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Fractals of Colossians
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I thought I would share with you one of the books out of the New Testament as translated by David Bentley Hart and published by Yale University Press, which, as I’ve said before, is very Gnostic in its interpretation because it uses the same words that our Gnostic Gospel uses. The translation is more precise than your normal conventional Bible.
Colossians is purportedly Paul writing a letter to this church in a town called Colossae. And I’m going to go through this verse by verse so that you can see how similar this is to the cosmology of the Tripartite Tractate that I am generally sharing with you. And he is writing this letter to the church in Colossae to exhort them to righteousness, let’s say, to help them walk in the path of the Christ.
And he says, for example, in chapter 1, verse 11, “being empowered with every power by the might of his glory for all endurance and longanimity, with joy.”
Longanimity means the disposition to be patient in the face of adversity, to suffer calmly. And boy, we could use some of that right now, right? You may not feel joyful all the time because of all that’s going on around us, but we can have endurance and longanimity if we’re walking with Christ, because he has the power over all of this.
“Giving thanks to the Father who has made you fit for participation in the Holy One’s allotment in the light.” And “the Holy Ones” is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, in my opinion. And they live in the light of the ethereal plane up there in the Fullness of God.
That is the place where the Aeons live. They are, “the Holy Ones who delivered us from the power of the darkness and translated us into the Kingdom of his love’s Son.”
His love’s Son—that’s a peculiar way to put it. Not his beloved Son, but the Kingdom of his love’s Son. So, the Son is the first emanation of the Father, the only emanation directly out of the Father, and he is still plugged into the Father. Whereas everything else that followed, the Fullness, and then us, and of course the various Principalities and Powers—they derive from the Son.
And remember, the Father’s love is his preeminent quality, consciousness and love, overwhelming love. He is nothing but love. He is the root of love.
Then it goes on to say, verse 14, “in whom we have the price of liberation, the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God.”
Remember, the Father, the invisible God, he’s consciousness itself. He’s the ground state matrix. He does not have a face. He does not have an image. He’s not the fellow in the Old Testament walking around in the robes with the long beard. That is not the face of God. The Son is the image of the invisible God, and he is love embodied.
It goes on to say, “firstborn of all creation.” And in the footnotes, Hart says, this can also be translated as “of every creature the firstborn” or “born prior to all creation.” So the Son is the very first emanation of the Father. He’s the first thing.
And then it says, “because in him, the Son, were created all things in the heavens and on earth, the visible as well as the invisible, whether Thrones or Lordships or Archons or Powers.” And those are the invisible spiritual Powers. And the visible, of course, is this apparently material world that we are living in.
“All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things. All things hold together in him. “
And if we’re thinking of nested fractals, even though the fallen Aeon, Logos, broke apart, and it is his shadow parts that create this material world, it’s of a lower vibratory order, we would say in our modern talk. We’re still within, ultimately, the Fullness of God. We’re still within, ultimately, the Son. The Demiurge may be our universal unit of consciousness that created this material universe, the fallen Logos, but sitting within the Son because these are all nested. He’s a fractal below the Son. All of creation are fractal offspring of the Son. And so, like any fractal formula, they continue to nest upward toward the One originating form or formula.
Picking that back up again in verse 18, “And he is the head of the body, of the assembly, who is the origin, firstborn from the dead, so that he might himself hold first place in all things.” So this is then the Christian doctrine that the Christ became embodied in the flesh of a human, Jesus, and he was dead and buried in a tomb for three days, and then he rose from the dead. And that is what makes him “the firstborn of all of the dead.”
And the promise of Christianity is that he’s the firstborn of the dead, but we will all be resurrected from the dead. So, death of this physical body that you’re walking around in right now, this is nothing to fear, because you will be resurrected the same way that Jesus was resurrected, through the power of the Son. That’s the point of Jesus being the firstborn from the dead, so that he might, “hold himself first place in all things.” Because, once again, he is our originating formula for the resurrected man. So this is again a fractal.
Verse 19, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling.”
