Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I'm going to read one of the books out of the Nag Hammadi that we haven't talked about before. It's called Authoritative Discourse, Authentikos Logos, and it was part of the original Nag Hammadi codices. I’ve been thinking of codices as scrolls but actually they were the first form of bound books. It's a very short book, unlike the Tripartite Tractate, which is the second longest book in the Nag Hammadi. This is one of the shortest books in the Nag Hammadi, but it was very well preserved except for the first page. It had gotten damaged and is missing a few words, but the rest of it's intact.







And I think it's such a lovely book, and it goes so well with our Gnostic Gospel teaching, that we're going to talk about it today. This book is not particularly Christian because it doesn't talk about the Savior, but what it does talk about a lot is the Spirit and the Soul. And these are two characters represented in this book as a fiancé, the Spirit, which we call the Self, and then the main character is called the Soul, but we refer to that as the Ego. So it's about the split between the Self and the Ego, and what drives them apart, and what brings them together. It begins with talking about the Fullness, or the Aeon of Aeons, is what I call it. And it says, From the Fullness,



From these, came the invisible Soul of Righteousness. One member with them, one body with them, one Spirit with them. Whether she's coming down or is in the realm of the Fullness, she is not apart from them, but they see her and she looks at them through the invisible Word, or Logos.



And by the way, this Soul, which I identify as the Ego, is characterized as a female gender, and the Self is characterized as the male gender. We haven't talked about gendering the parts of our Soul like that, but in this Authoritative Discourse, they're a betrothed couple. They belong together, though they have not yet joined each other. It says,




Secretly her bridegroom, [that's the Self], obtained the Word, [that's what we call Logos]. He held it to her mouth to make her eat it like food. He applied it to her eyes like medicine, to make her see with her mind, and perceive those who are kin to her, and learn about her root, that she may be able to hold on to the branch from which she has come, receive what is hers, and renounce matter.




So this is talking about how the Self is instructing the Ego not to become lost in this world. Then there's a little discussion about when a man marries a woman who already has previous children from another marriage, how those are different children than the children that he fathers with her, and that the children that he fathers with her are his genes, belong to him as well as to her when it comes to inheritance. And so this is a metaphor for our Self and our Ego to be wed to one another. This metaphor refers to after the Ego comes down to this fallen world, and leaves the Fullness of God, that the marriage she has is to our physical material body, and the children that she begets by the material body are her stepchildren, and that they possess the inheritance of their father, which are, get this,




exalted passions, life's pleasures, hateful jealousies, boastful expressions, foolish experiences, reproachful words.




And then there's a few more missing words here, and it says,




If a soul, [and whenever I say soul, think Ego], if a soul who is ignorant chooses a spirit of prostitution, he casts her out and throws her into a brothel. He has left her to corruption because she has abandoned modesty.




That is, the Self, which is still above in the Fullness,

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I have another treat for you this week, a conversation with my brother Bill and myself concerning what is knowledge? How do we know what is true? This is a field of philosophy known as epistemology. My brother Bill was a philosophy professor. He taught this at the university level for many years. I hope you enjoy this conversation and you learn something from it.



Cyd Ropp, Ph,D, Gnostic Insights author and podcast host



[Cyd] 



Okay, recording in progress. Here we are. Hi, Bill. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights.



Bill Puett, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Philosopy. Cyd's brother.



[Bill]



Well, it's nice to be back. I thought of a topic here that we've considered for a while. Let's get it done.



[Cyd]



All right!



[Bill]



Okay. So the question is, what is knowledge? And what is it to really know something to be the case?



[Cyd]



Wait a minute. Is this epistemology? Is that what is meant by epistemology?



[Bill]



That's right. Theory of knowledge, epistemology. It's as old as the hills. In fact, the conflict was back with Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle's saying we can get knowledge, and I'll explain kind of how we do it, theoretically do that. Plato said, no, you can't get it that way. You have to know it from the beginning. How about that? That's what we call our gnosis, right?



[Cyd]



Right. That's why Plato is included in the scrolls of the Nag Hammadi. Yes.



[Bill]



So the question is, where does gnosis fit in with regard to the knowledge? Okay. That's the point. So I thought, okay, let's just take it from the point of the scientific position, because the presumption is, isn't it, that science gives us knowledge, right? That's the presumption. So the debates that take place out there, someone says, well, that's not science, and so therefore they're negating what's being said. Okay, let's get this one answered.



It's a common belief that scientists believe that scientific method gives us knowledge. And so anything that is gained outside of science is not known. In other words, the word sometimes is dogma, right? The idea, you hold a position, but you can't verify it scientifically, but you hold it, so you're being so dogmatic. So let me make this point here.



Here it is. The best that science can really give us is well-founded belief, and I'm going to argue that. So that's the best. So why do I say that? Well, the scientific method is based on logical principles of modus ponens and modus tollens, okay? And let me explain what that means.



[Cyd]



How do you spell that?



[Bill]



M-O-D-U-S, modus ponens, P-O-N-E-N-S, okay? And tollens, T-O-L-L-E-N-S.



Now, symbolically, okay, I'm going to use words like this, and you'll get it. You'll get it for your listeners, by the standards. If P gets you Q, and if you have P, then you have Q. That's modus ponens. The idea, conditional. If P gets you Q, and you got P, then you have Q. That's the conclusion.



[Cyd]



You're saying if P is obliged to bring Q along, then if you don't have Q, you don't have P.



[Bill]



Exactly, that's well said. So in science, the problem occurs, you could put it this way. A problem is created, say that the science,

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today we're going to revisit the idea of evolution. You know, religious people are usually mocked by being unscientific for not believing in Darwinian evolution. Well, I'm a highly educated person and I don't believe in Darwinian evolution. It's an absurd theory that has never been proven.



My brother, Dr. Bill Puett, is also a PhD. He's what's called a professor emeritus, which means that he's a retired full professor who taught at the university level for a full career. He doesn't believe in evolution either.



