Episodes

  • Is the Gnostic Son of God the same as the Biblical Son of God

    Is the Gnostic Son of God the same as the Biblical Son of God
    Mar 23 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I would like to compare the Son from the Bible to the Son of the Tripartite Tractate. A couple of days ago, I was listening to a radio preacher who was railing against people like me and you who are trying to understand Christianity in its most fundamental sense—the original Christianity of the first 300 years after Jesus talked about himself and the Father and Heaven. I want you to realize that the last thing I want to be is a “false prophet” or a “false teacher.” And, of course, that’s what he was railing against. And he said that the only way you can be sure that you’re not falling into heresy and going to hell is if you follow Orthodox Christianity as presented in the Bible. So, I thought it would be interesting to look at a very important passage in the New Testament that talks about the Son of God, and to compare the Son of God of the New Testament to the Son of God of ancient Christian, what we could call, Gnosticism. But I think it was actual Christianity before the Pope and the Emperor of Rome changed it to become a means of wielding power and keeping the people under their control. Well, if you’ve listened to many of the episodes here at Gnostic Insights or to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, you will see that some of the terms that we use, although they sound like the same exact terms, have different meanings. And this was something else that the radio preacher pointed out—Oh, don’t believe them when they talk about the Son or the Christ or God the Father, because that isn’t the God, the Christ, and the Son that we know, he said. And that’s the tragedy of the situation, because there is only one originating source. There is only one Father by definition, and I often talk about that. The Son in this Gnostic Christianity that I’m presenting is the first encapsulation or the first breakout. It’s the first emanation of the Father. The Father, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, stretched himself out, and it was this stretching out that is the Son that made a space for the heavens and the cosmos and the Earth and all of creation to unfold. Here’s what it says in the Tripartite Tractate, part one, verse 64. It says, “The Father, in accordance with his exalted position over the Totalities”… let’s stop here a minute before we go further. The Totalities are also called the Aeons of the Aeons. The Totalities, what I generally call the ALL, and I use capital letters to show that this is a particular type of entity; it’s not just a word like the totality of God. No, the Totality, the Totalities, the ALL, is the Son’s complete Self. He wears them like a cloak and they wear him like a cloak. They are, in other words, coexistent. Just like yourself, if someone sees you and they say, Oh, there’s Mary, right? Well, Mary’s not just a big giant thing. Just like the Son isn’t just the Son. When you see Mary, you see she has brown hair and she is a 5 feet tall and she it looks like this, she has two arms, two legs. She’s got all of this within her. That’s the Totality of Mary. So, Mary’s right foot would be one of the Totalities of Mary. You see what I’m trying to say? So, the Totalities of the Son is a place and it’s an entity, and they all are together in one unity. As the Son is a unity, the Totalities are the Son’s unity, although they’re all broken out and distinguished. But they don’t realize themselves because they sit in perfect coexistence with the Son, who is a unity. So, back to reading from the Tripartite Tractate. It says, “The Father, in accordance with his exalted position over the Totalities, being an unknown and incomprehensible one, has such greatness and magnitude, that, if he had revealed himself suddenly, quickly, to all the exalted ones among the Aeons who had come forth from him, they would have perished.” So, the Father couldn’t reveal himself in all of his greatness, because they would just burst. They would explode because they can’t fit him in. So the Father always held back his true incomprehensibility. He held it back because the Totalities and Aeons could not comprehend it. He held it back in order to protect them. It says, “if he had revealed himself suddenly, quickly, to all the exalted ones among the Aeons and those of the Totalities who had come forth from him, they would have perished. Therefore, he withheld his power and his inexhaustibility within that in which he is.” And we’re talking about the Father. What is, that in which the Father is? because the Father is everything. He’s the ground state, so he can’t reside in something else. Nothing came before him. He doesn’t exist within something. But what has all the Father in it? That’s the Son. That’s the encapsulation. That’s the monad. That’s the bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. The bucket is the Son. Inside the bucket it’s the same exact character of God the Father, but it...
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    25 mins
  • Gnostic Easter—He and We Are Risen!

    Gnostic Easter—He and We Are Risen!
