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Father, Son, ALL 2024 edition
Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share, well, what the title of this podcast is—Gnostic Insights—with you.
Hey, I have some exciting news for you. I’m nearing completion of reformatting The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate for publication. I anticipate uploading it in the next few days, and then I’ll need to examine the proof copy before releasing it for distribution. The Gnostic Reformation could really use your help in the form of contributions for the cause, for advertising and promotion.
Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the audiobook, and that will also be available by the end of summer, and I need funds for paying for his narration as well. So now is the time to contribute what you can to this effort. If you need a bribe, I’d be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book in exchange for your generous contribution of at least $50 to cover the cost. If that’s the case, please contact me privately with your home address for mailing. You can use the contact form at GnosticInsights.com and let me know. However, if you can’t afford the $50, that’s fine—any contribution would help. I appreciate whatever you can contribute. Thank you so much. Onward and upward!
It’s summertime, and I’m distracted with working on the new book and with all of the events surrounding summer activities, so I’m going to rerun one of the foundational episodes from 2021, and this is about the nature of the Father, the Son, and then the Fullness. Enjoy!
The Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the great purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that package, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the Bible out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene.
These ideas were preserved in a set of books called the Nag Hammadi, which were buried in the desert to keep them from the purge, and then they were rediscovered and dug up in 1945, so they have been kept away from almost 2,000 years of formal study and formal theology. What you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts.
So what I have done is study one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. I like to begin with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then what happens in our lives and why are we here. And then the final roll-up is the very, very end of time as predicted by the scriptures.
So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed.
And so if you think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history—it is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind, something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the consciousness of the Father, and we only say the Father—there’s no gender, obviously. The Father is not a man with a beard and long robes.
Obviously there’s no gender, it’s a singular consciousness, okay? So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am translating for you, it is referred to as the Father.
And this Father, its basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there.
Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son, S-O-N.
So now we have the Father and a Son. So in the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of itself. The Son is the Father having a thought. The Son is the Father knowing itself, as the Father having a sensation of its own eternal self. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells.
Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, arose at once. Capital A-L-L.
The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father, because it is a reflection of the Father’s traits. And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In religious talk, the ALL is known as the preexistent Church.
Not your church down on the street corner with the people in it singing hymns on Sunday, but this is the true preexistent Church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the Church exists from the beginning.” The Tripartite goes on to say, “Before the ALL arose from the Father’s thought, He knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else. For they were within the Father as an embryo, or an unsprouted seed.”
So they were potential. They were there, they live in the Father, they live in the Son, but they don’t know anything, they don’t know themselves, they are not self-aware.
The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, it says, “Because they were newly formed, the Father concealed the ALL’s perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge. This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so the ALL would be able to relate to the Son and see the Father’s glory according to the ability of each one to receive Him.”
So nobody sees the Father. The Father is unknowable. The Father is too immense. When people say, Oh, you can’t conceive of God, God’s all too big and unknowable, that’s true, but God made itself into a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And one of the reasons the Son is there is because we can know the Son. We can’t know the Father, but we can know the Son.
The Tripartite Tractate describes this this way, “The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL, and they understood who He is, and He is covered by the ALL. And with the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father.”
So this can be a little confusing because you have the Originating Consciousness, the God Above All Gods, which is the Originating Consciousness or the Father.
The Father had a sense of itself. This was called the Son, S-O-N. The Son immediately produced itself, and this is called the ALL. With the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father. The Originating Father, that consciousness so lonely and still for eternity, now had a child who had also borne fruit from His glory. And in this way the One begat the ALL, and the Father loved them all as He loved His Son.
As I said, the ALL is referred to as the pre-existent Church, and it’s also called the Second Glory. The First Glory was the Son. The Second Glory is the ALL.
The Originating Father’s consciousness is incomprehensible. Its scope and greatness is so immense and so unfathomable that the Tripartite Tractate says anyone trying to take hold of it would be annihilated. And so the Father created the Son, giving form to what had been His formless and solitary Self. For the Father’s desire was to be known. His desire was to love and to be loved. The Son that arose is perfect, even as His Father is perfect, and He carries within His perfect form every quality of the Father.
Being the perfect image of the Father, the Son’s inherent creativity spread itself out into the ALL, like rays shining from a star. In my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I illustrate these concepts. The way I think of it is this way.
