A recording from Cyd Ropp and Tessa Fights Robots’ live video. Watch the entire video on Substack
The video is long–one hour and 44 minutes. The entire transcript is below if you prefer reading.
Tessa Lena: Hello, everybody. Hello. Thank you for joining today. It is my tremendous joy and pleasure to welcome Dr. Cyd Ropp, who is a beautiful human being, a very talented musician, singer, artist, and also a Gnostic practitioner. And we’ll talk more about the Cyd version of Gnosticism. But first of all, thank you and welcome Cyd.
Cyd Ropp: Well, thank you for having me, Tessa.
Absolutely. Your work is so unique and so interesting and your voice is so beautiful. You’re such a talented, gifted singer. So I look forward to our conversation. Great. Thanks. Absolutely. And everybody, thank you for joining. If you have any questions for myself or for Dr. Cyd Ropp, please put them in the chat. We will try to answer them. And I am so looking forward to this very interesting conversation. First and foremost, do you want to talk a little bit about yourself and what is the Cyd story?
Cyd: Okay. I’m a senior citizen. I’m in my 70s. So I’ve been working on my Gnosticism for many years by now. And I grew up with a philosophical mind. My older brother, Bill, who’s 10 years older than me, he was my mentor for my entire life, because he became a doctor of philosophy himself. So he and I had a very unusual childhood in that we would contemplate and discuss galactic level thinking from about four years up as far as I was concerned. He was about 14. So that was good. I’ve been trained up for a long time. And I became a Christian very young.
I had my first personal experience with Jesus when I was about that age. So I’ve been walking with Christ, oh, since about four or five years old. Our parents are not religious. So this was all self-study. And I came up through, basically the early Calvary Chapel type of Christianity and Assemblies of God. So I’m baptized, baptized in the Missouri River. And I speak in tongues and do all that crazy Pentecostal kind of stuff. And I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s degree in education, a master’s degree in Christian counseling from Azusa Pacific, and then a PhD in the Rhetoric of Science and Medicine, that’s my specialty.
And I don’t know if you know this, Tessa, but my dissertation was about midwifery, was about the differing models of home birth, traditional midwifery versus our contemporary medicalized, hospitalized Type of childbirth and which is safer and who’s got control and the definition. Really, they have nothing in common. Nothing in common is if they were two different procedures other than a baby is produced at the end. So that’s my scientific kind of background.
Tessa: I remember when we had a conversation earlier because this is the second time I’m interviewing you. I remember you were telling a story related to your work and your study of midwifery, and it was very dramatic. Do you want to tell that story? Because it was really striking.
Cyd: Sure. The midwife I personally knew, and she was the midwife that assisted the birth of my nieces—my brother’s daughters in San Diego. She was arrested in 1997 for practicing medicine without a license, which is an ironic thing to accuse a home birth midwife of because her ideology was 180 degrees away from medicalized. But they called her practicing medicine without a license and hit her with many felony counts.
It was the Board of Registered Nursing of California that went after her. It wasn’t the birth mothers. It was the nurses who wanted to punish her for practicing without a license. She was practicing without a nursing license or a medical license, all on her own, which the medical model, of course, and the state’s licensing really frowns upon. But she never wanted to be licensed because when midwives, sought respectability in the 1990s, they gave up their sovereignty in favor of respect and licensing. And so for a midwife to become licensed, she has to practice under the direct supervision of an obstetrician, a medical doctor, and she is obliged to follow protocols. And protocols are rules that you have to follow. The doctors—it all had to do with the doctor’s insurance coverage is what it basically boils down to. Because if something goes awry during a birth and the doctor or the midwife was not following the protocols, like you’re only allowed to labor for so long, you’re only allowed to let the child’s heart rate drop for so long. Various things that… Traditional midwifery does not keep that kind of tight schedule. It all has to do with the particular case and the birth as it is going. It has nothing to do with formulations and protocols. So she would not become licensed. And that’s why the Board of Registered Nursing went after her. And she was found guilty on all counts and sent to prison. Felony counts.
So, that’s the story. And that was the subject of my dissertation, which is about 500 pages long. And you can buy a copy of my dissertation on lulu.com. I’ve published it so that anyone can buy it. Very inexpensive, about $10, I think. So I’ve been trying to spread the word.
It shows the differences between not only midwifery and obstetrics, but natural approaches to health versus conventional.
And then I also wrote a play based on the trial that’s a gripping courtroom drama, which is also available at lulu.com. It’s a play based on the trial and the audience is the jury. So whenever the actors that are playing the lawyers are addressing the jury, they turn and actually speak to the audience. And the important parts of one of the births is highlighted as testimony and then reenactments on stage as the testimony goes on. At the end of the play, the audience casts their verdict. And I think it’s a very exciting play, but I haven’t been able to get anyone to pick it up, which floors me.