Today we're going to share with you another conversation that I had just this week concerning evolution with my brother on the telephone. The article that prompted this discussion of ours was published last week on the website called Aeon, and it's an essay called Why Birds Don't Buy Bentleys and Why Humans Will Never Fly. And it was written by a scholar named Anton Martino-Truswell, an evolutionary biologist, author, and member of the Sydney Policy Lab and School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He writes on human culture and society, evolution, and behavior at his substack, which is called The Village Green.



Bill and I both read his article and came away with a number of criticisms of the article. Mine had to do with the little nuts and bolts of particular claims, but Bill's observation of the article was profound and overarching from the Gnostic point of view. And so I'm going to share with you Dr. Truswell's article and then our reaction to it.



Now before I start with that, I would like to remind you that I've been writing about evolution for many years, beginning with an article I wrote called A Simple Explanation of Tuskless Elephants’ Super-Quick Evolution that I wrote on November 11th of 2018 on the Simple Explanation blog, and it is still posted there if you want to go to the Simple Explanation blog and read it there. But I covered that article here at Gnostic Insights in October of 2021, and then I repeated it in October of 2023.



So if you would like to read my original articles concerning evolution in detail, I recommend that you go to my GnosticInsights.com webpage and you do a search for the podcast called Gnostic Evolution in the Beginning, and that was posted on October 21st, 2023. And this is a very long and quite detailed theory of evolution that is not Darwinian.







You know, I don't know why people get stuck on these old theories. Scholars are very habitual, because if you change one of the basic theories, then all of their scholarship goes out the window. Then what are they teaching anymore? They don't know what to teach; they don't know what to write about. People would rather harken back to this old theory of Darwin, which is about as outdated as the original evolutionary theory of Lamarck. So I'm inviting you to open your minds today and think of a different way of looking at evolution.



Then I broadcasted a second podcast the very next week on October 28th of 2023 called Evolution and Conscious Design. And again, you can find that at GnosticInsights.com.



First off, let me repeat something out of one of those original broadcasts.

Ten years ago, back in July 22nd of 2015, I wrote one of my first articles about Gnosticism on my Simple Explanation blog, and I'm going to read from that for you today. This was very soon after I began to realize that the Orthodox Christianity that I had been strongly embracing for all of my life could be enhanced by this knowledge of Gnosticism.



I had been trained up to believe that Gnosticism was a heresy, and it takes many years for a very strong believer in Christianity to even be willing to consider Gnosticism as another sect of Christianity. So while not being willing to give up my belief in the Christ as our salvation, and not being willing to demote my relationship with Jesus, because I can't deny that since I personally know it to be true, I was at last able to begin reading the Nag Hammadi texts. I was particularly taken by the text called the Tripartite Tractate, which is the one that I share with you mostly on this Gnostic Insights podcast.



So let me share with you now this first article that I wrote in 2015 called Yearning for the Pleroma, which is still posted on my long-running Simple Explanation blog. This was originally broadcasted as an episode in August of 2021, which was before I started posting episodes to Substack, so my Substack readers have never seen or heard this episode. Also, for those of you who have been following Gnostic Insights from the beginning, you haven’t ever had a chance to read the transcript, so here it is. As I said, this article is ten years old. I hadn’t yet developed the illustrations that have become so familiar by now, which you can see throughout the Gnostic Insights transcripts and in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book from 2019. This episode features my first attempt at diagramming the gnostic cosmology. The concepts still hold up, although the artwork is more colorful and polished today.



This is called Yearning for the Pleroma.



Other words for the Gnostic word "pleroma" include the "Fullness," the "All," the "Totalities," and "the circle of divine attributes," which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism.  Wikipedia cites 17 uses of the Greek word kenoma that is usually translated as “fullness,” with only one usage of pleroma as we Gnostics would define it.Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma--a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as "the fullness.""For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Col. 2:9).The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ... This contradicts the Gnostic idea of  the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).While I do agree with the opening premise that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of ... beings," there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.First, the idea that the fullness can't be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into ...

A recent article called “All Is One” in the online magazine “aeon”  presents an excellent overview of the scientific and philosophical schism between what is called “monism” and its dialectical opposite “dualism.” If you are interested in the nature of reality and the history of the argument over whether or not there is a single, unifying reality behind all of the apparent differences we see around us, you should check out that article. I have included the link here in this podcast transcript that you can find either at Gnostic Insights dot com or the transcript on Substack.



As so often happens, my brother read the article first and forwarded it to me. After I read it, we had a good conversation about certain concepts in the article. By good fortune, we had the zoom app running during our conversation and I was able to preserve our discussion to play for you today.



There are two reasons why I want to share the audio of that conversation with you. One reason is the content—Bill had a good gnostic insight he wanted to get across to me, and that is presented to you here. The second reason is that I want to share with you the process by which my brother and I discuss these deep thoughts. I consider our discussion process an ideal model for how philosophical discussions should take place, although they rarely do because of ego.



I think of our philosophical discussions as an example of the Simple Golden Rule. We are both arguing not from a position of ego, but from a shared exploration of truth, and gnosis is the object in the middle we are both working on to level up. The discussion isn’t polite in the sense that there are plenty of interruptions and disputes, yet no negative or egoic emotions, only love and laughter. Keep in mind that Bill is a professor emeritus of Philosophy, and I am a Ph.D. rhetorician and university lecturer, so you can imagine we have both seen our share of unpleasant and offensive philosophical disputes in the halls of academia. Our conversation is how I imagine such talks should proceed for the benefit of all.



Let’s begin with the beginning of the aeon article by Heinrich Paes, a professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He says,



‘From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolized by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as ‘all that has been and is and shall be’ and the ‘mother and father of all things’.



Let me jump in here to say that we Valentinian Gnostics would identify this One as the Father rather than Isis. Back to the article:



This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: ‘entangle...

The purpose of this series of podcasts is to share with you the gnosis that I have gleaned from my readings of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.



These podcasts are coming in order as the cosmology of our universe unfolds, and I think it's a lot easier for you to understand the material if you follow along in order. The particular book out of the Nag Hammadi that I am using as my primary reference is called the Tripartite Tractate. In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, where I translated the Tripartite Tractate into modern English in a very, very simple way, and I also illustrated all of the concepts in order to facilitate understanding. It is my hope that as you listen to this information and then meditate upon it, you will come to understand the origins of our universe and our place in it, and also what are the major players at work for both good and for ill, and how does it affect our lives?