And you see, this is an example of where our conventional Christianity has lost the actual depth of the meaning of the Fullness. This is a capitalized word, and the Fullness, according to the Tripartite Tractate and other Gnostic texts, is the place where the Aeons dwell. The Fullness is co-existent with the Son. The Son wears the Fullness like a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son. The Fullness is the breakout of all the parts of the Son. And it says, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling.” This is a fractal reference, that the Fullnesses, that is the Aeons of the Fullness, that is the pleroma, another word for Fullness, they live within the Son. So we’re nesting upward, up toward the One, you see?
That whole subtlety of what is the Fullness, and our relationship to the Fullness, and the relationship of the Fullness to the Son, has been lost. It goes untranslated in the New Testament, because the books of the New Testament that reference the Fullness and explain it, such as the Tripartite Tractate, were removed from the Bible by the Catholic Pope and the Emperor of Rome when they codified what Christianity is, and should be, and decided what texts should stay in, and what texts should be thrown out, and which priests would be honored and promoted.
So, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling, and through him to reconcile all things to him.” You see? To reconcile all things to him. Not just the ones who go to church, not just the ones who have recognized their gnosis and acknowledge the power of the Son and of the Christ, or that Jesus was the human incarnate of the Son, but rather, all things to him. And it keeps referencing throughout the whole New Testament that Christ came to reconcile all things to him. They just don’t believe it. They think, well, reconcile all things, well, who have acknowledged the Christ, and who have been baptized and cleansed of their sin, but if you die in your sin, you’re going to go to hell.
No, it doesn’t say that anywhere. It says “reconcile all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross through him, whether the things on earth or the things in the heavens.” So that is saying that the Christ becoming incarnate, dying, and resurrecting was a message and a means to draw all of the Powers, and even before us second-order Powers, to draw all things in the heavens toward him, which includes the fallen Demiurge. And if there are other fallen angels, as are obliquely referenced here and there—we keep hearing about these one-third of angels falling from heaven. I haven’t run across it in my reading. It’s not in the Tripartite Tractate. But if there were a third of the Aeons who fell to earth along with Logos, then they’re also going to be reconciled back into the Fullness. They’re not going to be kept in chains below the earth forever.
And then it carries on, verse 21, to say, “and you back then had been aliens and enemies in thought through wicked deeds, yet now he has affected reconciliation by a death in the body of his flesh to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.”
Verse 23 says, “if you indeed abide in the faith established and steadfast and not moved away from hope in the good tidings that you have heard proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.”
So that does seem to reference that you’re only going to be made blameless and irreproachable if you abide in the faith. That’s what Paul says. And here’s the thing. We’ve discussed this before in the episode called Overcoming Death. Christ died for everyone, and everyone will wind up back in the Fullness of God. If everything that is alive didn’t return back into the Fullness of the ethereal space, then the God, the Son, would have been diminished by their absence, wouldn’t they? If we are their fruit and most of the fruit gets thrown away because it’s rotten, well, you have a much smaller harvest than you are entitled to, right? But the Christ took care of everybody through his power, not through ours. So it’s not our own works or our own blamelessness that earns us the right to go to heaven.
So skipping a few verses on to verse 26, it says, “The mystery that has been hidden from the ages and from the generations, but that has now been made manifest in his Holy Ones, by whom God wished to make known that the wealth of this mystery’s glory is among the Gentiles, [that is, amongst all of us non-Jews], which is the anointed within you, the hope of glory, whom we proclaim, warning every human being and teaching every human being in all wisdom, so that we may present every human being as perfected in the Anointed.”
Okay, now let’s break that down. So what’s the mystery that has been hidden from the ages? Generations means those things emanating from the Fullness, being generated out of the Fullness, and that is us. We are the generations, all of us, all of us second-order Powers.
It’s not just humans, it’s blades of grass and butterflies and dogs, okay? It’s every living thing that has now been made manifest in his Holy Ones, and his Holy Ones are the third order of Powers. That’s the body that is the Christ.