    Mar 29 2024
    The Son, The Christ, and Jesus Explained Welcome back to Gnostic Insights, and Happy Easter! Last week, we spoke about the characteristics of the Son of God and whether the Son of the Gnostic faith is the same as the Son of the Christian faith. And my answer was, Yes, definitely it is, and Well, there are some differences. You may wish to back up to last week’s episode to listen to that in-depth discussion of the Gnostic Son compared to the Christian Son. Today, we’re going to look at some of those differences. And then, stay tuned until the end of this episode for an Easter message from me to you. Now, when the scriptures say that the Son is “the only begotten Son of the Father,” this means that the Son is the only consciousness to have emerged directly from the Father. All other units of consciousness emanate from the Son. The Tripartite Tractate says, “Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no one else and the one apart from whom there is no other unbegotten one, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no other and after whom no other Son exists. Therefore, he is a first born and an only one. First born because no one exists before him, and only Son because no one is after him.” That’s from verse 57 of the Tripartite Tractate. And, because he carries all of the characteristics of the Father, as soon as the Son emanated from within the Father, the Son began to generate offspring of his own. And so the Son became a Father. And the immediate generation of the Son is called the Totalities of the ALL, which are coexistent with the Son. And then the Totalities gave glory to the Father and the Son, and in their giving of glory they generated their own emanations. And those are called the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And these Aeons of the Fullness became self aware, and they sorted themselves into a hierarchy based upon position, rank, duties, or jobs. They all had names, so therefore they had an ego. Each Aeons has an ego, whereas the Totalities have no ego—their consciousness is entirely subsumed to the Son. And the Aeons continued to generate more emanations of the Spirit of God. When the Aeons look upon each other with love and devotion, and the Father and the glory reflected through them, their union produces another Aeon, and that’s how Aeons procreate—have babies, so to speak. The Third Glory that is the offspring of the Aeons, “was produced in accordance with the free will and the power they had been born with, enabling them to give glory in unison, while at the same time independently of one another according to the will of each.” That’s verse 69 of the Tripartite. So the Fullness of God is not just a one and done thing. They continue to emanate units of consciousness called the Third Glory. Now, in the cosmogeny or cosmology of Gnostic Christianity, the original Christianity, the Aeons continued to produce their own generation of offspring until all combinations, all possible, infinite combinations, of Aeons were produced. The final Aeon was named Logos, and he carried fractal images of all the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. He was a package, a fractal package, of the entire Fullness. And here is when we have the Fall. When Logos tried to reunite with the Father and produce the world—produce the Paradise that they had all been dreaming of—all by himself, without the Fullness because he could do it. He had all of the characteristics. But instead, he fell because it was unauthorized. The other Fullnesses were not joined in giving glory with him, and so the Fall produces our material existence here, down below. And then, once he fell, Logos split into two and what’s called the best part of Logos—that would be his one true Self that reflects the Fullness—fled back up into the Fullness and his ego stayed behind. The ego of the fallen Aeon did not remember the Fullness, did not remember the Father, or the Son. Didn’t remember anything that came before. That’s why the Demiurge is called the amnesiac God. He did, however, still contain all of the patterns and blueprints for Paradise, but without the life and love flowing down through the Son, through the Father, into him. That is why the material is dense and heavy. It’s not ethereal anymore. It has heft and weight to it, and we can’t pass through objects because we are no longer ethereal. I say we, but we haven’t been created yet. We are called the Second Order of Powers. The Fullnesses are the First Order of Powers. The Aeons and Logos together prayed for a solution for this dense and heavy Paradise down below that was being formed and run by the Demiurge without any life or love. And so, we were created. All living creatures and all of our soft, squishy, meaty parts were created in order to be carriers of the consciousness of the Father, because the Demiurge had forgotten about it. The ultimate aim at that point was to bring love ...