So far, we've talked about the Father, the Son, the All and the Fullness. We've talked about the Fall of Logos, and we have talked about the Deficiency that came from the Fall. Now we're getting to the good news, which is the plan that was devised by Logos and the Fullness of God in order to redeem the Fall and all that came from the Fall.



So, after the Fall, Logos broke apart, and all of his small parts, which were themselves small copies of all of the originals of the Fullness, because Logos was an entity that contained all of the Aeons inside of it, however they were smaller versions of it. They were fractals of the original Aeons. When Logos reached and fell, he broke apart, and these smaller fractals that constituted his being left him, and they went out on their own.



We are fractal children of the consciousness of the Fullness of God



Logos was horrified by what had happened, and the Nag Hammadi says that the best of Logos returned back to the Fullness, leaving the Deficiency behind. As I explained in the previous podcast, the main reason that this is called the Deficiency is because the parts of Logos were no longer arranged in their hierarchical structure that encouraged cooperation. They all rolled out and became equal to one another, and they were driven by ego and self-centered ambition, because Logos had been reaching for the heights when it fell, and therefore the parts of Logos that separated out from him continued to reach for the heights.



The small fractalss that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos.



However, because they are not in a cooperative structure of the Hierarchy, they're all self-centered, they're all each one reaching for the heights on their own. They have no cooperative arrangement. Logos regretted the Fall, and the phantoms, (these are called the phantoms, these little bits of him that rolled out—phantoms of the Deficiency), Logos regretted the Fall and the phantoms born of the Fall, and regret turned into condemnation of the irrational things he had produced.



Logos wanted their destruction because it was just a horrible thing that was happening. As I said in the last podcast, when Logos beat it back up to the Fullness, the Fullness and Logos did not remain idle,

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I thought I would share with you a column from Substack by a friend of mine, Tessa Lena. Her Substack is called Tessa Fights Robots. She's an immigrant from Russia and she lives in New York. She's a really wonderful writer and her heart is in such a good place. She speaks about love most of the time in her columns.



This week's column by Tessa is called “Letter to Future Dissidents, subtitled Don't Become a Dissident Before Reading This,” and it was a good article that I thought I would share with you. I'm going to read the whole thing to you. I did get permission from Tessa Lena to do this. She says go for it. By the way, Tessa Lena was a guest here on Gnostic Insights, two interviews back to back. It was called Interview with Tessa Lena Part 1 and Part 2, and those were posted March 13th and March 19th of 2022. So if you go to theGnosticInsights.com website, you can find all of the past episodes posted. Just search for Tessa Lena or March 13th, 2022, and you ought to be able to find those interviews.



I like to run every episode past my brother for discussion before releasing it to you. My dear brother Bill was somewhat shocked that I chose this essay to read to you this week. He's concerned that the essay is not uplifting and may bum you out rather than inspire you. So let me address that concern here at the top.



Tessa's article is about the interpersonal challenges of being a dissident, whether we are talking about spiritual disagreements, such as we Gnostics may encounter with other spiritual seekers, or political and cultural disagreements we run into with others. What Bill asked me to say here at the beginning is that the negative spiritual encounters we may have with other people is really the Demiurge and its archons messing with us Second Order Powers. We need to remember that we are not enemies with any person, but rather we are fellow Second Order Powers defending ourselves against the Demiurge.



Bill also shared an article called “The Science of Spiritual Narcissism” by Scott Barry Kaufman that was posted this week on the GetPocket app. I've put the link into the transcript here. That article is relevant to today's podcast, so let me start by reading you a couple of paragraphs from that Pocket article to prepare you for Tessa's essay. Kaufman says,




Self-enhancement through spiritual practices can fool us into thinking we are evolving and growing, when in fact all we are growing is our ego.




And by the way, we'll drop in that we're not really growing our ego, but we're growing our memes. Our memes are stuck onto our egos. Our egos come along with us. They are our personality. They are our self-identity. They're part of our aeonic inheritance. So we're not really growing our egos with wrong beliefs. We're simply growing the beliefs—the memes—that are stuck onto us and overshadowing our God-given egos and pure selves.



So back to Kaufman's article.




Some psychologists have pointed out that the self-enhancement that occurs through spiritual practices can lead to the “I'm enlightened and you're not” syndrome and spiritual bypass by which people seek to use their spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences to avoid genuine contact with their psychological unfinished business. In Kaufman's recent book, Transcend,

Gnostic interpretations of familiar Bible verses



Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I'm so glad to have you here with me. I thought this week we'd go ahead and do some more of those Gnostic interpretations of Christian memes so that you can see the differences and similarities between our Gnostic message and the traditional Christian way of interpreting these same Bible verses. I simply went out on the internet and looked for popular Bible verses, and these were the first ones that came up on this particular search. So here we go.



From 1 Corinthians 3:16. “Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in your midst?”







Even conventional Christians realize that we are God's temple, but they generally think of the temple that we are as somewhat separate from God Himself and God's actual temple. However, when we Gnostic Christians speak of inhabiting God's temple, we take it in a much more literal sense—that when we invite the Third Order of Powers to come in and take over our souls, we're moving our own Second Order Powers off the throne of our souls and inviting the Christ to occupy the throne of our souls. This brings God into our temple.



It makes our body a literal temple of God, a temple of the Christ, because there is Christ dwelling within our midst, God dwelling within the temple. You see, our body is as much a temple to the Third Order of Powers as the temple in Jerusalem was to Jehovah. Now that's another discussion—the relationship between the Hebrew God Jehovah and the God Above All Gods. But what we're talking about here is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the temple of our bodies. Our body is a replication of the Fullness of God, and we are Second Order representations of that Fullness of God whereas the Third Order of Powers are the actual living images of the Fullness of God, and there's a Third Order Power for every one of our Second Order Powers inside of our body, inside of this meat mountain that we live in. So, of course, God's Spirit dwells in our midst once we invite God's Spirit to do so. God's Spirit cannot dwell in the midst of our temple until we invite it in, until we get off the throne and invite it to take its place.