When I picture the originating consciousness of the Original Father, I see just total blackness, an entirety of dark, dark blackness. Then when I picture the Son emerging and being held by that blackness, I see the Son as kind of this foggy light that begins, very diffuse, very foggy, that begins to emerge out of the inky blackness. That is what I see as the Son.
Then immediately coming out of that foggy image of the Son, like rays of a sun spreading out, I see bright golden light coming from the of that fogginess and beaming outward like the Sun. These are just helpful illustrations for me. So when I picture the ALL, I picture it as a bright yellow starburst.
The ALL, like the Father and the Son, is infinite and limitless in its scope and capability. Each individual ray of that Son emerges from the central seed of the Son, shining forth as one shared body. In the same way that a crystal refracts light into all the colors of the rainbow, so the Son beams forth every one of his countless qualities as the individual and yet unified rays of the ALL. The ALL is a single entity, yet it has differentiations. Picture each one as a ray coming out from a central starburst.
The Son intimately knows each facet of the ALL, for the ALL are all facets of himself. The ALL is at the same time one and many, one and all. The ALL is a selfless diversity, giving glory to the Father with a single song of praise.
So you can picture the ALL as singing in unison when it sings. The Son, who became the Father of the ALL, shines forth as the emergent rays of the ALL. So these are the basic ideas behind the Father, the Son, and the ALL.
One more thing before we leave this idea. What does glory mean? Because glory is one of these religious terms that is used quite a lot. But what is glory? The way I interpret glory, glory is the fabulousness of someone.
I think we have an intuitive sense of what glory means. Glory is, oh my gosh, that is so fabulous! So we say that the Father is glorious, the Son is glorious.
And what does it mean to give glory? Because we’re to give glory to God. Giving glory means that you are focused on the object in adoration and love. That is giving glory. So glory is the wondrousness of the object, and giving glory is reflecting that glory back at your object of devotion. God is glorious, and when I give glory to God, I am loving God by seeing that glory and acknowledging it and reflecting the glory back to the God. Glory is not something that you can offer to another person.
When you glorify another person or thing, that’s what I would call vain glory, V-A-I-N, because no one but the Creator of the universe qualifies to generate and to receive glory. And glory is not worship for the sake of worship, as if God needed our adoration. This would imply that the Father of the universe is hungry and insecure and wheedling for our affection, as if we mere mortals could offer up anything of value not already owned by the Lord of creation. That just doesn’t make any sense. So giving glory is not for God’s benefit, it’s for our benefit. The reason we give glory to God is because that is the method by which we tune in to God’s frequency, you could say. Giving glory to God is how we synchronize ourselves with the one consciousness of which we are essentially fractal units. I’ll explain fractals at some other time.
Why would we want to synchronize with the Father? The Gnostic Gospel tells us that we were designed with a built-in homing device that gives us indescribable pleasure when we are in communion with one another and when we are operating according to plan. The closer we are to dialing in to the Father’s frequency, the happier we feel. It is through this process of giving glory that we realign ourselves with the universal unit of consciousness, or what we are calling the Father or the God Above All Gods. This is how we align ourselves for instruction and for renewal.
When we center ourselves and sit in silence with the Father, we feel peace, happiness, joy, and love. When we acknowledge the Maker and focus in that direction, we give glory and we are united in glory. And when we give glory alongside others who are themselves giving glory, we share with them a worship experience of the One that transcends what any of us can experience alone.
So this is not for the benefit of a needy god, but for the edification of the saints. Edification means strengthening. It is through giving glory that the choir, of which we are a part, is able to sing along with one perfect voice.
It is very important to choose your objects of glory carefully. In this distracting world in which we find ourselves, we are giving glory away right and left to things that do not deserve glory. We glorify movie stars and television stars. We glorify sports figures. We glorify models and products that we love. This is a distraction away from true glory, and it doesn’t make us happy.
Only glorifying the Father in love can make us happy. The other objects that we may find ourselves glorifying, these are imitations, these are deficiencies, and so they cannot ever fulfill us the way that we hope they will. I think this is a good beginning for our basic concepts.
We’ll talk a lot more about all of this in podcasts to come. So thank you so much for being with me today, and I’ll see you again next time. God bless!