality. But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances. They are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves. And then Hart summons up the idea of a single recurrent image, he says, That of a parent whose beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who remains a parent nevertheless, and therefore keeps and cherishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delightful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that damaged soul. Is all of that, those memories, those anxieties and delights, those feelings of desperate love, really to be consigned to the fire as just so much combustible chaff? Must it all be forgotten or willfully ignored for heaven to enter into that parent's soul? And if so, is this not the darkest tragedy ever composed? And is God not then a tragedian utterly merciless in his poetic omnipotence? Who or what is that being whose identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child? [Skipping to page 153] Personhood as such is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing. And it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not an action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller or a retreat into a more impoverished existence. And so, as I said in my first meditation, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances. A person is first and foremost a limitless capacity, a place where the all shows itself with a special inflection. We exist as the place of the other, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Certainly, this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection. That we must rise from the dead to be saved is a claim not simply about resumed corporeality, whatever that might turn out to be, but more crucially, about the fully restored existence of the person as socially, communally, corporately constituted. Each person is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ. Well, that's pretty neat. See, we are nested fractal hierarchies of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. And if you've been with me a while, you know what that long and complicated sentence means. Picture a pyramidal shape, picture every living part of your body as building up the pyramid, and your conscious self is the capstone of that pleroma that makes up your body. Now, you are then nested along with all other humans into the pleroma of humanity, the body of humanity, also called the body of Adam. Just the way our cells nest up into building us, we nest up into building the great body of humanity. And then, Hart is saying this body of humanity exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ, because when we then nest up and make Christ the king of our pleroma, we are nested into the Fullness of Christ. And that is what the final salvation resting point is. When we all finally pass through the final judgment and nest up into Christ, then we're all nested up into the pleroma, we're all nested up into the Son. And there we are. And we will still have our lives the way the Fullness has their lives. They dream together as one of paradise. And that's where we're headed. Hart says, Our personhood must truly consist not only in the immediate love of those close at hand, but also in our disposition toward those whom we, by analogy, care for from afar. Or even in the abstract, for the most essential law of charity, of love, when it is truly active, is that it must inexorably grow beyond all immediately discernible boundaries in order to be fulfilled and to continue to be active. And all of those in whom each of us is implicated, and who are implicated in each of us, are themselves in turn implicated and intertwined in countless others, and on and on without limit. We belong of necessity to an indissoluble co-inherence of souls. And I think that down here on the physical level, on the material plane, the demiurgic version of that shared coherence of all souls together is quantum entanglement. That's the Demiurge's material version of how we are implicated and intertwined with every other soul. And now he goes on to say something that's very Gnostic. On the next page, Hart says, There may be within each of us—indeed there surely is—that divine spark, that divine light or spark of nous or spirit or atman that is the abiding presence of God in us, the place of radical sustaining divine imminence, nearer to me than my inmost parts. But that light is the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existence, in and with one another. Oh, hey, there it is. That's what I'm always saying. This one spark, that's what we call the big S Self. And the particularity of our personal existence is what we here at Gnostic Insights label as our Ego. So we are made up of the Self that we share with all others and that we share with the Son, but we are also our own individual existence. That's why we can't just blink out into nothingness and not be missed, because we have our particularity, and it has its own place in the hierarchy. Then Hart says, But then this is to say that either all persons must be saved or that none can be. [He says,] God could, of course, erase each of the elect as whoever they once were by shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of hell and then raise up some other being in each of their places, thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of the loves that made him or her this person, associations and attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. If that were the case, only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal destiny, tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether. [Jumping to 157, he says], I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If then anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. . . For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair, and hence the love that has made all of us who we are and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone. Amen. And that's the end of the third meditation. Now the fourth meditation, we just don't even have