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    23 mins
  • Spirit, Mind, Body: Spirit down, mud up

    Spirit, Mind, Body: Spirit down, mud up
    Apr 6 2024
    Earlier this week I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio and was interviewed by Miguel Conner about my new book—A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. The interview was about an hour and a half—very extensive. So, I hope that you will catch it. It’s on YouTube, but he’s also posted it to audio-only podcast platforms. The name of the episode on Aeon Byte was The Gnostic Myth Simplified. So that’s what you would look for. This week we’re going to look at the three-part nature of humankind, as presented by the Tripartite Tractate. We humans and all other creatures are called the second order of powers. The first order of powers are the Aeons of the Fullness, and we are their fruit. We have a three-part nature. This is why it’s called the Tripartite Tractate: tripartite, meaning three parts, tractate, book. It’s not just because this book is divided into three sections, which it happens to be, but it is because it describes the three-part nature of God, the three-in-one, and we humans are fractals of that tripartite system. And, by the way, I talk a lot about fractals in that Aeon Byte interview. The first part of our nature is our version of the monad of the Father, the Son, what is called our Self, with the big S. Self is what we call it here at Gnostic Insights; other people often refer to that as your spiritual aspect. The second part of the 3-part structure is called the psychical, our association with the Aeons of the Fullness, because we are representations of the Aeons of the Fullness; we are fractals of them. The psychical part is our psychological nature. It’s the part of us that thinks. Our third part is associated with the ego of Logos after the Fall. And our third part is the material level—the hylic. So, reading from the Tripartite Tractate, “To those who belong to the remembrance…” and those are the second order powers, because we are of the good thought, the remembrance, whereas the material world is of the presumptuous thought—the Fall. The material world is based upon egoic strivings of Logos in particular, and we all carry that ego forward through our material aspect, and so that’s why it’s called “those of the presumptuous thought,” because it was presumptuous of Logos to think that he could reach the Father and reunite without the Fullness. So, the presumptuous thought is the material level, whereas “those of the remembrance” is the psychical, or psychological level—our thinking, our thoughts and the fact that we can remember that there is a Father above. We remember we were pre-existent consciousness because we are all of the remembrance. But, of course, we forget it. We get all tangled up with the material and we forget our higher nature. Again, “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.” So let’s think about that sentence. We second order powers, we humans in particular, we belong to the remembrance, and all of the second order powers belong to the remembrance. The flowers remember the Father, the dogs and cats remember the Father. All the creatures on Earth, even the cells of your body, remember that we come from the Fullness and from the Father, because we all have to remember in order to instantiate the Golden Rule of cooperation, and it is cooperation that builds our bodies up from single celled, fertilized eggs, all the way up to whatever creatures we become. That’s the remembrance of the Father. So, we second order powers belong to the Father, but we also belong to Logos because we’re fractals of Logos himself. And, remember, Logos himself was a fractal of the Fullness of God, so he was already one iteration down from the entire Fullness. And we are a second iteration down because we’re fractals of Logos and the Fullness down here below. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. “He revealed the thought of that which he had stripped from himself…” And what is that thought that he had stripped from himself? It’s his ego, it’s his presumptuous thought. Logos, after the Fall, finds himself down here below in another dimension and he goes, what the heck did I do? He then stripped himself of the imitations of the likenesses. And the imitations of the likeness are imitations of the Fullness; imitations of the broken open fractals that Logos carried within him when he Fell into this dimension. That’s why they’re called imitations; they’re not true fractals. They’re the shadows, the imitations, the phantoms of those fractals that Logos carried along with him. He stripped himself of the presumptuous thought. That presumptuous thought was his over-reaching ego. He left that behind and Logos, “the best part of him,” that would be ...
