Transpersonal Consciousness and Gnosis 2024

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week I’m sharing with you an episode that was broadcast in 2021, very close to the beginning of the Gnostic Insights podcast, but it’s really good as I listen to it and I am going back and slightly re-editing it, and I think that you’ll get a lot out of this episode. It’s foundational, alright.

Last week I made a plea to you for donations to help me publish this book that I’m putting out now. Please, if you can afford to, this is a good time to chip in and give me some financial support. I really hate asking for money. This goes against my grain in a big, big way, so please don’t confuse me with the televangelists or any other person out there with a podcast that’s always asking for money. You know I don’t ask for money very often. You can think of yourself as contributing to this extremely important book that’s coming out. You will be part of history at this point.

I’ve inserted a donation form at the bottom of this page for you to use.

That book, of course, is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. You know, I started with a Christian publisher and that ran into troubles, and so now I am producing the book myself. I have completed the editing, the layout, the typesetting, and now I have uploaded it, and I’m waiting for my proof copy, at which point then I can put it on the market and release it to you.

Okay, enjoy this week’s episode. Onward and upward!

My goal here at this podcast is to share with you information from the Nag Hammadi, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate, concerning the gnosis of our existence, which is a big topic. Gnosis means knowledge, and the knowledge we talk about here is the knowledge of our preexistent conscious spirits and our souls, and how these fit into these bodies that we wear and we walk around with, and how it is that we interact with one another. And the reason it seems to me that it’s important to discover the gnosis that is within you is because this is your personal reassurance that you’re not alone in this universe.

We are not alone. We come from the God Above All Gods initially, and we pass down through the Son and through the Aeons and the Fullness of God. Our spirit comes directly from the God Above All Gods.

It’s a conduit. It’s a flowing stream. So we are embedded within the consciousness of the originating consciousness. That is like the background matrix of not only of our universe, but before our universe and outside of our universe. We are a part of this great Being that we call the Father in Gnostic studies. And I share with you the gnosis that I have gained over my entire lifetime of thinking about, praying to, pursuing the ideas of, in all the different forms, this form of consciousness.

You know, as a child, I began these kinds of studies very young, probably around age four, oftentimes in conversation with my older brother, Bill, whom you run into here and there on Gnostic Insights. And then I majored in psychology because I wanted to understand psychology. I majored in education because I wanted to learn how to share and to educate other people. I have an advanced degree in counseling and an advanced degree in communication, yet I’ve discovered that all of these degrees don’t really matter much if there’s no one to talk to about it. So my purpose here at Gnostic Insights is to share with you the gnosis that I have come across, not so that you will adapt anything I say, but so that it triggers within you the gnosis that you carry, because we’re all sharing the same stream of consciousness.

I would very much like to hear from you, because as an educator, it helps me to know where you are at, and I need to have questions from you in order to stimulate answers from me. I often feel as though I’ve used up all the information I have to share, and I know that’s not true, because my gosh, I’ve read so many books, and I’ve had so many papers on these topics, yet I need to know what you want to know in order to know what direction I should go with these episodes. So please, go to the GnosticInsights.com website, and go to the comments form, and send me your email, send me your comments, send me your questions, and then I can address them, hopefully publicly here at Gnostic Insights. I can preserve your anonymity, that’s fine.

I’d like to know where you are in your Gnostic search, and then we can go together from there. So, this week I was at something of a loss about what to talk about, and so once again I am dipping back into the wells of time to my Simple Explanation blog, and I’m pulling out an article from January 31st of 2011.

I’ll read it to you, it’s in Simple Explanation terminology, but then I’ll translate it into Gnostic speak, so that we can see how these things go together. The Gnosis I share with you comes not only from my own personal experience, but it comes from the Nag Hammadi, and primarily the text in the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate. Our focus here is on consciousness and your life.

It’s not on the names of the 365 angels or anything like that. To me, these are irrelevant to our pursuit of Gnosis. In my mind, what we need to understand is our relationship to the God Above All Gods, and our relationship to the Son, to the Christ, to the Fullness of God in the Pleroma, and we are fractals of all of that consciousness.

And so, our lives resonate to the Fullness of God. This has all happened before, and it has happened at a different level and at different times in history. Most of the stories, most of the things that happen to us in our lives are fractals of things that have happened before. There are only so many stories. There really aren’t that many different things that can happen to you in your life. They boil down to the large archetypes.