time to get to. It's called, What is Freedom? And if you want to hear the fourth meditation in depth, please text me in the comments and ask for more David Bentley Hart That All Shall Be Saved. But as for now, this treatise on what is freedom? I'll actually just jump to the last page and skip all of the explanations. The fourth meditation, What is Freedom? is all about free will. I guess I'll include it in some future episode about free will and just quote Hart extensively in that episode. But to close it out, Hart says, It would make no sense to suggest that God, who is by nature not only the source of being, but also the good and the true and the beautiful and everything else that makes spirits exist as rational beings, would truly be all in all if the consummation of all things were to eventuate merely in a kind of extrinsic divine supremacy over creation. But God is not a god, [or as we would say, the God Above All Gods is not the Demiurge, is how we would put it in Gnostic terms]. And his final victory, as described in scripture, will consist not merely in his assumption of perfect supremacy over all, but also in his ultimately being all in all. Could there then be a final state of things in which God is all in all, while yet there existed rational creatures whose inward worlds consisted in an eternal rejection of and rebellion against God as the sole and consuming and fulfilling end of the rational will's most essential nature? If this fictive and perverse interiority were to persist into eternity, would God's victory over every sphere of being really be complete? Or would that small miserable residual flicker of Promethean defiance remain forever as the one space in creation from which God has been successfully expelled? Surely it would, so it too must pass away. All right, that ends this long episode, because I was trying to wrap up the entire book, which I almost did. Write to me, tell me what you think of this sort of thing. I'd especially like to hear from people who used to be Christians, or who were raised in the church, and who fell away from the church because of some of these very problems and conundrums that we've been talking about for the last four episodes. God bless us all, and onward and upward! If you find these gnostic insights meaningful, please donate to the cause. Cyd pays for these podcasts out of her retirement money, and the well is running dry. If I am to keep this up, I need your financial assistance as well as your good company. I thank my (very few) paid subscibers from the bottom of my heart to the top of my pleroma. Please help. 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
Greg sits down with local Gnostics, Taber and Jake, to discuss the intricacies of modern gnosticism and alternative modes of Christianity.
Sat Nam Sovereign Sister! If you feel like you don't know who you are, it's not because your Soul is missing. It's because your nervous system is running an inherited survival program that has distorted the field where your Soul expresses itself. In this episode, we break down false identity from generational trauma through two lenses: Kundalini Yoga Therapy (energy signal + electromagnetic field repair) and Jesus / A Course in Miracles (holiness as lived experience, not self-improvement).You'll learn why trauma doesn't only live in memories, it can create a rupture where intrusive patterns take over:The Gnostics called these distortions archons (ruling forces of fear, shame, confusion).Carl Jung described a similar reality as autonomous complexes—parts that can run your mind like a separate agenda.And here's the thing: if you treat this like a mindset problem, you'll keep blaming yourself.If you understand it as just a moment of nervous system dysregulation + inherited survival + a scrambled signal, you can actually repair it so inherited survival patterns stops getting passed down.Inside this episode, we cover:-Why identity confusion shows up as “I'm too much / not enough / I'm broken / I can't trust myself / I don't belong” from an energetic perspective -How trauma changes breath, heart rhythm, brain signaling, and your whole sense of self from the perspective of Carl Jung's, Gnosticism, Kundalin Yoga Therapy, Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and science -What “closing the gate” really means (without fear, without fighting energy)-Why devotion + meditation strengthens your inner sanctuary so you stop being recruitable by guilt-ACIM Lesson 109: “I rest in God.” (rest as identity restoration) as a way to close the gate If you're a first-time cycle breaker, your permission is this:You are not crazy. You are not weak. Your Soul is not broken.Your system can be retrained and your healing reaches seven generations before and after you.If this lands, drop a comment: What false identity has tried to rule your life?Like, subscribe, and share this with a sister who's been saying, “I don't feel like myself anymore.”✨ Join the Sovereign Sisterhood Sanctuary for first time generational cycle breakers (Kundalini Yoga Therapy + ACIM spiritual psychotherapy):
In the early centuries of Church history as well as in our day, many cults and false teachings have denied either the full deity or the full humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Groups such as the Arians taught that Jesus was merely God's highest created being, while the Gnostics believed that he was divine and only appeared to be human. What does the Bible teach about the deity and the humanity of Jesus Christ? Find out on Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/791/29?v=20251111
Send us a textThis podcast continues Paul's defense of the deity of Jesus proving to the Gnostics that Jesus is God and not some being lower than the angels. Paul, a prisoner in Rome, sends others to deliver his letter in hopes the Colossians will wake up to the false teaching being presented by false gnostics. If this continued the gospel message would be in jeopardy. Listen to hear Paul's powerful message. Support the show
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...