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    25 mins
  • In the Origin, there was Logos

    In the Origin, there was Logos
    Apr 13 2024
    Greetings, and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I imagine that some people who tune into this broadcast or read my writing, when they see the word Gnostic, they’re hoping it’s going to be more exotic than it turns out to be, because there are many ancient myths and stories that are labeled as Gnostic and Gnostic scriptures that don’t much resemble what is taught in the Judeo-Christian line of religions. But when you read the New Testament afresh with this new translation by David Bentley Hart, you see that many of the phrases and concepts that we’ve become accustomed to in the standard translations of the Bible are not entirely accurate to the original ancient Greek writing. The New Testament as recently translated by David Bentley Hart sounds very much like the Tripartite Tractate in its speech and in its allegories. Hart has translated the New Testament afresh from the ancient Greek without reference to what we have come to believe the words mean—doctrinal expectations, you could say. Quoting from his preface, he says, “The relation between Christian theology and scriptural translation has a long and complicated history; theology has not only influenced translation, but particular translations have had enormous consequences for the development of theology (it would be almost impossible, for instance, to exaggerate how consequential the Latin Vulgate’s inept rendering of a single verse, Romans 5:12, proved for the development of the Western Christian understanding of original sin).” He says that, “In the end, even the most conscientious translations tend at certain crucial junctures to use language determined as much by theological and dogmatic tradition as by the plain meaning of the words on the page.” He says that what happens as a consequence often verges on a kind of “pious fraudulence.” So, in this translation, he has elected to produce an “almost pitilessly literal translation.” Many of his departures from received practices are Hart’s efforts to “make the original text as visible as possible, through the palimpsest of its translation.” Palimpsest? I paused a moment to look up palimpsest, and it means something reused or altered, but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. This morning I want to share with you some important passages out of the New Testament from Hart’s translation, which demonstrates the compatibility between this Gnostic Christianity that I talk about, and more conventional Christianity, although few people have noticed or care to draw these similarities. So let’s begin with a passage from John, chapter one, verses 1-6. And, it’s a very familiar passage for us. It usually reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Well, the actual Word is Logos, and we talk about Logos a lot here. And so it reads like this: “In the origin, there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD.” And, by the way, when Hart is referring to the highest character of God—The God Above All Gods, as we would say—he uses GOD in all capital letters. And when he refers to God in the more usual way that we refer to God—the God that is involving itself in our human existence—it’s god or God. And those differences are all indicated in the original Greek, but they don’t ever translate through into our modern Bibles. So, “In the origin there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) and the Logos was god.” God meaning, then, that the Logos incorporated all of the attributes of the God Above All Gods, but in a place in a particularity. Going on, “This one was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) in the origin. All things came to be through him (Logos) and without him came not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life and this life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.” Carrying on, “It was the true light which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos. He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be. And the cosmos did not recognize him. He came to those that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him. But as many as did accept him, to them, he gave the power to become GOD’s children (the God Above All Gods’ children)—to those having faith in his name. Those born not from blood, nor from a man’s desire, but of GOD. And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:9-14.) Now, of course, this is usually meant to refer to Jesus Christ coming to Earth in fleshly form. And that “he came to those who were his own” is usually thought to mean to the Jews, but the Jews did not recognize him as the Messiah and did not accept him. And, in conventional Christianity, “but as many of the Jews that did accept him, he gave the power to ...
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    25 mins
  • The Logos of Life

    The Logos of Life
    Apr 20 2024
    Last week we looked at David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, and compared some of the verses to verses out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. And we see that when the ancient Greek, which was the language that the New Testament was written in originally, when it is correctly translated from the original text rather than simply anglicized out of old Latin editions that had been put out by the Catholic Church, we find that the similarities between this Gnostic Christian gospel and the gospel as presented in the New Testament of the Bible are very, very close. There is actually no distinction. Of course it is my opinion that the Tripartite and other Valentinian texts of the Gnostic Gospels were stripped out of the Bible on purpose by the Catholic Church and by the Emperor of Rome. Now, most of us are no longer Catholics and we’re certainly not Roman subjects, so I believe we have no allegiance in particular to the Council of Nicaea, which was set up around 300 AD and that was responsible for taking these books out of the New Testament. The only reason these books were taken out of the New Testament—it’s true they have a slightly different take on the origin story, on the pre-Genesis story, but as far as the New Testament goes, as far as the nature of Heaven, the nature of the Son, the nature of the Father, the nature of the Fullness of God—that all belongs back in the New Testament because it is not at all at odds with what Jesus taught. So, we’re going to look again this week at one of the books of the New Testament, the 1st letter of John, which is attributed to John the Elder, and we’re going to look at it with a Gnostic mindset and see how it is that it is not conflicting with the New Testament. I want to share with you that it grieves me deeply that Christians would consider this Gnostic Gospel to be heresy because I believe it is the true Christian gospel, and that the reworking of it by the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome is what the heresy was. So let’s take a look at this first letter of John. And right off the bat, we’re going to see that David Bentley Hart translates the Word “Logos” as Logos, who is a major character in this Gnostic Gospel that we learn about here on Gnostic Insights and at the Gnostic Reformation. This personifies the Logos. It’s not simply the Word of God, as if when God speaks, things happen, and of course they do. But the Logos