The Christ is not exactly the same as the Son. The Son is still sitting in the ethereal plane, plugged directly into the Father, and the Fullness of God dwells within the Son. Now, generating from the Fullness, we’re the second order of Powers. Life, creation, it all comes from the top. Life, love, consciousness is a top-down phenomenon. The mud, or the molecules, the particles, the atoms, that’s a bottom-up phenomenon. That is after the Fall.
The Fall is the break between the ethereal plane and this apparently material universe that we live in. The Holy Ones live above. They are holy, which means that they have the same characteristics as the Father and the Son, so they are untouched by sin. Therefore, they are not the generations down here that have been melded to the mud. We are not the Holy Ones. We are the fallen ones.
We actually were sent down. We weren’t fallen. We were purposely birthed down here, so we’re not illegitimate. However, once we became bonded to the material that’s bottom-up, that demiurgic material, then we become “wicked,” or we become sinful. Not because it’s inherent in our souls, because we are from the good thought. We are fractals of the Aeons. We’re fractals of the Fullness of God, and we all have within ourselves the remembrance of the Fullness of God. We all remember Paradise, and that is why it feels so wrong down here. It feels so disappointing when things go wrong, and when we disappoint ourselves, when we choose to reach for sinful things, when we choose to partake in evil, whatever that evil is, you know it.
That is the deviation, and that comes from the bottom-up, and it has to do with our material makeup. But from the top down, we are pure, but we’re not pure enough to be called the Holy Ones, okay? So these Holy Ones that are being referenced here, that is the preexistent church, the Totalities, the Aeons that have never fallen, and it’s also the body of the Christ, because the Christ is the Son, and all the Fullnesses, and the knowledge that Logos brought back with him of this material world of the Fall. The Christ purposely arose from all of it. So he is the Son, but with all of the subsequent history also piled into him, whereas the Son stays pure. The Son is undefiled. He has to be, because he’s the nature of the Father. But the Christ, he became flesh for us, you see, so he was defiled. He did know the great death, which is ignorance. “Oh Father, why hast thou deserted me?” he said, just before he died, because he was dying, and the eternal Son never dies.
So the Christ did die, but then he resurrected, and that’s what the true Christian message is. That’s the gospel. So the Holy Ones are the third order of Powers that are incorporated into the flesh of the Christ. It’s his pleroma. The first order of Powers is the original Fullness of God. That’s the Son. He’s the first order of power. We’re the second order of power. That’s pretty high up there. But then we are sent down, and we are plugged into this material world. The third order of power is the composite that is the Christ, that is the Son, the Fullness, all of the holiness of the Father, and all of the Fullness, all of the Aeons, their best version, they’re all together in the Christ, and that is his pleroma. And that actually came down physically into this material world with, as I call it, the correcting algorithm for this space.
It is not perfect down here. This is a fallen world. We are no longer perfect once we begin to practice wickedness because of this flesh that we have been bonded to. Our spirits are ethereal, but our flesh is bonded to the material of the Demiurge, and that is where all the struggles come in. Our struggles brought about by our flesh are the desires of this material body. It’s not our spirit, because our spirit is of the good thought, but the material body has all of these pulls and desires. Even our organs—they have their own struggles, their own karma. You know, we have pulls to overeat. We have pulls to smoke. We have pulls to take drugs. We have pulls to have unsanctioned sex. We have passions. The Tripartite Tractate says passions are a sickness, and passions—that’s your emotions when we boil up.
Boy, I myself am a very passionate person, I must say. Not in the realm of sex necessarily, but I’m very passionate in my emotions, so I can flare up at the drop of a hat, and that is where my struggle is, or my surrender is in the direction of that equanimity, is in that direction of patience and long-suffering. So we each have what is called our cross to bear, right? You’ve heard that expression. We each have our own particular challenges brought about by being incarnated in this material flesh. Well, the Christ, when he incarnated, he did not ever succumb to those passions, to that desire of the flesh. He was tempted by the Demiurge and by Satan, but he said, “no, I’m not going to do it. I’m fine the way I am, thank you very much. I prefer to walk with the Father, and I wish that everyone would walk with the Father. And look, here’s how you do it.”