Today, we take a closer look at Gnosticism. We'll explore the dramatic discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, the unique divine family of the Gnostics, the story of Sophia and Yaldabaoth, and their different perspective on Jesus… Welcome to Religion Camp!
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
Please enjoy these new 28 soul songs for December 2025! It's time to color more magic and music in the world. These soul songs are found in my December 2025 ~ Part 2 video. They aim to inspire you throughout the Holiday Season as well as to empower your rising Divine Creative Hero/Heroine in changing times.Song titles in December 2025 Holiday Playlist include: Higher Ground, Lanterns In The Storm, Shine On, The Knower's Flame, The Garden We Never Left, We Are The Ark, Endings & Beginnings, Higher Ground 2, Awakening Light, The Light of Gnosis, Eve The Knower, Ending & Beginnings 2, We Are The Ark, Home In Our Sacred Soul Songs, Tis The Season, Home For The Holidays, Journey Home, Unity Star, Light A Candle, Light The Flame, Mother Mary - The Light You Are, Mother Mary - Christ Light, The Ark You Are, The True Ark, The True Ark 2, The True Ark Calls, The True Ark Calls 2, & Exponential Rising (2026). Songs like these can elevate our frequencies ~ empowering us to rise every day, consciously create, and make a positive impact in the world. Thank you for joining me and please share with others who could use some inspiration today!You can find me on Substack (my main hub now for all of my messages) through these links:https://frequencywriter.com/https://frequencywriter.substack.com/For more information about life/soul coaching with me, or to contact me, please email me: info@frequencywriter.comYou can find me on other Social Media platforms here:X: https://x.com/marie_mohlerFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/wholesoulmasteryYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@colorthemagicRumble.com: https://rumble.com/c/c-353585Telegram: https://t.me/wholesoulmasteryTruth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@frequencywriter* For educational purposes only.Support the show
Please enjoy these 13 new inspirational soul songs for November 2025. It's time to color more magic and music in the world. These soul songs are found in my November 2025 ~ Part 2 video. They aim to inspire your rising Divine Creative Hero/Heroine in changing times.Song titles in November 2025 - Playlist include: Days Like These, Be The Light, Knowers In November, Eve's Spark, Echoes of Before, Echoes of the Master, Breathe Deep, Ascension Colors, Fly Star Seeds Fly, Sophia's Song for Humanity, Rise and Echo, Soul Echoes, and Remember November. Songs like these can elevate our frequencies ~ empowering us to rise in our daily lives, consciously create, and make a positive impact in the world. Thank you for joining me and please share with others who could use some inspiration today!You can find me on Substack (my main hub now for all of my messages) through these links:https://frequencywriter.com/https://frequencywriter.substack.com/For more information about life/soul coaching with me, or to contact me, please email me: info@frequencywriter.comYou can find me on other Social Media platforms here:X: https://x.com/marie_mohlerFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/wholesoulmasteryYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@colorthemagicRumble.com: https://rumble.com/c/c-353585Telegram: https://t.me/wholesoulmasteryTruth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@frequencywriter* For educational purposes only.Support the show
An exclusive Patreon/AB Prime show is now public. I was thrilled to chat with the amazing Ryan Bledsoe on a variety of topics. We started with his incredible journey. Then he shared his ideas on the astral vibe of the Gnostics, Extraterrestrial, and the White Lady. We got in the weeds on the Cathars, Fatima, ancient spiritual offworlders, and alien gods. Check out my interview on his podcast as a nice, heretical complement. More on Ryan: https://www.bledsoesaidso.com/ Get The Occult Elvis: https://amzn.to/4jnTjE4 Virtual Alexandria Academy: https://thegodabovegod.com/virtual-alexandria-academy/ Gnostic Tarot Readings: https://thegodabovegod.com/gnostic-tarot-reading/ The Gnostic Tarot: https://www.makeplayingcards.com/sell/synkrasis Homepage: https://thegodabovegod.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aeonbyte AB Prime: https://thegodabovegod.com/members/subscription-levels/ Voice Over services: https://thegodabovegod.com/voice-talent/ Support with donation: https://buy.stripe.com/00g16Q8RK8D93mw288 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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.