You know, Jung talked about archetypes. And he got those archetypes, as it turns out, from his reading of the Nag Hammadi. When I was a psychology major and a counseling major at the university, I studied Jung. I liked Jung. I never realized that Jung got this information from ancient spiritual texts, the same ancient spiritual texts that we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. So, the archetypes that Jung speaks of, which I learned as simply Jung’s theory of transpersonal psychology, these are not Jung’s ideas. These are eternal concepts that were preserved for us in the form of the Nag Hammadi codices. And you know, the Nag Hammadi was buried in the desert for just about 2,000 years and stumbled across in 1945. So, they have been preserved for us unmolested by 2,000 years of Christian interpretation and theology.

They were thrown out of the Christian orthodoxy around the time of the Nicene Council and buried underground in order to preserve them for us. And this is what we are sharing. So, today what I would like to talk about is an article I wrote back in January 31st of 2011, and it’s called, A Simple Explanation of Transpersonal Memory.

And you can find this at my original blog called asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com. Transpersonal psychology deals with mystical and spiritual experiences of the human psyche. Transpersonal memory is defined as memories that are shared at a cultural level, rather than at a personal level. Transpersonal memories reveal themselves in many ways, through societal archetypes and archetypal dreams, through subconscious assumptions, stereotypes, and expectations, and through strange occurrences such as the 100th monkey phenomenon.

Jung referred to this transpersonal memory as the collective unconscious. Now, I quote Jung. He says, “My thesis, then, is as follows. In addition to our immediate consciousness, there exists a second psychic system of a collective universal and impersonal nature, which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily, and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

And that is from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, published in 1996. And, quoting from Wikipedia, excuse me for that, Jung also made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as being similar to Levi-Bruhl’s use of collective representations, or représentations collectives, mythological motifs, Hubert and Mauss’s categories of the imagination, and Adolf Bostein’s primordial thoughts. The Simple Explanation refers to these collective memories as culturally shared memes and meme chords.

A person can be defined by the memes they cling to. To a large extent, one’s memes shape one’s personality. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written extensively about and staked his professional reputation upon a scientifically controversial process called morphogenetic fields.

How does an oak tree develop from an acorn? By information carried in the morphogenetic field surrounding the acorn. Sheldrake explains that morphogenetic fields are to life forms, as quantum probability clouds are to subatomic particles, carrying the information that gives rise to particular biological manifestations of form. The Simple Explanation would cite these morphogenetic fields at the zero-point field at the center of the torus, part of the metaversal information streaming into our universe through our universal unit of consciousness, and that information is tempered by each organism’s karmic record and its acquired memes.

In the case of the acorn and the oak tree, the morphogenetic field of the oak tree provides the genetic blueprint, while the mama tree’s karma and memes provide the individualized epigenetic pattern that tells which genes to turn on and off. What karma can a tree have? Well, its karma is the record of its life, nutrients, history of water availability, pest attacks, and so on. And what memes can a tree hold? Well, how about, the sun feels good on my leaves, I must follow the sun. Or, there’s a pest attack on the other side of the forest, I must put out chemicals to repel that pest.

In an article published in the journal called In Context, Robert Gilman ties together morphogenetic fields and personal memories by describing how the memories generated by our brains are, “not locked in your brain, but are available through all space and all future time,” through the process of morphogenetic resonance. Gilman claims that not only is our biological form influenced by these fields, but our behavior, as well as shared memories, influence behavior.

The Simple Explanation agrees with Sheldrake and Gilman that personal memories do not reside in the meat portion of our brains, but are rather vibratory patterns held in the zero-point field and accessed through our minds. Furthermore, apparently personal memes are actually harmonics of collective memes and are shared in common with all who hold on to that meme. The particular shadings of one person’s meme differ slightly from the next person’s, as is to be expected among fractal replications of a single phenomenon, but all who hold the meme recognize its pattern and are affected by it.

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That’s the end of the article I wrote years ago, and let me talk about it in more Gnostic terms now. We exist as individual entities, and we are floating in this ocean of consciousness. The basic ocean of consciousness is referred to as the Father, and that consciousness funnels down to us, you could say, focuses on each of us in the following way.

You have the original matrix of consciousness, and then a particular instantiation or a particular thought out of that consciousness, and that is often referred to as the Son. That’s what it’s called in the Tripartite Tractate. In other books of the Nag Hammadi, this is the Barbello.

And out of that Son differentiates a myriad, an infinite number, of individual characteristics or individual laws, principles, concepts, and those are called the Totalities, or once they sort themselves and form themselves into some sort of a cooperative structure, that is called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. And I picture that, by the way, of course, as a hierarchy, as a pyramid. And that’s why these pyramid forms are so popular in ancient styles of thinking.

The pyramid, the mountain—that is a remembrance of the Pleroma above. And the Pleroma is another word for everything, which is referring to the Fullness of God, which is referring to this myriad of infinite variations of the one thought. Now, we are the fruit of that Fullness of God pyramid.