That is the message that the Christ brought. So he brought us teaching, which is supposedly captured here in the New Testament, but a lot of it was taken out. But he also brought us that supernatural aspect, and that supernatural aspect is the resurrection from death into eternal life. And that’s where our hope lies. We know things are going to be better because we will return to the eternal realm, and we know the eternal realm deep down inside of us because we were born with what’s called the good thought, the remembrance of the Father. We remember the Fullness. We remember Paradise, and we expect to go back there. That is what all humans hope for. And I speak of humans because we’re the humans, right? We do all this thinking and wondering and worrying, but the grasses know it inherently. They’re not worried. The butterflies know it. The birds know it. The dogs know it. The cows know it. Everybody else but the humans has assurance of their return to the ethereal plane.
So this is just a passing. We’re passing through this life. The Christ that walked among us, who goes by the name of Jesus in our traditions, and he carried with him the entirety of the Fullness of God. So as we second-order Powers are fractals of various combinations of Aeons, we each have our own aeonic heritage, our own aeonic parents. We’ve got our human parents, mom and dad, two of them, but we also have an aeonic combination that is unique to each one of us, mostly the same but also unique. We have various talents and various personalities, various characteristics are made manifest in each one of us.
And the third order of Powers that came to earth along with the Christ, there’s a third order power for every one of us. All of the third order Powers are manifested in the Christ when he came to the material plane. He brought all the third order Powers to us. And it’s the third order Power that is our Christ that we recognize. And each of those third order of Powers has the ability because it is the highest ranking power in the heavens. That third order Power of Christ, the Holy Ones, can overcome any and every challenge that we second order Powers encounter. It’s the Christ. The third order Powers are like an overlay upon our second order soul, upon our own unique pattern, and it is the perfection of us. And that’s what is the advantage to accepting the coming of the Christ to this material plane, that you know that you are taken care of. It’s not just the worry about whether or not you’re going to heaven or what’s going to happen to you after you die. The third order Power, if you will allow it to come in, will take up residence inside this material flesh along with your second order Power. So it’s not just your second order Power that’s animating the body.
The third order Power comes in with the holiness of God and then says, oh look, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to do that. It’s okay. We got it covered. And that gives you the power to walk away. And once you start walking away from those temptations of the flesh, you could call them, because now you have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of the Christ, you are suddenly free from the bondage. You see all these words? These are very familiar words in Christianity, but they have a much deeper meaning when you understand the gnosis behind them. “The wealth of this mystery’s glory” is how Paul put it. It is a mystery. It is supernatural stuff we’re talking about, but we are supernatural beings.
So people that want to steadfastly remain happy materialists, well, it’s a lie, first off, because you’re not happy. Addicts aren’t happy with their addictions. Mean people aren’t happy being mean. There might be a surge of satisfaction, but that satisfaction is just part of the dominion. It’s part of dominating another. It’s part of a power play. And the power plays are all on the part of the Demiurge. They’re not God. They’re not good. The Christ does not come as a power play to steal your soul. The Christ comes in order to give you the reinforcement troops that will help you overcome the lies of the Demiurge and his Archons. I think everybody knows this. The Tripartite Tractate says everybody knows it, but we tend to forget because of the nature of the never-ending war.
And the never-ending war is against the Powers of the Demiurge. It’s against the Archons that are constantly confounding and confusing us, constantly trying to bring us down, messing with our technology, messing with our families, messing with our governments. They are trying to control us. They are trying to control you.
This gospel, especially this Gnostic gospel, is not trying to control you. And this is where many churches and many Christians have gone astray. It’s not a matter of us controlling, of us overpowering, because, once again, that is us trying to do it without the third-order Power. It’s a matter of stepping aside, of relinquishing the power, not in order to be overpowered, but rather once you stop trying to dominate, then your eyes are opened. Then you can see, ah, ah, oh, wow, oh, hey, this is good. Ah, this is good.