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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
Gnosticism is one of the most confusing and enigmatic early Christian groups, whose beliefs were considered secret knowledge meant only for a select few. Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman answers my questions about what Gnostics thought about Jesus - where he came from, what he was doing on earth, and whether or not he was divine.
Human beings have always prided themselves on the advantage gained from possessing knowledge that others lack. We boast of being smarter, more informed, more enlightened—as if we were the elite guardians of some secret insight reserved for our sect, our institution, or our circle. Whether the advantage lies in religious doctrine, education, status, political ideology, or modern technology, it always devolves into the same pattern: insiders against outsiders, the few who “know” against the many who do not.From ancient cults, esoteric associations, and manufactured religions (steeped in symbols wrongly appropriated from sacred texts) to modern marketing campaigns promising the “secret to success,” humanity's obsession with exclusive knowledge endures. Yet all of it is vanity—corruption and folly dressed as wisdom. Whether through ritual, ideology, or playground-style cliques, every claim to possess hidden knowledge and to exercise control over others is sublime vanity, doomed to folly.There is only one source of knowledge—the Father of all—and he alone is the fountain of might, power, and strength. Scripture repeats this warning at every turn, and when human beings ignore it, all things collapse in ruin. The arrogant, trusting in themselves, gleefully amplify human chaos in opposition to him, emboldened by misguided self-confidence.Indeed, their knowledge springs from self-importance, and their strength from oppression. In their false eschaton, the work of men's hands turns to dust, even as the God of Abraham remains—ever present, all-knowing, all-wise, and all-powerful. Moreover, as Matthew wrote, this God stands as the enemy of those among them who invoke his name, “Lord, Lord.”But Yahweh, our Elohim, is always in control despite the schemes of Baal's followers who deceive the devout who have fallen for the institutions he destroys.“For they plan, and God plans; and God is the best of planners.”وَمَكَرُوا وَمَكَرَ اللَّهُ، وَاللَّهُ خَيْرُ الْمَاكِرِينَwa-makarū wa-makara llāhu, wa-llāhu khayru l-mākirīn(Qurʾan, Surat Āl ʿImrān سورة آل عمران “The Family of Imran” 3:54)Every time the human being seizes power or claims insight as his own, the result is the same: pride, decay, and judgment. Yet each collapse becomes Elohim's opportunity to remind us of his immutable sovereignty. He alone commands and restores. As it is written by Paul's right hand:“God is not mocked.” (Galatians 6:7)His wisdom is not ours to possess, let alone to control or co-opt. His dominion is written into the fabric of creation itself. The heavens do not father the earth; both submit to the patriarchy of the one God of Abraham, the Master of all things.This is the reality encoded in Scriptural grammar and function and fulfilled in the obedience of Jesus. It is the recognition that knowledge and strength proceed only from God's command, which has the power to heal even Israel.This week, I discuss Luke 8:46.“ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν· Ἥψατό μού τις, ἐγὼ γὰρ ἔγνων (י-ד-ע) δύναμιν (ח-י-ל) ἐξεληλυθυῖαν ἀπʼ ἐμοῦ.”“But Jesus said, ‘Someone did touch me, for I was aware [ἔγνων (egnon) / י־ד־ע (yod–dalet–ʿayin)] that power [δύναμιν (dynamin) / ח־י־ל (ḥet–yod–lamed)] had gone out of me.'”(Luke 8:46)γινώσκω (ginosko) / י-ד-ע (yod–dalet–ʿayin) / ع-ر-ف (ʿayn–rāʾ–fāʾ)In its scriptural itinerary, יָדַע (yadaʿ) functions as relational recognition rooted in revelation and obedience. Gnostics invert this by treating knowledge as an object of possession: a secret commodity that grants status or liberation to a spiritual elite.The Itinerary of Knowledge“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew [וַיֵּדְעוּ (wayyedaʿu)] that they were naked.” (Genesis 3:7)When Adam and Eve transgress the divine command, their eyes are “opened,” and י-ד-ע (yod–dalet–ʿayin) marks the moment of realization. They do not gain divine insight; they recognize their separation and vulnerability.