Tessa: Do you know what happened to the midwife? Is she still in prison?
Cyd: No, she was, well, I haven’t talked to her in about 10 years or so, but she was out on parole when I was defending my dissertation, which was based upon her and her trial. And she actually was allowed to fly to Memphis, Tennessee. I was at the University of Memphis. She was allowed to fly from California to Memphis and she appeared At my dissertation defense, which was a very cool thing to do.
Tessa: Wow. She’s out now.
Cyd: Yes, she’s out now. And see, the thing about Abby—her name was Abby Odom—the thing about Abby is that she never was repentant. See, the judge threw the book at her because she wouldn’t repent. She upheld the midwifery model to the dire end. And so, uh, So that’s the case.
But I felt that it was a it was a mitzvah for her to be able to come and hear her trial presented as a rhetorical model and to be able to be there to witness it. So it was good for her. But she’s not allowed to be a midwife. She’s not allowed to be a doula or a childbirth educator, anything. She was forbidden to have anything to do with children after she was released from prison. And she, by the way, was 53 years old when the trial take place. And she had been practicing midwifery for 30 years and had birthed thousands of babies, which is why it caught the attention of the nurses.
Tessa: Wow, it is horrible. Oh, thank you for doing that work.
Cyd; Well, I keep trying. I want to spread it. I want to spread the whole thing through the play. So if anybody’s got a theater company out there, contact me because the play’s all ready to go, but I haven’t gotten any theater to want to pick it up.
Tessa: Wow. So fast forward into now, before we go into your Gnostic work proper and the flavor of Gnosticism that you work with, what is, let’s say the most important thing in life, in Cyd’s life that you’re working on is an event, an experience, A philosophical exploration? Like what is right in front of you right now?
Cyd: OK, well, thanks for asking. Let’s see. My weekly schedule is to write and produce and edit. I’m a one man show. I don’t have any producers or helpers is to do my weekly podcast. And so every week by Saturday morning, it’s released at GnosticInsights.com and on Substack as The Gnostic Reformation.
And I’ve had a lot of listens, not very many subscribers, but that is to be expected. This is Gnosticism after all. And my brand of Gnosticism, as we’ll talk more about later, is unique. So I think that many people that might go, ooh, Gnostic and sign up on Substack, Then they get all disappointed by my simple Gnosticism.
But the other thing that’s major to me is my singing. So thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, I’m a singer and I sing. Well, I sing to the cats and my dog mostly just about every day. I’ve got a huge repertoire and a very wide variety of types of music I sing. I sing rock, classic rock, jazz, blues, country and gospel. I sing standards from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Whatever the audience, whatever kind of show they want, I like to put on. I’ve been a stage actress and a headliner in many local musicals, but I don’t do that anymore. I got very turned off from the stage from the pandemic because the theaters just folded; they just folded up and put it away for a couple of years, which so surprised me because I had always thought of the theater as a space that was not, what’s the word I’m seeking for? You know, a space of- Compliant? Yes, compliant, a space of rebels, a space of free thinkers. And these folks were all too happy to slap on the masks, and I wasn’t. I was cast in three different plays at the time, and I was in rehearsal on three different plays, including a couple of leads at a very big theater here in Ashland. And they just folded.
I told off the theater directors, which I haven’t tried auditioning since because you don’t tell off the theater directors. The actors are the little people on the totem pole. So I got very turned off and I haven’t been back to the theater since, but I’ve been doing parties. I’ve been doing memorial services. I’ve been doing church singing. I throw a lot of parties in my backyard. And if anybody… So have you tuned in on Cyd Sings on YouTube, Tessa? Have you seen any of the whole party roles?
Tessa: I’ve seen it. And your singing voice is beautiful. But we’re going further. Now I have a question. What kind of repertoire is favorite for your dogs and cats? Because you mentioned singing for your dogs and cats. What do they prefer?
Cyd: I guess they actually like the classic rock. But I’m not blasting them with the big speakers. What I do is I sing in the sauna. The sauna has great acoustics, and it’s got a really nice built-in sound system with Bluetooth and colored lights. So I sauna like four times a week, and I’m in there singing between 124 and 145 degrees, which I think opens up my voice and allows me to sing strong. Because as you know, I sing strong, don’t I, Tessa? I’ve got a big voice.
Tessa: Yeah, you have a very good voice.
Cyd: Well, it’s a big voice.
Tessa: So let us talk about your Gnosticism and your flavor of Gnosticism because you have a very unique approach to that. It’s very fascinating, very in-depth and very Cyd. So do you want to go over your path, how you arrived at it and what it is and how it is similar or different to the mainstream Gnosticism? And also… About mainstream Gnosticism. How is it similar, different to mainstream Christianity? So let’s go into all of that.