of God was an actual character, one of the Aeons. And if you’re new to us here, if you go to the gnosticinsights.com website, there on the landing page, the homepage for Gnostic Insights, you’ll find 21 episodes that teach this Gnostic Gospel with great clarity so that you can understand it. I refer to the concepts in those first 21 episodes continually, because that is the basic teaching of the Gnostic Gospel. So, from 1John 1:1-4: “What was from the origin… concerning the Logos of Life—And the Life was made manifest, and we have seen, and bear witness to, and announce to you the Life of the Aeon which was present with the Father and which was made manifest to us—What we have seen and heard we also announce to you, so that you may also have communion with us. And our communion is indeed with the Father and with his Son Jesus the Anointed…” And this is why I say it saddens me that conventional Christians think that what we’re teaching here is heresy, designed to lead you astray because it isn’t. And actually, if you are a contented Christian that has a home within the conventional church, you’re not my intended listening audience. The people I think that most resonate to this Gnostic Gospel message are, first of all I’ve noticed, fallen-away Catholics who love Jesus, love the Father, but do not like the Catholic church and all of its extra doctrines that come along with it. Any fallen-away Christian—if you’ve fallen away because certain things don’t resonate well with you, such as universal salvation, well then, you will find a home here at Gnostic Insights because part of the Gnostic Reformation is that, yes, you have to believe in Jesus to be saved. But guess what? You can do that after death. And that is a big no no in the conventional church because they want to seal the deal. They want to make sure you come forward and confess Christ while you’re here on Earth. And I also agree that’s way better—that’s the best thing. Ask the Christ into your heart today, really, because it will turn around your life. It will put you in touch with your true mission here on Earth. The world—our cultural space that we live in—is really screwed up, and it always has been because it isn’t run by God. It’s run by what the Bible calls the God of this world, and they call that Satan. But we call that the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen nature of Logos. That was the Fall, and it happened before Adam and Eve. It’s not the fault of human beings that the ...
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    23 mins
  • You, Your Body, and All of the Pleromas of God

    You, Your Body, and All of the Pleromas of God
    Apr 27 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This morning we’re going to hear an episode that was recorded in 2022 that bears repeating. It’s called Heavenly Pleromas. And if you’re fairly new to Gnostic Insights, or even if you’ve been with us for a while, all of this information about the various nested pleromas of consciousness bears repeating. You’ll even learn what the word pleroma means. Before we hear that, I’d like to mention something that came to me during a walk this week, and it has to do with this: Is it selfish to be kind to your body? Many people mistreat their bodies, and that’s a terrible thing to do because your body isn’t just you. You are like the Raja sitting on top of the elephant of the consciousness of your soul and of your body. You are the god of this universe that you ride upon. Not the big God, not the God Above All Gods, but a little miniature copy of a God. And this episode of Heavenly Pleromas will explain why it is that I’m saying that our bodies exist to support us, to keep us alive. That unit of consciousness that’s sitting on top, that you think of as you, that’s your Self and your ego, but it’s also the countless billions of units of consciousness that make up all of the living flesh of your body. Each of those little organs, each of those little cells, is alive and devoted to you. They are selfless in their devotion to keeping you alive. And it seems that the least that we can do is be kind to them—is to go ahead and separate that egoic self; that you sit up on the top of the mountain like Logos sat up on top of the Fullness. You need to be kind and respectful to everyone below you, to the Fullness of the pleroma of your body that’s keeping you alive, and to remember that each one of those little units of consciousness, each one of those little cells and organs and processes that make up your physical body are fractal emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness above. They each came down as you were being formed from the egg on up. The molecules belong to the Demiurge, but all of the living parts belong to the Fullness of God. And so, when you are bad to your body, if you mistreat your body, if you poison your body, if you deny your body the needs that it has for sleep and nourishment, then you are being unkind to the Fullness of God. You are spitting in the eye of the Aeons that entirely make you up. So just think of that the next time—don’t think that it’s your body and you can do whatever you want. It actually belongs to the Fullness of God, and we’re kept alive through grace. So be a kind ruler of those elements that make up your body. Now, here’s Heavenly Pleromas. “Pleroma” is a common word in gnostic scriptures, and it has a particular meaning that only relates to the Gnostic Gospels. In fact, we gnostics are expecting to wind up at the end of days in a Pleroma that others usually call “Heaven.” Today, I’d like to take a closer look at Pleromas in order to discover where we all came from and where we will wind up at the end of days. Pleroma is a Greek word for “all that which is contained within a body or organization.” The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the Pleroma we most often refer to here at Gnostic Insights. The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the sum total of all the individual characteristics and powers of the originating consciousness of the Father as manifested in the monad known as the Son. Here is how the Pleroma of the Fullness is described in the Tripartite Tractate: “Each one of the aeons is a name, , each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another. It is possible to speak of him because of the wealth of speech, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names…” This first differentiation of the properties contained in the Son is known as the ALL or the Totalities. The Pleroma of the ALL is pictured as a central star with rays going out in all directions, yet unified without personal identity within the single body and will of the Son. When the Totalities of the ALL become self-aware, they name themselves and sort themselves into the Pleroma of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. “… the aeon of the Truth, since it is a unity and multiplicity, receives honor in the small and the great names according to the power of each to grasp it – by way of analogy – like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into streams and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root spread out beneath trees and branches with its fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.” The Fullness of God is the Holy Spirit of the Father bursting out into individualized, fractal units of consciousness. The Fullness of God is pictured as a stack of golden cannon balls, ...