“You shall know [וִידַעְתֶּם (widaʿtem)] that I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.” (Exodus 6:7)In Egypt, Yahweh assured deliverance. Israel will know him as the mighty one who was victorious against the elite rulers who burdened his people. Knowledge comes through divine encounter (in this case, remembrance at the opportune time) and obedience, not human speculation.“Then they shall know [וְיָדְעוּ (weyadeʿu)] that I am Yahweh.” (Ezekiel 6:7)The same Yahweh declares judgment upon Israel for their idolatry. Weyadeʿu means that through destruction and exile—the opportune time—through divine encounter, the people will come to recognize his immutable sovereignty.“The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge [דַּעַת (daʿat)].” (Proverbs 1:7)Wisdom begins not in self-referential discovery but in submission. Daʿat, י-ד-ע (yod–dalet–ʿayin), denotes divine instruction. It is submission to God's ordering of creation that begins with fear, that is, reverent submission to his command.“But Jesus said, ‘Someone did touch me, for I was aware [ἔγνων (egnon)] that power had gone out of me.'” (Luke 8:46)When the woman touches Jesus' garment, ἔγνων (egnon) expresses not psychological awareness but recognition of divine power at work. In Genesis 3:7, Adam and Eve know [wayyedaʿu] only after breaking the divine command. What they perceive is separation, not illumination. In Exodus 6:7, Israel knows [widaʿtem] Yahweh because at the opportune time, they remember his act of deliverance; the exiles know [weyadeʿu] Yahweh through judgment. In every case, knowledge is not a self-referential human discovery but an encounter with God's judgment. Even in Proverbs 1:7, daʿat signifies not human moral or ethical insight but awareness of divine instruction grounded in reverent fear.When Jesus knows that power has gone out from him (Luke 8:46), the same dynamic unfolds: divine initiative, human encounter, recognition, and restoration. The “knowing” is God-referential. It is an acknowledgment of divine operation rather than an act of introspection.This same itinerary and literary pattern continues in the Qurʾan, where the Arabic triliteral root ع-ر-ف (ʿayn–rāʾ–fāʾ) appears frequently. Its core function is to know, recognize, acknowledge, or make known. It parallels the Hebrew י-ד-ע (yod–dalet–ʿayin) and the Greek γινώσκω (ginosko) in expressing knowledge as submission to God rather than human possession.“And say, ‘All praise be to God! He will show you his signs, and you will recognize them [فَتَعْرِفُونَهَا (fa-taʿrifūnahā)]. And your Lord is never unaware of what you do.'” (Qurʾan, Surat al-Naml سورة النمل “The Ant” 27:93)The Prophet is commanded to proclaim divine praise. God will reveal his آيَات (āyāt, “signs”), and humans will recognize them. تَعْرِفُونَهَا
Friends of the Rosary,Today, October 28, we celebrate the feast day of two great apostles: St. Jude Thaddeus and St. Simon the ZealotSt. Jude Thaddeus, brother of St. James the Lesser, preached the Gospel in Judea, Samaria, Idumaea, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Libya. He suffered martyrdom in Armenia, which was then under Persian rule.He is the author of an epistle (letter) to the Churches of the East, in particular the Jewish converts, directed against the heresies of the Simonians, Nicolaites, and Gnostics.St. Jude was the one who asked Jesus at the Last Supper why He would not manifest Himself to the whole world after His resurrection.He is invoked as the patron of desperate, forgotten, and lost situations and causes because his New Testament letter stresses that the faithful should persevere in the environment of harsh, difficult circumstances, just as their forefathers had done before them.Every image of him depicts him wearing a medallion with a profile of Jesus.Saint Jude Thaddeus is not the same person as Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Our Lord and despaired because of his great sin and lack of trust in God's mercy.St. Simon, who had been called a Zealot, is thought to have preached in Egypt and then to have joined St. Jude in Persia. Here, he was supposedly martyred by being cut in half with a saw, a tool he is often depicted with.Today, we also celebrate the Fourth Anniversary of the departure for the glory of heaven of Maria Blanca, co-founder of the Rosary Network, along with Mikel A. Ave Maria!Come, Holy Spirit, come!To Jesus through Mary!Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.Please give us the grace to respond with joy!+ Mikel Amigot w/ María Blanca | RosaryNetwork.com, New YorkEnhance your faith with the new Holy Rosary University app:Apple iOS | New! Android Google Play• October 28, 2025, Today's Rosary on YouTube | Daily broadcast at 7:30 pm ET