The next meme is from 1 John 4:8, and it says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”







We talk a lot about love and the importance of love, and I think a lot of people come to Gnostic Insights here because I'm talking about love.



God is love. That is the most basic definition of God. Yes, in our modern parlance, we like to say that God is consciousness, and indeed God is consciousness. However, God is perceived by us as love, as the quality of love. Love is not an imaginary thing. Love isn't something people make up or when you feel attracted to another person that you love them. That isn't what love is. Love is an actual standalone quality that is one of the virtues of God. It's the primary virtue of the God Above All Gods.



And by the way, speaking of the difference between the God Above All Gods and the Hebrew God Jehovah, that Old Testament God did not demonstrate love. That Old Testament God, whom we Gnostics call the Demiurge, yes, he was the creator of this physical material cosmos that we live in, but the God Above All Gods is the creator of heaven and all consciousness and all emanations of consciousness.



All spirits and powers above come from the God Above All Gods through the Son and then on through the Fullness of the Son, which is called the Fullness of God. We come from the Fullness of God. We are emanations. We are children of the Fullness of God, fruited down here into the material cosmos with all of the qualit...

How you can help out



Say, do you realize that I basically pay for this entire podcast and these books, everything having to do with Gnostic Insights, all by myself? except for some generous contributions from my sister-in-law, Barbara, and my brother, Bill, and a couple of other people who have been sending in donations since the beginning of the podcast. Fortunately, God has blessed me with a very successful Airbnb property, and many people come and enjoy staying here in this cute little village that I live in, in Oregon. That is the method by which God is funding Gnostic Insights.  If you are being touched, if your life is being changed, I'd like to hear about it. I wish you'd send me an email or comments, because whatever you are being blessed with becomes a blessing for other people.



If you can contribute financially, that would be helpful. I do have ongoing monthly expenses, such as the cost of the media service that hosts and distributes the podcasts. And nowadays, I am attempting to help the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, float up into everyone's awareness. Right now, it's hard to find that book, because there are so few reviews. So, if you've read the book, or started to read the book, or even if you listen to this podcast on a regular basis, you are qualified to leave a review. It doesn't have to be a long review to say, I never thought much about God or religion, but I've found that this material is helping my life. These are very important comments to make, where other people can see them, because that will encourage them to join us here.



So, please, make the contribution that you are being moved to make, whether that's money, one time or monthly, or whether that's comments at Amazon, or comments here at Gnostic Insights, and at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. If you click here, a PayPal donation form will pop up.



Many of you listen to the podcast only and never visit the website. If you visit the website, the transcripts for all of these podcasts are there, episodes that you can re-listen to, that you can read and contemplate. But all of the material is found in a very clear and simple way in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.



The expenses for getting the book publicized are mounting. Praise God, I have the money because of this Airbnb that I'm running. So, hospitality and housekeeping is my main job, other than putting out these weekly podcasts, writing an article every week, recording it, editing it—you know, I'm a one-person factory here. I can't afford to hire an editor. I can't afford to hire a webmaster or podcast producer. I have to figure out how to do all of this on my own. But it would be nice to be able to hire some help.



I have hired an illustrator for the children's book, because I know I can't illustrate a children's book. So, that's one thing I can't do on my own. It's really neat that I've been given the various gifts that I'm able to do all of these things and put together Gnostic Insights. I believe that this is my purpose in life, finally. And everything I've learned, formally and informally, God is using it to put together these broadcasts.



I put in an application this week at the Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University in order to teach the Gnostic Gospel. And if they allow me to teach this to their students, then I'm going to be videotaping those lectures. People have often said, hey, you really need to put out more on YouTube. You know, there are some older lectures there on YouTube, both from before the Gnostic days and then after the Gnostic days. The earlier ones are lectures that were given publicly concerning A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I thought it would be fun this week to look at some Christian memes that are posted on the internet, little posters with inspirational sayings. I asked for Bible quotes inspirational from Jesus, and what I'm going to do is read you the quote, and I'll post the meme itself on the transcript of this episode. And I would like to explain to you the Gnostic meaning of each of these memes. So let's see how this goes.



The first one I run across here is from Philippians 4:13, and it says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”







Now Christians generally think of Christ as an exterior force, that Christ is basically the Holy Spirit of the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. And so they picture Jesus being outside them, but very near, someone that you can call to you and pray to, and he knows you, and he will take care of your prayers.



Gnostic Christians, on the other hand, have an understanding, a gnosis, that Christ is within us when we accept Christ, when we invite Christ in, because as the Christians always say, Jesus is a gentleman, and he won't just come plowing into your soul unless you invite him in. So Christians understand that you are asking Christ in, but they don't understand that he completely takes up residence inside of you.



We know that we humans are made up of a spiritual Self, that one Self that is the reflection of the Fullness of God. We all share that in common. It is identical to all of us. Then we share a psychical level, our emotional level, generally what we would call our ego, and that's our Second Order nature that comes into us and melds to the third part of us, which is our physical body. And our physical body is built from the molecules on up.



The physical body is of a demiurgic origin. This is why it has always so many cravings that go against our better judgment, let's say. We eat too much, we take drugs we shouldn't, we drink too much, we have sex with strangers or sex outside of marriage. These are physical urges that arise from the demiurgic level because they are embodying and carrying forward the commands of the Demiurge. And that's the way the Demiurge likes to do things—keep us under control, keep us alienated from our higher Self.



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



When we invite Christ in, we invite the Christ to take residence in our souls and in our bodies. We invite the Christ's Third Order Powers to replace our own Second Order Powers because we're leveling up. We're leveling up to a more powerful and loving Godly existence when we invite Christ in.