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    30 mins
  • The Nature of the Gnostic God

    The Nature of the Gnostic God
    May 4 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m starting to review a few of our previous episodes from a couple of years ago because we have a lot of new listeners and, in case you haven’t backed up to listen to the entire series, I’m picking out what seems to me to be important ideas. And for those of you who have already heard this, again, like I said last week, it really bears repeating. It takes many, many times to hear these things in order to fully grasp them, as I’m sure you agree. Now, my intent here at Gnostic Insights isn’t to teach you these things so much as it is to remind you of these things, because it is one of the basic tenets of gnosticism that we are born with this knowledge—we 2nd Order Powers—and that’s everything that’s living in the cosmos. We 2nd Order Powers come down from the Fullness with all of the attributes and knowledge of the Fullness of God, because the Fullness is throughout our entire bodies. Every cell carries a fractal of the Fullness, and we carry a fractal of the Fullness in our overall personhood, our Self. We tend to forget all of this in the living of our life down here. The Tripartite Tractate says the reason we forget this knowledge is due to the what they call the never ending war, and the never ending war is the tension between those of the Remembrance—we 2nd Order Powers—and that which did not exist from the beginning, which is the Archons and the Demiurge. They don’t know any of this. The Demiurge thinks that it is the beginning of all there is. It doesn’t remember the God Above All Gods or Logos, its better Self. It thinks it came into this cosmos and woke up and suddenly the cosmos existed, which is kind of the way it is because it is the result of the Fall, and it’s the Fall that made the cosmos. It’s the Fall that split Logos in two and the better part of Logos goes up, returns to the Fullness and to the Father. That’s its One Self, its overall fractal of Selfhood. But it left behind, down here in the Fall, its broken pieces. That is the ego that overreached in the first place—the part that left the Fullness of God. It works for its own self. It doesn’t work for the overall good. It doesn’t remember the Father, the God Above All Gods, the Fullness from which it came. It doesn’t remember the Golden Rule of cooperation. So the Demiurge thinks it is the God and it goes ahead. And it is a God. It is the God of this world, and it creates the heavens and the Earth and all of the dry, hard, rocky parts—the material, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals—that is all demiurgic. And that is the never ending war that we living creatures find ourselves engaged in. And because of the nature of always having to put up our dukes and fight, we forget the goodness and love and what our original purpose was for being incarnated in the first place, which is to remind the Demiurge of the love of the Fullness and the love of the Father and the love of the God Above All Gods. Our job is to bring love into this universe. So here is the beginning of that story. This is the story of the God Above All Gods, the God of the gnostic mythologies. Today we’re going to be looking at the concept known as the Father. As you know, we’ve been looking at the gnostic Gospel according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The Tripartite Tractate is a book that focuses on the origins of our universe and everything in it, including us. So I thought we would look around again today and revisit the Tripartite Tractate and what it has to say about the Father as the first principle of gnosticism. Philosophers often speak of the hard problem of consciousness. Materialist scientists don’t believe in consciousness. They believe in a thing called material monism, which is that we are only our physical bodies and that any appearance of consciousness or of a soul is merely a by-product of physical mechanisms, hormones, atoms moving around–this sort of thing. The counterpoint to that view, often called dualism, is that, yes, we have a physical body and then we also have a soul and it’s your soul that survives after death. This gnosticism that comes from the Nag Hammadi is a religious system that presupposes that there is a soul and there is a body. So, first off, we acknowledge that gnosticism is a dualistic philosophy. It seems to me that the soul that people speak of surviving is the consciousness that began with the Father and derives from the Father. And that is why, whenever I discuss the system of consciousness, whether it’s in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, (my prior gnostic book), it always begins with the Father, because the Father is where consciousness resides. The Father is consciousness itself. The Father is another word for consciousness. Then this entire creation cosmology that’s presented through the Tripartite ...