You know, I belong to many evangelical churches and churches that preach redemption and come forward and accept the Christ and you will be freed. That’s good. That’s not bad stuff. And the people that do come forward to accept the Christ do have these marvelous experiences. Of course, I myself have experienced it, and I’ve been around many, many, many people who do go forward and experience the freedom that is suddenly… you know, the pain, the grief, the struggle falls away the moment you allow the Christ to come in. And that’s what the born-again experience is all about. But I think then the church often, not all of them, but many churches then re-enslave that person. They’ve accepted the Christ. They are free from bondage now of the Demiurge, but then they enslave themselves to the law of the church, working the good deeds to get to heaven. And that isn’t right either. So we’re perched on this precipice. We’re perched on this tipping point between the sinful nature and the rule-bound, law-bound nature of many churches. And that is just as bad as being on the other side.
Neither side is going to hell. Everyone is going to heaven because we’re all from there, and we all must return. Not for our sakes. It’s for God’s sake. The Father has to remain full. It’s a set. It’s a formula. We were sent down out of this gigantic set into this other space. And if we don’t return back to the set, then it negates part of the formula. And you can’t reduce God. God is ever the same. So the formula must be restored. We must be returned to the Fullness of God. Do you see how that works? Do you see the logic of that?
Then Colossians goes on to give some very practical advice for how you can walk in a virtuous life. But we need to take it as good advice of how to be free here on earth. But it’s not good advice on how to be saved, because we are already saved. We were never lost. We may appear lost temporarily while we’re wandering around in the bondage of the Demiurge. We’re lost if we are pretending that materialism is the way to go and we don’t have an eternal soul. But you’re not really lost, because God knows where you are. The Christ knows exactly where you are. Because, let me try to explain this one last time for this week, and then I think we’ll pick this up again in Colossians next week, where I can give you the advice out of Colossians for how to be happy, how to walk a happy and more secure life.
The reason we are never lost is because this body that you’re walking around in and this Self that you think of as yourself, it is completely known and understood and covered by third order Powers. There’s a third order Power for every second order Power, and we are the second order Powers. So you do have an angel hovering right behind you all the time. You’re not lost. It knows right where you are, and it is the holiness of the Christ just hovering all around you. But it is not a domination power-tripping thing the way the Demiurge is or the way other people are. It is gentle. It is the gentleness of the Holy Spirit. That’s why it is likened to a dove, and it’s right there with you, and all you have to do is acknowledge it.
Just remember, well, what if it’s true? What if I do have third order Power right here, right now? What if the Christ really did come to earth and bring me my own personal third order of Powers to help me and make me strong and make me holy again, make me happy, make me joyful? Why would you want to push that away? Try it on. It can’t do you any harm. You know, I’m back to Pascal’s wager, which I talked about a few weeks ago. If there is no third order of Power, and yet you invite the third order of Power in, you invite the Christ to come in and help you, “help me please. I can’t do this on my own. I’m too disappointed. I’m too sad. I need your help. I’m sick and tired of the way the world is treating me and the way I am in the world.” If you say something along those lines, and you will really mean it, because usually people who do profess, who do want to be, quote, born again, if it’s sincere, then it will come in.
The third order of Power will come and overlay your second order Powers, just bringing them light and love, comfort and knowledge, just bringing you the gnosis that you have forgotten, and once you let it in, you’ll recognize it. You’ll be lighted up from within. And like I was saying, if it’s not true, as in Pascal’s wager, Pascal said, look, what have you got to lose? If it’s not true, then what have you got to lose? Big deal. You won’t know about it because you’ll be blinked out into nothingness like you thought you’d be all along, so you won’t be there. It won’t matter. But if you do ask the Christ to come in and redeem your life, you’ll be opening the door—that’s the key. You’re born again. You have gnosis. You’re redeemed and you feel the redemption. You have the assurance of the ethereal plane. You come to know your aeonic parents. You come to know your purpose in life. You begin treating people with love. I think that is the true gospel message that has been lost.
So let’s pick this up again next week. We’ll learn some particularities of how to do this.
God bless us all. Onward and upward.
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