You can't put down various mistakes and cravings and sins in your life just out of striving within your own little Second Order ego because it's the one that got you in trouble in the first place. You need the higher power of the Third Order to embody you. That is the real meaning of Philippians 4.13. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me because I'm no longer just me...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation. My brother shared with me this week an article that's published in Scientific American, and I will post the link to that article here. The article is called, Where Does Consciousness Come From? Two Neuroscience Theories Go Head-to-Head. The subtitle is, Two Leading Theories of Consciousness Went Head-to-Head, and the Results May Change How Neuroscientists Study One of the Oldest Questions About Existence. This was published on April 30, 2025. And I'm not going to share much of this with you, except to say that neuroscientists still haven't coalesced around one explanation of where consciousness originates, largely because it's such a hard question to probe with the scientific method.



The article says that scientists have landed on two leading theories to explain how consciousness emerges. The first is called Integrated Information Theory, or IIT for short, and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, or GNWT for short. And it says that the frameworks couldn't be more different, yet they rest on completely different assumptions, draw from different fields of science, and may even define consciousness in different ways.







The article goes on to explain that there have been a series of studies trying to decide which of those two theories is the right way to approach consciousness. And despite all of the scientific studies, nothing came to fruition. There were no results that proved either of the two theories.



The article says that this type of research will encourage new ways of doing studies, which is to design experiments that have the best chance of distinguishing between theories rather than finding evidence for or against one specific theory. And they explain that it's very important to understand consciousness because it has, for example, a practical application when you're dealing with people that are in vegetative states and comas about when to pull the plug, since no sign of consciousness shows up on the brain scans, then they feel the person is dead, even if their body's alive, and so they pull the plug. But if consciousness is more diffuse than that, it is possible that the people are still alive and conscious, and that their bodies should be kept alive with life support.



I went back and looked at our Gnostic Insights articles and episodes to review what we have to say about consciousness. And I must say, there is no better explanation than the Gnostic explanation. And so I'm going to share with you again an episode called The Father of Consciousness, which is essentially the first chapter of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.



This episode was originally the first episode of Gnostic Insights that described the rollout of consciousness through all the stages, and you can find it posted at GnosticInsights.com under A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel tab. This would be the first article. We reviewed this article in December of 2022, and it's time to review it again, because this is the ground state of everything and everything that we believe.



It also clears up the what we call the category error of whether consciousness arises from the brain, and which neurons or synapses it's contained in, and how the network works, which is the materialist scientific approach that isn't working out, according to Scientific American, versus the idea that consciousness is the pre-ex...

Today's episode will discuss the difference between ego and Self. These terms are often used interchangeably, but at least as far as I use them in my writing, the ego is very much different from what we call the Self, and that's a Self with a capital S. This episode reviews a couple of articles from the Simple Explanation blog from 2018 and 2019 during the time period I began realizing my gnosis and before launching this Gnostic Insights podcast. A version of this episode was first broadcast in 2021.



This episode clears up some confusion about our various sub-selves. We are not just one big clump of consciousness but are made up of different sub-selves. In other words, who are you? When you say “I” what is that I? Who is that me? What is the difference between your ego and your Self or what people call your soul and spirit? Who runs the show? What’s the difference between being selfish and selfless? How is ego related to selfishness? And finally, is having a strong ego a bad thing?



According to the Simple Explanation, our bodies are comprised of countless units of consciousness that are all working to keep us alive. Every particle and molecule, every cell and body organ from your skin on in works to keep you alive and functioning. Every piece of you knows how to do its job, and all of your pieces coordinate their work to keep you up and running. In Gnostic terms we say that these units of consciousness are all Second Order Powers from the Fullness above. At least, that’s true of the living, meat portion—the cells, the body organs. Below that the particles, molecules, elements, and minerals are not independently conscious—they are extensions of the Demiurge. They lack life. The Demiurge controls and runs the material portion of our cosmos, but the cells on up are part of our Second Order Powers that bring life into the universe.



When any part of you breaks down and no longer does its job, it either has to be replaced by fresh parts through cell regeneration or by other means, like surgery. When major body parts fail, your physical body dies. This article that I'm reading from has a diagram of a pyramid, and the pyramid is broken down into the ascending order of the hierarchy, up from the material particles of the Demiurge, on up through the cells and you, and then on up through the Father in Heaven. It's a meta-diagram of existence that shows how your body is comprised of countless units of consciousness that work to keep your body alive and running smoothly.



We 2nd Order Powers are melded to the demiurgic material below us and are infused with life from above



You are not only that sole person you usually identify yourself with, but you are also every particle, molecule, cell and organ that makes up your body. The ego is the mind that arises from and watches over the trillions of parts that make up your physical body. The ego is only aware of the needs of your body, not the needs of others.



Our egos are inherited from the Aeons that make each of us a unique individual. You see, Aeons also have egos. The Tripartite Tractate says that the Aeons awakened to themselves by giving glory as One to the Father because it was the Father’s will that every unit of his consciousness should be self-aware. When the Aeons awakened to themselves they sorted themselves into a hierarchy of names, stations, positions, and duties. This identity within the Hierarchy of the Fullness is their Aeonic ego. Ego is not a negative term; it is only a signifier of who, how, and where they fit in with their neighboring Aeons. Their egos are their identities. We also gain our personal identity by way of our egos because that is what differentiates us from our shared and identical Selfs. It is our ego that bears our inherited and individu...

In evangelical Christian circles, people have had a born-again experience where they have asked Jesus into their hearts to take over their lives. In our Gnostic terminology, we would say that this is a person's acknowledgement of the Christ, and an invitation that invites the Third Order of Powers—the pleroma of the Christ—to come into ourselves to correct the mistakes that we have gained through the memes of the culture that surround us and clutter up our souls. Now, I know this all sounds like funny talk. It's a little different than how we normally speak of Jesus Christ in evangelical circles, but I hope that if you've been following Gnostic Insights for any period of time, or if you've read the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, that you will understand what I'm saying. All I'm saying is exactly what is said in Christian doctrine about asking Jesus to come into your heart. It's just a deeper explanation of how the process works.



It is not necessary to understand all of the steps in the Gnostic Gospel, because the only thing you really need to know is that we come from the Father and we will return to the Father. Christ is the mechanism by which that is accomplished. The Bible puts it this way:




11 For it is written:



“As I live, says the Lord,Every knee shall bow to Me,And every tongue shall confess to God.”