Cyd: Okay. Well, one of the reasons my Substack is called The Gnostic Reformation is I, like Martin Luther, oh, I don’t have big plans, do I? But like Martin Luther, I’m trying to reform Christianity as well as reform Gnosticism. So it is The Gnostic Reformation. It goes in both directions.
Backing up, as I told you, I’ve been a practicing Christian for 60 years plus before I ever read the Nag Hammadi. Because by the way, most of my life, the Nag Hammadi was not available, was it? So I first picked up the Nag Hammadi…
Well, actually, before the Nag Hammadi, I owned a bed and breakfast in Ashland, Oregon. Very popular bed and breakfast. Every day I would cook and I’m a breakfast chef. I would cook and prepare the meals for 10 to 12 people at a common table. 300 days a year at least. And I sliced and chopped a lot of fruit. And while I was building those fruit salads, I had more and more gnosis flooding in on me, but I didn’t I didn’t know that word gnosis because I was pre-Gnostic in the formal sense. But what I noticed was that every piece of fruit that you cut into has the same shape, the same diagrammatic shape. If you cut an apple down the middle from the stem to the flower end and you look at where the seeds are, it’s always skin on the outside. Then the majority is meat. And then there’s that center area with the pole running straight down from the stem to the bottom and the seeds. Whether it’s an orange, a watermelon, a banana, it doesn’t matter what kind of fruit it is. That’s the shape of fruit. And then I started thinking of it as a geometric shape. And that is the shape of a torus. T-O-R-U-S is the shape of a bagel, a donut, a bicycle tire. It’s that ring, a smoke ring.
So based upon that, and that was it, I was hit one day. I actually went to my computer and I was going to start writing the play, the midwife play. And I’m standing there at the computer and instead of the midwife play coming out of me, out comes an entire theory of everything. I mean, it was almost like channeling, but I’m not one that prays to spirits and asks to be channeled, but it was, it just flew out of me. And next thing you know, it’s like four days later, I had a book and it was all based upon this torus shape and the fruit. And so forth. And it’s called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.
I wrote that 20 years ago and it’s still available on Amazon as well. And I still have a blog that’s been up all that time from the same name. So you can still look up A Simple Explanation. Then about what year was it? Hmm. Well, let’s say it was 15 years after the simple explanation, which is a theory of everything, which begins with the premise and ends with the conclusion and explains everything about our universe in between in a completely unique way—the way I describe physics and chemistry and social interactions.
Then I picked up the Nag Hammadi and being a strong Christian, I’ve always been wary of being led astray. Or of listening to false doctrine or even of the Apocrypha. Oh, those were kept away from us to protect us from false teaching. But I read the Nag Hammadi all the way through. Most of it I didn’t care for, but I landed on one particular book in the Nag Hammadi. And that one is the Tripartite Tractate. Tripartite means three, tractate means book. And it’s Christian. It’s what’s called Valentinian Gnosticism. And it completely comports with my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.
It’s as if I am the unknown writer of the Tripartite Tractate, which I believe is at least 2,500 years old. I believe it predates the New Testament. It’s certainly, no one argues, not even the heresiologists of the church, no one argues that it’s contemporaneous with the books of the New Testament.
And indeed, they were once part of the New Testament, the Valentinian Gnosticism. Those were Christian Gnostics, Tripartite Tractate being the foremost book among them. They were all cut out of the New Testament. They were all dropped. And someone, some Gnostic Christian, buried all of the books in a six foot earthenware jug in the Egyptian desert somewhere around 300 AD is what we think. There’s no proof of that, but it had to be. And around 300, that was the great purge of Christianity to narrow down the focus of the New Testament by the Catholic Pope and by the Emperor of Rome, Constantine and Clement.
They wanted to control the narrative of Christianity. And so they threw out all the Gnosticism. They just stripped everything Gnostic that they realized was Gnostic. There’s still a lot of Gnosticism in the New Testament, but you have to already be a Gnostic to recognize it. Now that I’m a Gnostic Christian, when I reread the New Testament, with which I’m quite familiar, Oh my goodness, the depth, the depth of meaning. It’s so much deeper than what’s taught in the churches. The churches are the, you know, they’re like a dumbed down version of Christianity because the Gnosis was taken out. I believe that Jesus was actually Gnostic. John the Baptist, the Essenes, they were certainly Gnostic. And when Jesus was preaching, he was preaching Gnosticism. And when you think of it in that manner, then you can reread everything that Jesus said and it doesn’t conflict with Valentinian Gnosticism at all. So I was okay.
I landed on the Valentinian angle to Gnosticism. I did a deep rhetorical dive, the way I had done for my dissertation about Abby’s midwife trial, I did the same type of Ph.D. level rhetorical analysis that’s called hermeneutics on the Tripartite Tractate. Now, keep in mind, this was not even dug out of the desert until 1945. So the whole Nag Hammadi doesn’t have that 2000 years of theology, Christian theology, Catholic theology. It doesn’t have any of that because it was buried. It was preserved. Held back. And then it was rediscovered in 1945 and really only translated into English is my understanding in the late 1970s. So that’s how fresh this theology is. Very fresh.