Tim Hogan joins us for a deep chat about the Templars and Freemasons, and the time we are in and the secrets coming out. We chat about true alchemy, making Manna, The arks as powerful artifacts, gothic manuscripts, the Templars bringing back esoteric knowledge to the West, gothic cathedrals, Atlantis, Egypt, Moses and Akhenaten, granite temples, ley lines and making monoatomic Gold and platinum based metal tinctures. In the second half we get into how the ancients worked with Granite using these processes, Cyclopean architecture, the Gnostics, Sophia, Atlas and seeding the planet with ancient myths, ancient and modern UAP's, levitation, the Rose Cross, and the American revolutionary war funded by Templars, and how you can become a Templar. Timothy Hogan is an author and lecturer within the Western Mystery school tradition. He is a Past Master within several different spiritual traditions, including many bodies in Freemasonry (AF&AM) and of Rosicrucian lineages. He is a Grand Master for multiple Knight Templar lineages https://www.youtube.com/@timothyhogan5494 https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B006QH94T4 https://neurobuddha.wordpress.com/ https://www.templarcollegia.org/ https://www.youtube.com/@TemplarTravelTours To gain access to the second half of show and our Plus feed for audio and podcast please clink the link http://www.grimericaoutlawed.ca/support. For second half of video (when applicable and audio) go to our Substack and Subscribe. https://grimericaoutlawed.substack.com/ or to our Locals https://grimericaoutlawed.locals.com/ or Rokfin www.Rokfin.com/Grimerica Patreon https://www.patreon.com/grimericaoutlawed Support the show directly: https://grimericacbd.com/ CBD / THC Tinctures and Gummies https://grimerica.ca/support-2/ Eh-List Podcast and site: https://eh-list.ca/ Eh-List YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheEh-List Our Adultbrain Audiobook Podcast and Website: www.adultbrain.ca Our Audiobook Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@adultbrainaudiobookpublishing/videos Darren's book www.acanadianshame.ca Check out our next trip/conference/meetup - Contact at the Cabin www.contactatthecabin.com Other affiliated shows: www.grimerica.ca The OG Grimerica Show www.Rokfin.com/Grimerica Our channel on free speech Rokfin Join the chat / hangout with a bunch of fellow Grimericans Https://t.me.grimerica grimerica.ca/chats Discord Leave a review on iTunes and/or Stitcher: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/grimerica-outlawed http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/grimerica-outlawed Sign up for our newsletter http://www.grimerica.ca/news SPAM Graham = and send him your synchronicities, feedback, strange experiences and psychedelic trip reports!! graham@grimerica.com InstaGRAM https://www.instagram.com/the_grimerica_show_podcast/ Purchase swag, with partial proceeds donated to the show www.grimerica.ca/swag Send us a postcard or letter http://www.grimerica.ca/contact/ ART - Napolean Duheme's site http://www.lostbreadcomic.com/ MUSIC Tru Northperception, Felix's Site sirfelix.bandcamp.com