12 So then each of us shall give account of himself to God. (Romans 14:10-12)




On the one hand, Christians acknowledge that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Yet, on the other hand, church doctrine says that only those people who, before death, have repented and invited Jesus into their hearts will be saved. And to them, being saved only refers to being saved from damnation, being saved from hell. I'm safe. But that is not really the goal of inviting the Christ to dwell in your heart. We Gnostics say that the purpose of asking the Christ in is to replace your flawed Second Order pleroma with your redeemed Third Order pleroma.



That is, you ask the Fullness of God to wipe away all of the misunderstandings, all of the doubts, all of the sin. Sin simply means straying from the path of virtue. When you invite the Christ in, you're asking for the correcting algorithm of the Christ, we might say,  to remove confusion from your life so that you only operate out of truth and love rather than ego. Being saved by Christ means that every moment of your waking life, until the time that you pass away and move on from this life to the next, will be for the glory of God, in order to demonstrate God's love to the world and this cosmos. Therefore, thinking that being saved from hell is the goal and stopping there, entirely misses the point of salvation. Going to church on Sunday mornings yet acting unloving the rest of the time is not what Jesus meant by salvation.



Salvation is meant to bring you back into alignment with the glory of God. Jesus is our exemplar of a blameless life. Jesus is the first of the Second Order Powers that came fully loaded with the Third Order of Powers. That's why he's called Jesus the Anointed. He walked with the truth and spirit and love of the Father at all times, and through the power of the Christ we are to emulate Jesus. It's become popular in academic circles, such as the Jesus Project, to say that there was no such human being on the plane...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I'd like to share with you an essay that David Bentley Hart recently posted to his Substack site. His Substack site is called Leaves in the Wind by David Bentley Hart.



And you know we use Hart's translation of the New Testament here frequently. He's a brilliant man, a wonderful writer. So I'm going to read for you a very good essay that he calls The Story of the Nameless, The Use and Abuse of History for Theology. This was posted on April 9, 2025. It was a lecture that he had delivered at Duke University in September of 2017 to theology graduate students. So if you find this deep and difficult to follow, well just imagine that you're a Duke theology graduate student and they probably didn't follow it any better than you do. So don't worry about that because he writes in a very highbrow manner. Also I'm only reading portions of this essay. I'm leaving out most of the small details that historians love so much.



Hart cites many different philosophers—European philosophers, German philosophers, historians from all ages, from Eusebius on up. And I'm leaving all of those details out. So if you like those sorts of details, because I don't—I get lost amongst the names, I'm not really good at sticking in names--I like concepts. That's where I dwell. And so I'm giving you the conceptual level of this essay. But if you want the details, go and look up Hart there on Substack and read for yourself. Even subscribe. He's always amazing. So here goes.




Most of the history we read and write is a lie, though often a lie told in earnest. We fabricate the past as much as we recall it, if not more so, and almost invariably in ways that reflect an ideology that we either consciously seek to promote or unconsciously absorb from the society surrounding us.



For the most part, this is nothing to lament as long as we remember to think of written history primarily as a species of literature. In truth, the greater the historian, the vaster and more ingenious his or her misrepresentations are likely to be. And the greatest of all, those who are the most accomplished masters of detail and style need not distort a single fact in order to produce an entirely fantastic image of the past.




Let me pop in here and say that there's a difference between facts—choice points in history—observable phenomena that occurred—and the narrative or the story that weaves those facts together. Narrative is not truth. Narrative is the story you tell around the facts and it is your truth. It's usually ideologically centered. So you can see this clearly in our political situation where you have a certain set of facts and then half of the people say blah blah blah blah blah as they weave together the facts into the narrative that they promote and the other half of the people say no no blah blah blah blah blah that's their narrative around the same exact facts.



So do you see how that works? It's not that what you hear reported is true or false. It's the story that people have woven around the facts as they stand. And of course, all of the news outlets and certainly the social media influencers are all about narrative. People tell the story from their point of view because we each have a unique and personal point of view and we always think that our version of what we see is the correct one because it's our point of view, see? So when we share that with others, we try to convince them to accept our narrative. So that is why the media outlets on the left have different narrat...

"Elohim" is a Hebrew word that is commonly used in the Bible to refer to God. It is a plural form of the word "Eloah," which means "god" or "deity." Despite its plural form, "Elohim" is often used with singular verbs and adjectives when referring to the God of Israel, indicating a singular divine being. The term emphasizes God's majesty, power, and sovereignty. In the context of the Hebrew Bible, "Elohim" is used in various passages to denote God's role as the creator and ruler of the universe." (GBT 4.o)





"In some Gnostic and mystical traditions, the term "Elohim" can be associated with a variety of divine beings or emanations, including aeons. Aeons are often considered to be divine entities or aspects of the divine that represent different attributes or aspects of God in Gnostic cosmology. In this context, "Elohim" may be used to refer to a group of these divine beings rather than the singular God of traditional Judaism and Christianity.



However, in the traditional Hebrew Bible context, "Elohim" primarily refers to the singular God of Israel and does not typically encompass the concept of aeons. The interpretation of "Elohim" can vary significantly depending on the theological framework and tradition being considered." (GPT 4.o)




This is the story of “mud up, spirit down.” I’ve mentioned before that my gnosis began to blossom about 20 years ago whenever I'd be walking in the woods or standing by the river with the dogs. The phrase mud up, spirit down would come to mind. That's it. I pondered the phrase mud up, spirit down for a few years, but I didn't worry about it. I usually trust my subconscious to work out big ideas for me while I am busy with other things. I used to think that the subconscious was just ordinary consciousness that we aren’t paying particular attention to. It’s usually depicted as an iceberg, with our aware consciousness peeking out of the ocean at the top with the majority of the subconscious iceberg below the surface of the water. Now I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Now I would say that there are different types of subconscious thought that represent the unconscious aspect of the three different aspects of our being.



The three aspects of our being, also known as the tripartite nature of humanity, are these: We have the big S Self, which is the spiritual aspect that is always in communion with the Father; then we have our ordinary consciousness that is called the psychical or psychological part; and finally we have the thoughts that arise from the material, physical aspects of our body. These three levels of our nature are able to function independently of each other, and one or the other is in conscious control at any given time.



For example, when I’m walking in the woods my physical awareness may be on my feet and immediate surroundings so I can navigate the trail without tripping over things, but my subconscious physical aspect is probably thinking about food or avoiding getting bitten by bugs or scratched by brambles or things of that nature. At the same time, my psychological self may be replaying a recent conversation in my head, or singing a song, or even remembering some incident that provoked an emotional response earlier in the day. And of course the subconscious psychological self has a whole list of things I’m not aware of that it runs through—triggers from family or friends or the media, or constellations of similar incidents from the past that resonate with whatever I’m consciously thinking about, or subconscious emotional reactions to what is going on around me at the moment, and so on. This is the “mind chatter” that continually runs through most people’s heads. And then there is the spiritual Self, which is always in subconscious communion with the Father and the Fullness. At the conscious level,

I have recently taken down my older “New Gnostic Gospel” blog in favor of focusing on GnosticInsights.com and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Before taking down the old blog I saved this one article that was first printed in June of 2015. I’m going to go through it with you today to see how this gnosis has held up over the past 10 years.



The obvious improvement is the quality of my illustrations. I thought it would be a treat for you to see how they have evolved.  This was the original mapping of the new Gnostic Gospel. These concepts have been more colorfully illustrated, although the original mapping still holds up. You may find all of this in its most simple form in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. For a more detailed explanation, pick up a copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel at amazon.



Monday, June 15, 2015



These diagrams are my visual representations of the "Tripartite Tractate." The Tripartite Tractate is one book of the collection known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures that were discovered buried in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The Nag Hammadi texts were buried sometime in the 3rd century by monks who sought to preserve and protect them from those who wanted to weed them out as heresies as they designed the official shape of the Christian religion. After studying the Tripartite Tractate, I can see why the early Pope did not want this to make it into the Bible.  For one thing, the Christ figure, the "Son of God," is not all perfect and all powerful, as portrayed in the Christian Bible; matter of fact, Logos is directly implicated in the Fall. For another thing, salvation is a personal, mystical affair conferred directly by the Father through Logos, not something conferred by preaching or baptism. Thirdly, the cosmology presented here makes clear that those who, shall we say, struggle for righteousness against a sinful world are not necessarily doing God's work, but are caught in an endless war against the "evil doers," and have themselves fallen into some sort of earthly death trap. 



Okay. Let’s quickly amend that first concept about the Son of God. The Christian religion has lumped three distinct characters together into one Son of God. In the Gnostic Gospel, these three are broken out by their sequential appearance in the rollout of the Gnostic cosmogeny.



1: The Son of God is indeed the all-perfect “only begotten Son” of the Father’s originating consciousness. Because of His perfection and proximity to the Father, the Son is the only entity that can link directly up with the Source without the risk of annihilation. The Son is the bucket dipped into the Sea, reflecting every characteristic of the originating Father. All subsequent entities, life, consciousness, laws and power come through the Son. 



2: Logos is not the Son after all. My confusion arose from John 1:1-5 where it states, “in the beginning was the Logos [Word], and Logos was with God, and Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him,

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week's episode is an unusual treat for you. It's not particularly "gnostic" if you only peg gnosticism onto ancient manuscripts. But if you realize that understanding the nature of space and time is itself gnosis, then you will understand why this week's episode is important. So, put on your thinking cap and open up your mind because we're going to look at some interesting facets of quantum mechanics and how, exactly, it relates to consciousness and free will. It's a short episode--you have time to listen to it twice if needed. Here goes...



My brother, Bill, and I love to ponder the nature of time, space, and reality. This week we discussed an article printed in The Essential List newsletter put out by the BBC called "The bizarre quantum paradox of 'negative time'. We recognized that the theory called "block universe" described in the article is exactly what I have been calling the Cherry-Jello-universe. I've written about this block universe in two previous articles and one podcast episode.



Here's the original blog post:



A Simple Explanation of Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry-Jello Universe



It's been a very long time since I developed any new concepts to add to A Simple Explanation, spending the past couple of years concentrating instead on the Gnostic Gospel. So my longtime readers may be very happy to see this new posting featuring the torus, consciousness, and Jello?



Yesterday my brother and I were musing over the nature of time--what is it exactly? It isn't a thing, it is nowhere to be located. Is it therefore a force? This was my response. I have long thought of the universe in this fashion, but I had never written it down or even shared it with my brother until after our phone call. He flipped out over it. Let's see what you think...



A Giant Bowl of Jello



Here is how I picture time, space, and consciousness —



We live in a Jello universe--a gigantic, torus-shaped, bowl of gelatin, studded with an infinite number of cherries.



The Jello is the matrix that holds everything that ever was or will be. It is the ground state.



The cherries are every thing that ever were or will be--all potential events, all potential objects. An infinite array of cherries already laid out as unrealized potential.



Consciousness is each spark of life/consciousness making its free will way through this vast ocean of Jello.



Time can only be apprehended through consciousness; time is nowhere to be found if there is no observer.



The cherries are the full panoply of choices we could make along the way.



Our free will chooses to swim this way and that as it moves toward the next cherry of choice. This free will is swimming from the middle of the torus in the direction of the outside boundary of the giant torus. All of these cherries are being held within the shape of the torus—the doughy part of the donut.



Every lifetime is the trace of the worm-like path our consciousness chooses as it travels through the universe of cherries.



In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in potential. It is our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time.



My brother, the professor of Philosophy, notes that this way of looking at time and consciousness may have just solved one of the longstanding ...

Gnosis means knowing, and to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. The gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate, out of the Nag Hammadi codices, but even more than that, I'm deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above.



As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible, because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council around 360 A.D. under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope, and none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which scriptures are holy, and this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirit’s leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray, and there is a lot of information out there on the internet that can lead you astray.



For over 10 years now I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.  The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In A Simple Explanation there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along, because they help to illuminate this Gnostic Gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ.