We come out of the pyramid. And the way that happens with us is that those Aeons that live in that Pleroma, the Aeons of the Fullness of God, they get together, they admire, give glory to the Father together, and in their mixtures of the various Aeons, another level of personalities, another level of entities are conceived. And you can think of those as the forms that we become, as the forms of each of us. And then we come out into this material world as those forms.

Now, the transpersonal consciousness is the thoughts of the Fullness of God, and we all share those thoughts. We are all plugged into the Fullness of God. We directly come down from them.

We all share the same Fullness of God, whether or not you remember it consciously, we all remember it subconsciously. And the shared thoughts that we all share, this is referred to by Jung as the transpersonal field. And when Rupert Sheldrake talks about the morphogenetic field around each individual life-form—the morphogenetic field around an acorn that causes it to become the tree—this is the form, this is the pattern that is coming out of the transpersonal field and informing or giving form to that life-form.

Life-forms don’t come from the mud up. Life-forms do not aggregate upward from the molecular level on up the way that evolution suggests it does. That is an error. That is a materialist worldview. But you know, no matter how scientists try, they cannot prod a piece of mud into life. It is impossible.

Life comes from above. Life comes from the top down. Our material comes from the bottom up, but it’s dead. It is a product of the Fall. It doesn’t come from the Pleroma of God. The mud comes from the Fall.

The Spirit, and this is what is meant by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is flowing unimpeded like the river from the Father’s consciousness through the Son, differentiating out into all of the Totalities, now into the Fullness of God, that great pyramid in the sky where the Aeons all sit and sing in perfect harmony, glorifying the original consciousness. And they sit and they dream of stuff the way we dream of stuff. They come up with ideas and stories. They come up with books and screenplays. They come up with works of art and music. That’s all going on up above.

Our inventors and scientists and musicians and writers, they’re tapping into the Fullness of God. They’re bringing these archetypal stories down to us. So they are singular archetypal stories, but then they become flavored with the individualized memes of this person walking around down here on earth, because our personalities and our basic spiritual composition is precisely patterned upon the forms in the Pleroma, in the Fullness of God.

But once we are instantiated here on this material plane, we acquire these ideas from each other, and these are what I call the memes. Everything you learn, everything you experience, everything you hate, everything you love, no matter what it is, these are ideas that are acquired down here. That is, the earthly memes are all acquired down here, and they color your interpretation and restatement of the archetypal pattern that exists in the Fullness of God.

So our life is a combination of the pure knowledge informing us, and that’s the gnosis from above, as well as these loves and hates and knowledge that we acquire down here below, and those are the memes. And then another aspect that colors our interpretation of the archetypal forms is our own personal karma, and karma is your record of consequences, of actions. So your karma may or may not allow you to even hear what someone else is saying, because as a consequence of prior actions, that is your karma, you are either open or closed to what they have to say, to their memes.

So the transpersonal consciousness, the morphogenetic field, these are the same as the patterns of the Fullness of God, and they don’t live inside of our brains. They live outside of us. They are floating. They are the sea. They are the ocean in which we are immersed, and your karma and your meme bundles pretty much determine how much of that transpersonal field you’re able to tap into. And this is the bottom line of what I attempt to do here.

When I share thoughts, when I share my memes with you, I’m attempting to suggest that these memes are occurring in the transpersonal field, and these are the virtues. The virtues, by the way, are the memes of the Fullness of God, and the Tripartite Tractate is a book that shows how these memes came to be in the first place, and how it is that they come to us, and who we are in relationship to the Fullness of God. So that is the purpose of today’s episode, just to share with you this idea that there is a transpersonal consciousness that we all share.

You could call this the mind of the Father. In our earthly realm, we have generated a lot of memes, like the cloud, right? And the cloud, I do think, is a technological representation of the transpersonal field, and it houses these earthly memes that people are generating. Now the error of the cloud, of the human-built cloud, is that some of the things that are in it are true, and some of them aren’t true. Some of them are lies. Some of them are hurtful. Whereas the information that comes down to us directly from the Fullness of God, the gnosis, is all true. It’s all helpful. It’s all loving. It’s all good.

So rather than spending all of our time delving into our earthly generated meme cloud, which has a lot of crap in it, it’s a good idea to focus upward and tap directly into the gnosis that you can trust. There, there’s a bumper sticker, gnosis you can trust. So that’s all I have to share with you today.

I hope that you reach out and talk to me using the comment form at GnosticInsights.com, because I would love to be able to respond to your questions and observations, and this will give me something to talk about on the next episode. So until then, look inward, look upward, onward and upward, and God bless.