If you enjoy this episode, we're sure you will enjoy more content like this on The Occult Rejects. In fact, we have curated playlists on occult topics like grimoires, esoteric concepts and phenomena, occult history, analyzing true crime and cults with an occult lens, Para politics, and occultism in music. Whether you enjoy consuming your content visually or via audio, we've got you covered - and it will always be provided free of charge. So, if you enjoy what we do and want to support our work of providing accessible, free content on various platforms, please consider making a donation to the links provided below. Thank you and enjoy the episode!Links For The Occult Rejects and The Spiritual Gangsters https://linktr.ee/theoccultrejectsOccult Research Institutehttps://www.occultresearchinstitute.org/Cash Apphttps://cash.app/$theoccultrejectsVenmo@TheOccultRejectsBuy Me A Coffeebuymeacoffee.com/TheOccultRejectsPatreonhttps://www.patreon.com/TheOccultRejectsEvents The Occult Rejects will be atOctober 18th - Charlies Beyond Belief at Tropical Lodge 56 F & AM Fort Myers, FLhttps://www.charliesbeyond.com/October 25-26, ARKANSAS PARANORMAL EXPO,at 503 East Ninth, Little Rock, ARhttps://www.arkansasparanormalexpo.com/Events The Occult Rejects will be atOctober 18th - Charlies Beyond Belief at Tropical Lodge 56 F & AM Fort Myers, FLhttps://www.charliesbeyond.com/October 25-26, ARKANSAS PARANORMAL EXPO at 503 East Ninth, Little Rock, ARhttps://www.arkansasparanormalexpo.com/
Oliver is a Wisdom Keeper, Writer, Storyteller, Teacher and Sacred Site Guide. Currently deepening his connection to the Land and Mysteries of Ancient Wales whilst writing his first book. He is on a soul mission to bring back lost Mystery School Wisdom and Initiations from the Druids, Gnostics and a lost Celtic Christianity. Oliver is also a scholar specializing in the life and story of ‘Joseph of Arimathea'; who was an Uncle, mentor to Yeshua, guardian and protector to Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary.He is a passionate teacher for the ancient language of Aramaic spoken by Yeshua and the Essenes. Oliver has over ten years of experience in holding land based retreats all over the world, specializing in the unification of the Gnostic and Druidic Mysteries of Avalon (Glastonbury) and Cymru (Wales). He has the rare ability to take you on an adventure uniting the worlds of Spiritual Initiation, Historical Knowledge and the Wisdom of Nature. Guiding individuals and groups through sacred journeys. Oliver weaves together sacred stories, ceremonies and teachings long forgotten from the Gnostics and Druids. Helping you remember and reconnect to the ancestral magic of the land and the stories of its holy history.This episode covers the the following topics:Celtic ChristianityJoseph of ArimatheaAramaic languageMary MagdaleneMother MaryPilgrimage GnosticismVisit Oliver's website: https://www.thegnosticdruid.com/Oliver's Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/ My Law of Positivism Healing Oracle Card Deck:https://www.lawofpositivism.com/healingoracle.htmlMy book The Law of Positivism – Live a life of higher vibrations, love and gratitude:https://www.lawofpositivism.com/book.html My readings and healing sessions:https://www.lawofpositivism.com/offerings.htmlVisit Law of Positivism:https://www.instagram.com/lawofpositivism/Website: https://www.lawofpositivism.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawofpositivism/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/lawofpositivismTikTok: www.tiktok.com/@lawofpositivism
Missionary Evangelist and Pastor Robert Breaker talks about the modern battle over the biblical doctrine of "Faith in the Blood," and how there are many today who say you don't have to know about it or believe in it. He further shows how Unitarians and Gnostics are historically the ones who have been against it, and deny the blood atonement of Jesus Christ.
This week we're diving into the beliefs of the ancient Gnostics. Were we created by the Demiurge and not a loving God? Are there trickster Archons persuading us to stay stuck in a cycle of birth, death and rebirth? What can the beliefs of the Gnostics teach us today?Thanks for listening! If you enjoy the show, please tell a friend, subscribe, rate and leave us a kind review.Don't forget to join our community on Facebook by searching Psychic Teachers. If you have a question or story to share with us, send us an email at psychicteachers@gmail.com. For more information on us, check out our websites: debbowen.com and samanthafey.com.You can also find Samantha on Instagram @samanthaofey. If you want to pre-order Deb's book, go to debbowen.com or (if outside the US), check out clairegelder.com Signed copies of Samantha's book Heavenly Alliance and The Awake Dreamer are available at samanthafey.com. Be sure to check out Samantha's other podcast Enlightened Empaths. Have a great week. Be the Light!