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    29 mins
  • The Son of the God Above All Gods

    The Son of the God Above All Gods
    May 9 2024
    In the previous episode, I talked about the characteristics of the Father as recounted by the Tripartite Tractate in the Nag Hammadi library. Now, the funny thing about that whole last episode discussing the characteristics of the Father is that the Father is unknowable. The father is ineffable and illimitable, and all those gigantic words which mean that we can’t really comprehend the Father at all. So, it was an ironic episode as a description of the Father. Let me add that this material is not easy. This is advanced material when trying to read directly out of the Tripartite Tractate. That’s why my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is much simpler and easier to understand. In The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated I take this material and I reword it into simple, common vernacular that anyone can understand. It’s a very short book, beautifully illustrated—very, very simple as far as sharing the gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate. It is not an academic book. It is a very simple book for understanding. So if this material is too thick and difficult for you, forget about it. Skip it for now. Get my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and sit with it for a while, and then I think if you come back to this type of material directly from the Tripartite Tractate, you will be able to easily understand what’s being said. You may purchase my original Gnostic Gospel at gnosticinsights.com or any online book dealer. So, how is it that we can claim to know these characteristics of the Father—his sweetness, his greatness, and so forth? Well, that is because the Father reveals his own characteristics through what is called the Son, and the Son is actually the God that we are able to relate to. The Son is the relatable father to us and to the Aeons, whereas the Son is the only Son of that Father who is otherwise inexpressible. The Son does reflect and incorporate the characteristics of the Father, so it seems to me that we can infer the characteristics of the Father from the Son, and that’s what I think the author of the Tripartite Tractate did—inferred what the characteristics of the Father must be by examining the characteristics of the Son. And so now, in this episode, I would like to share more about the characteristics of the Son. And, what is the Son? What does it mean to be the only begotten Son of God? And what was this first expression of the Father? In the Tripartite Tractate, the Son is the Father of the Totalities, and sometimes these names get interchanged where the Son begins to be referred to as the Father. Again, this is a confusing bit because the Father is the originating source, the ground state of consciousness from which all else emanates, but the Father of us and of the Totalities before us—that is the Son, the Begotten Son. The translation of the Tripartite Tractate that I’ll be sharing is from the gnosis.org website, and this is the translation by Attridge and Mueller. It all emanates from the Father. So here, near the beginning of the Tripartite Tractate, the writer is saying, “Concerning the Father, rather, one should speak of him as good, perfect, complete, being himself the Totality. Not one of the names which are conceived or spoken, seen or grasped, not one of them applies to him, even though they are exceedingly glorious, magnifying, and honored. However, it is possible to utter these names for his glory and honor, in accordance with the capacity of each one of those who give him glory.” Which is saying that it is a reflection of the speaker, like me saying these things, or the writer of the Tripartite Tractate claiming these things about the Father that are good and glorious. It is more a reflection of our capacity to understand and grasp the Father rather than the Father itself, because the Father is unknowable and ungraspable, and so the glory that we give is a reflection of our capacity to give glory. The Tripartite says of the Father 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.” And, after describing our inability to conceive of the Father, the Father therefore brings forth the Son, which is someone that we can begin to praise and grasp with any sort of true reflection of its Self. So it is saying we really don’t know any of this stuff that we’re saying about the Father. But what we can infer is that now, as it says again, “He is the One who projects himself thus as generation, having glory and honor, marvelous and lovely; the One who glorifies himself, who marvels, who also loves; this is the One who has a Son who subsists in him, who is silent concerning him, who is the ineffable One in the ineffable One, the invisible One, the incomprehensible One, the inconceivable One in the inconceivable One. Thus, the Son exists in the Father forever. The Father is the One in whom he knows himself, who begot him having a thought...
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    18 mins