We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings because, in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression, “As above, so below.” The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called roots.



The same is true with us humans and all other Second Order Powers; we share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self's unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform, each lives their own life, and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ. Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional.



Our bodies hold countless units of consciousness, all working together according to the Simple Golden Rule



Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father and the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if instead I turn inward, I am as near to God as the center of all of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering. When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man,

We’re talking this week about what I call units of consciousness. Consciousness is a big topic. Let’s start by thinking of our own consciousness. In Gnosticism we say that there are three different orientations to self-awareness. This is generally called three types of people: the spiritual, the psychological (called psychical), and the material type that is oriented toward their body’s level of awareness (called hylic). Most people’s self-awareness arises from their psychological level of functioning—their ego. Spiritual types add the voice of the spiritual level to their self-awareness. Here at Gnostic Insights we call this spiritual aspect their Self (with a capital S). The physical or material type of person focuses on their body and its needs and abilities. When their body performs well, or their body’s needs are satiated, their ego is pleased. They may or may not ever dip a toe into the spiritual level of self-awareness until they inevitably face the afterlife.



Now the interesting thing about what I call units of consciousness is that every living thing in our universe carries a piece of the originating consciousness of the Father. The term unit of consciousness applies equally well to any size creature, from the smallest bacteria or cell on up through the largest of the Second Order Powers. On the other hand you have the mud—that being the smallest subatomic particles, protons and whatnot, on up through the atoms, molecules, and elements—which are unconscious and operated by the Demiurge. That mud level of nonliving material arises from the deficient pleroma of the Demiurge. The egoic consciousness of the Demiurge is disconnected from its higher Self—the Aeon Logos—and so it has forgotten the love and memory of the Father and the ethereal plane because those spiritual aspects are part of the One Self and not the ego. After the fall of Logos, the Demiurge was aware of only the egoic portion of Logos and the shadows of the Pleroma of Logos that became the hylic material of this fallen cosmos.



We 2nd Order Powers are melded to the demiurgic material below us and are infused with life from above



Every nonliving thing in our universe belongs to the demiurgic consciousness, whereas every living thing is a true, self-aware unit of consciousness that flows unimpeded through the Son, through the Fullness, and on into all living creatures as the Self. When I first came up with this idea of units of consciousness in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I thought that if every manifest object in our universe is a piece of the mind of the Father then it has to be a piece of consciousness, yet there was always a schism between the living and the non-living creation. But with the hindsight of Gnostic realization I now see that the nonliving “mud” is without consciousness and is ruled by the strong bonds of the Demiurge, whereas the living “meat” of our universe embodies the top-down consciousness of the originating Source—the Father.







The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will.



The Father’s source consciousness is illimitable, undifferentiated consciousness without particular thought. Once the Father had a thought, that is referred to as the Son, S-O-N. The Son contains all of the Father’s qualities, like a bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. And the Son is an encapsulation of the Father, with all of the traits of the Father, except now in a particular place, so to speak—a unit of consciousness. The Son is what is called a monad with a unique and particular point of view.



So the Son is the first unit of consciousness. And then, according to our Gnostic studies, the Son immediately differentiated into the ALL and the Fullness of God, which is all of the traits of the Son of God broken down into th...

Last week I was interviewed for the Belcultassi podcast out of England. It was an interesting and interactive interview of gnostic insights combined with Mr. Belcultassi’s focus on Gurdjieff. I'd call this an intermediate level gnostic interview... The interview was prerecorded and aired on 2/27/25. I sat through the entire run of the show and made additional comments in the chat bar. Here's the link:




https://youtu.be/i0f-XBReeU8




Dreams--Parables of the Night



Today's episode is a replay of an episode first posted July 9, 2021. In those early days of the podcast, there were no accompanying transcripts. So here is your first chance to read the transcript of this episode.



This episode is about dreams. What are they and how can you go about keeping track of and interpreting your own dreams? I was first trained in dream interpretation back when I was working on my master's degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and this was a gestalt type of dream interpretation, as popularized by Fritz Perls. Later on I spent a number of years teaching myself Jungian dream interpretation. Then when I was working on my master's degree at Azusa Pacific University, which is a Christian university, I studied dream work through the lens of the Bible and also incorporated Jungian dream interpretation into that practice, and dream work became one of my major modalities when working with counseling clients. And then later on again, when I was working on my PhD, I studied the hermeneutics and rhetoric of dreams, because my PhD is in rhetoric, and hermeneutics is the flip side of the coin of rhetoric.



Rhetoric is the ability to persuade others of your point of view, and hermeneutics is the ability to decipher points of view. So, I've written a number of articles over the years about dream interpretation. If any of you would like dreams to be interpreted, you may go to my GnosticInsights.com website and send me a message using the comment form, and we can talk it over.



So by now, having listened to episodes of Gnostic Insights, you understand what a meme is in the sense that we use it here on Gnostic Insights. A meme is a basic unit of information. It's not just the cute posters that people make on the internet. And I suggest that our personalities are largely defined by the memes that we hold on to, and it's these memes and our reactions to them that contribute to our behaviors and to our karma. These memes constitute what could be called vibratory patterns that are held in the transpersonal field, or sometimes known as the Akashic Record or the quantum vacuum. This is a shared memory field accessed by all of us here on Earth. These memes aren't personal within our brains, but they live in this shared transpersonal space.



So, apparently, personal memes are actually harmonics of the collective memes that we all share in common with everyone who actually holds on to that meme. The particular shadings of your memes differ slightly from the next person's as to be expected among fractal replications of a single phenomenon, but all who hold the same meme recognize its pattern and are affected by it. So, for example, the meme of cup. If I say cup, you have a vision of a cup that immediately comes into your mind, and I have a vision of a cup that immediately comes into my mind. Mine might be a large coffee mug with pictures of kitty cats on it. Yours might be a dainty little cup made of porcelain with beautiful flowers or any other sort of cup. But it's the idea of cupness. The cup is what holds the liquid, and it has a handle. That's what a cup is.



So it's the same cup meme. Plato called these the forms. It's the same meme, but we each have a slightly different shading on our cup meme,