Anyone who hates Christianity or hates the church—they haven’t seen Gnostic Christianity because I believe that’s the truth. And so what I am teaching is The Christianity with the Gnostic flavor from particularly the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. And I stick extremely close to that. I don’t wander off into what’s more popular. I don’t wander off into the more popular Sethian Gnosticism, which is what most modern people associate with Gnosticism. And that comes from Egyptian and Phoenician sources. So I’m not that. I’m coming right off of Jesus like I always have since I was five years old.
Tessa: So it is so interesting that you’re bringing up the royal shapes because now it’s all the rage in physics. If you have seen the book by Robert Temple, The New Science of Heaven, which is amazing, I highly recommend it. He talks about, you know, plasma, plasma clouds as spirit. And so many people nowadays talk about the toroidal shapes as the foundational shape of the universe and life and consciousness. So it is fascinating that you got a download about like the same things
that other people have been getting downloads from other directions and it’s all based in the same source.
Cyd: Right, exactly. And I was one of the, as far as I know, I was one of the very first persons to talk about the toroidal shape of consciousness and our universe. Because I believe there’s a toroidal shaped bubble—I think the edge of our universe is actually a fractal, a torus with fractalated inside images, but let’s not get into that. The point is, I got it directly from the spirit. I got it from cutting apples and oranges and kiwi fruit for fruit salads.
And then it started me to wondering, well, how does spirit then merge with the molecules, with the molecular level? I call it top down. I call it spirit down. Spirit is top down. Consciousness comes from above. Mud, mud up. Mud is our particles. You know, it’s the quantum particles, atoms, molecules, elements. Aggregates of minerals, that’s your bottom up. And somehow our spirit has to be stuck,
glued to that molecular level in order for our consciousness to be around and walking around the way it does. And so that’s what the simple explanation has explained all along. And then now I am saying it, now I’m teaching it.
Well, we don’t like to say teaching when talking about Gnosticism because one of the basic tenets about Gnosticism is that we are born with this knowledge. We all have the gnosis within us, but we forget. So we are all in an amnesic state the way the Demiurge is in an amnesic state. It doesn’t realize, it doesn’t remember the Fullness of God and Logos and the Father and the Son and all that business. It doesn’t understand where its consciousness comes from. It thinks it stands alone. And we’re all that way.
But one of the unique things about my Gnosticism is that instead of interpreting this fallen world—welll, of course the Christians think the fall came after a perfect world was already in place. They think Eden and the Earth was perfect and there was no death and everything was wonderful until Adam and Eve. And then we humans were responsible for blowing everything up. Now, even though I’ve been a strong evangelical Christian all my life, I’ve always thought that was above our pay grade. I didn’t think that humans could ruin God’s plan. That would put us more powerful than God. So in Gnosticism, in Valentinian Gnosticism, the fall is actually way upstream. It’s one of the Aeons of the Fullness of God, and Aeons are the occupants of the Fullness of God.
And by the way, Fullness of God is an expression that runs throughout the New Testament and is preached on Christian pulpits. But they don’t understand what it means. They’re just “Fullness of God,” like it’s a name for God. But that’s not it. The Fullness is a location. The Fullness is where the Aeons live. And the Aeons are the independent variables of the Son, the S-O-N, Son.
Now, this all starts to sound complicated, but it’s not. It’s a very easy flow. Consciousness flows from the Father through the Son, and the Son radiates into all of the variables, an infinite number of variables. And all those variables, that’s the Fullness of God. And those little parts, each variable is called an Aeon, A-E-O-N. And the last Aeon to be formed, Logos—logos meaning logic, reason, knowledge—Logos was the one who overreached and fell. Not Satan.
And in the Tripartite Tractate, it wasn’t Sophia either. I reject the idea that the Aeon who fell was a female who birthed the Demiurge. That’s just another patriarchal put-down of femininity, if you ask me. I don’t think this “preserving the divine feminine” is doing femininity any favors because it’s predicated upon the idea that it was a female Aeon who overreached and fell. In Valentinian Tripartite based Christianity, it was Logos who fell. Logic and reason. And it was Logos that lost its way and broke apart. And then, down below, he couldn’t control the chaos that had spilled out of his guts. And he fled back up to the Fullness of God, abandoning the deficiency down below. So it’s not Sophia giving birth to Yaldabaoth. It’s Logos falling, breaking open, and abandoning the chaos that he had unwittingly, didn’t mean to, it was an accident, formed.
And by the way, the Tripartite Tractate says we shouldn’t blame him. