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The purpose of Gnostic Insights is to help us all remember the gnosis we were born with, which is knowledge of where we come from and who or what is the originating consciousness, as well as the nature of our relationship to that originating consciousness. So far, we have looked at the Father, which is what we call the originating consciousness, and the Son, which is that consciousness made into a particular entity that we call the Son.
The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but rather like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father, now contained within the bucket. So it’s exactly the same as the Father, but it is a particularity. It is a singularity.
As soon as the Son was formed it immediately created more entities from its own Self in the same fashion that the Son came out of the Father. The distinct characteristics within the Son are variously referred to as the Totalities, the ALL, and the Fullness of God.
The ALL emerged from the Son, and it was said that this wasn’t like a casting off in the manner that a fungus casts off spores which then grow into their own little fungi. This was more of a spreading out of the Son and, by extension, the Father through the Son. The Totalities of the ALL remain completely within and inhabiting the Son.
In my description of the Fullness, I picture rays of a star, with each of the rays being part of the ALL, and each one of them expressing a slightly different characteristic of the Son out of which they spread forth.
My imagery for the Son is like a diffuse cloud sitting in this great inky blackness which is the Father, and out of this cloud comes a starburst, with each one of the rays of the star is one of the Totalities. At first the ALL was identical to Son, and all of these parts of the Son formed a unified Totality. As soon as the ALL came to know itself and to recognize its own individual consciousness, each one of the rays became its own singularity.
And once they did that the Totalties immediately recognized a self identity and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible. All possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack, with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher.
In my illustrations, I picture the Hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannon balls, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannon balls on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid, until finally at the top you have only a single golden orb.
There is a principle in Gnosticism that I call “the higher the fewer.” Using that principle the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own individual point-of-view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven.
Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we’ve hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself.
This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through the Aeons, which is to say, through the fractals that come out of the Son. As we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son.
The Tripartite Tractate says, “They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them. When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the […] and he brought forth those within him, but since he is as he is, he is a spring which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it.”
“Generations,” as the Tripartite Tractate uses the word, means “to create, to generate.” Here it is saying that when the Son was formed, all of the Totalities that make up the body of the Son were formed along with him, and their formation or generation did not lessen the Son or subtract anything away from the Son’s essence.
The word “deficient” as used here simply means not yet manifest. Deficient can’t indicate any shortcoming or inadequacy, because the Son is a complete embodiment of the Father, and his Totalities are a Fullness. The missing word indicated by the ellipsis […] probably refers to the structure of the eternal heavens; not “the universe,” because the material universe occurs further on down the line. So it likely reads, “When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the heavenly plan and he brought forth those within him…”
The Tripartite Tractate says of these Totalities: “While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depth knew them, but they were unable to know the depth in which they were. Nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father and they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed, so that it has been discovered that they were like a fetus.”
And so now we have these potential entities existing like a seed, living within the Father; existing as thoughts of the Father. They don’t know themselves, they’re not yet awake. They don’t know themselves and they don’t know where they are. They don’t even realize that they comprise the body of the Son. And in that sense they are like a fetus that is still inside the womb, still sleeping.
The Tripartite Tractate carries on to say that, “The one who first thought of them, the Father, — not only so that they might exist for him, but also that they might exist for themselves as well, that they might then exist in his thought as mental substance and that they might exist for themselves too, — sowed a thought like a spermatic seed.”
So, in other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading consciousness, awakened consciousness, throughout the entire body of the Son. He doesn’t want them only to be unthinking constituents of the Son, making up the overall body of the Son. The Father wants them all to have their own existence and their own realizations, their own consciousness, their own Self. The Tripartite describes them “like seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth.”
So the fractals of the ALL were asleep, and the Father “wished to grant that they might come into being, as faultless ones.” The Tripartite says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them, “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.” Meaning that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. That is all they knew: that they had a benefactor. Somebody cared for them and wanted only good for them. They awoke to Self realization because someone loved them. This beneficence was their first knowledge.
Now the Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that, “The One whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the One from whom they take their name, he is the Son, who is full, complete and faultless. He brought him forth mingled with what came forth from him […].” Again confirming that the Totalities coexist with the Son, although they are not yet fully awakened.
“As for the parts in which he exists in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for <them> to see him and speak about that which they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them, because it is possible for them to comprehend him.” And remember that in last week’s episode I used the analogy that the Totalities are to the Son as the cells that make up our bodies are to us—we wear them like a garment over our Self, and they wear our eternal Self over their little cells. We go everywhere they go, and they go everywhere we go.
“He, however, is as he is, incomparable. In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself, even in his ineffability, hidden, and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore, the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest, so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness … And just as the admirations of the silences are eternal generations and they are mental offspring, so too the dispositions of the word are spiritual emanations. Both of them admirations and dispositions, since they belong to a word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring, and roots which live forever, appearing to be offspring which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring to the glory of the Father.”
This passage is saying that the manner by which the Totalities become awakened is through the process of praising the Father, singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. In other words, they come to Selfhood by giving glory to the Father. The “admirations of the silences,” which is to say, the glory given by the Totalities, “dispose” them to their individuality—“appearing to be offspring which have come forth by themselves.”
The passage also says that the Totalities are the Son’s “seeds and thoughts,” and that they will live forever. This affirms that the Son also lives forever.
The Tripartite Tractate then confirms the “heavenly plan” we filled in earlier as the missing words in the ellipsis, saying, “But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire.”
Perhaps this is a good place to begin talking about fractals. Fractals are a mathematical terms for objects that are “self-similar” and “replicate at larger and smaller scales.”
This leads us to discussing the concept of fractals. Every now and then I talk about fractals and if you don’t know what a fractal is I would like to explain it to you. Fractals are not discussed in the Nag Hammadi or in the Qumran manuscripts. Yet, fractals are all around us, all of the time. Our consciousness, like that of the Aeons, is a fractal expression of the Fullness.
Fractals are now recognized as a basic principle of mathematics and this manifested universe. But unless this concept of fractals is pointed out to you, you may never notice it because fractals weren’t even recognized or formulated until the 1970s. It was then that a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in the first published paper on fractal geometry. I talk about fractals a lot on my blog, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You can find the fullest explanation of fractals in the article that I wrote and published on the blog on January 6th of 2011, called “The Fractal Roots of Consciousness.” So if you’d like to study more about fractals and see imagery of what fractals look like, you may go to https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com and look up that article in the topical index over on the right-hand side of the page. But I’m going to explain it a bit right now for our immediate purposes.
First off, let’s look at some fractals that you are undoubtedly familiar with. Think of the branching structure of a river delta where it flows into the sea. You have a river and then it branches. And then each of those branches, branches again, and each of those branches branches, and they send out more and more branching structures. You can see them on Google Earth all over the world. Each of those branches are called fractals.
Using the same branching structure, roots of a plant send out finer and finer tendrils at each level of fractal branching into the soil. You start with one stem of the plant, but then the stem branches out and branches out and branches out with finer and finer tendrils as it goes into the soil, searching for nutrients and water.
Another good way to see fractals is to take a stock of broccoli and perform a simple experiment as demonstrated on my YouTube channel. If you go to the Cyd Ropp YouTube channel and look for Simple Explanation videos, you’ll find one that’s called Broccoli Fractal Demonstration.
Here’s how it works: you start with a big stalk of broccoli, fresh from the garden or market. You have probably noticed this before, that if you pull one of the larger clumps off of that stalk, it looks just like a smaller version of that first stalk you were holding. And then you can take another clump off of that smaller stalk, and it looks just like those two larger stalks, only smaller. And you can keep breaking off smaller and smaller fractals of broccoli at least seven times, always resulting in a stalk of broccoli that looks just like the others, only smaller. Each of those smaller pieces of broccoli are what is called a fractal iteration. This broccoli experiment is a nice little demonstration of what a fractal is.
I suggest that the consciousness of God is distributed in fractals, the same way that the broccoli stalk or the river delta or the tree roots are fractals. So we can imagine that the root of consciousness, the Father, is like the mother plant. The Son is that first bunch off of that mother plant of the Father–that first broccoli stalk if you will. The Totalities of the ALL make up the Pleroma of that first bunch of the Son. When the ALL becomes self-aware it recognizes itself in all of its variables and potential as the entire blueprint of our universe–because it is, after all, the mind of God. Each one of those Aeons of the Fullness of God is a fractal, and each of them replicates, on a smaller scale, the original Son who Himself is also a fractal iteration of the original consciousness of the Father.
Now, one thing about consciousness fractals, or “units of consciousness” as I call them in my Simple Explanation theory, is that the Father is consciousness itself, and off of that initial consciousness come fractals that are each a unit of consciousness. So the Universal Unit of Consciousness is the largest fractal that we are aware of and it holds all of the blueprints and all of the potentialities for our entire universe, as thought arising out of the originating Father’s consciousness. And each one of the fractal iterations that come off of that Universal Unit of Consciousness also holds the potentiality of the Father as expressed by the Son. These fractal potentialities are first expressed as the combination of traits called the Pleroma of God, also known as the Fullness of God. When the Fullness sits in its unified perfection, ALL of the traits of the Son are on full display.
We will talk more later about how these fractal units of consciousness play out in our lives, when we begin to cover gnostic psychology.
So, just to run it past you again real fast, the Father is the originating consciousness. The first fractal of the Father is the Son. The Son quickly became a Father itself by branching out into the Totalities of the ALL. And as soon as those differentiations of the ALL arose, the Totalities of the ALL became aware of their own selves and they sorted themselves into the pyramidal hierarchical shape that is called the Fullness of God or the Pleroma.
Each one of those glowing golden cannon balls, as I described them in a previous podcast, each one of those is a full fractal of the Son of God, but it only expresses its place, position, rank, function, and point-of-view. In a similar way, our DNA expresses our body, yet our DNA carries a tremendous amount of unexpressed information that apparently goes far beyond our body. This extra 95% of our DNA is a mystery to geneticists who call it “junk” DNA. We can think of the junk DNA as the full Pleroma of our physical selves, not expressed in this lifetime.
So each of the Totalities, once they’ve become those little cannonball shapes stacked into their pyramidal hierarchy, are known as Aeons. And each Aeon is a fractal of the Fullness of God, but each Aeon only expresses its job, its point-of-view, its position, place, power, and name.
And now perhaps we can grasp the following passage from the Tripartite Tractate more clearly, incorporating our understanding of fractals:
“There is no need for voice and spirit, mind and word, because there is no need to work at that which they desire to do, but on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire. And the one whom they conceive of, and whom they speak about, and the one toward whom they move, and the one in whom they are, and the one whom they hymn, thereby glorifying him, he has sons. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they have come, according to their mutual assistance, since they assist one another like the unbegotten ones.”
They assist one another, working together. And this brings us back to the Simple Golden Rule, from A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which we will cover in depth later in this series [book].
For now, this is what the Simple Golden Rule says:
Units of consciousness work together with their neighbors to hold hands and help one another with knowledge, with physical assistance, and with love, to build the next level up, to build something they can’t make on their own. They will make it together with those with whom are working. The Simple Golden Rule is a fractal principle that runs our universe: holding hands in cooperation, being useful, giving. This is the base line of the golden rule and it works for everything. And it began up here, before creation, within this entity known as the pre-existent Church, which is the body of the Son.
I would love to hear from you. I encourage you to go to the Gnostic Insights dot com website and find my comment form and then write to me that way. I always respond to your questions and comments. I would love to dialogue with any of you that would like to talk this material over.
So thank you for spending this time with me and onward and upward. And God bless.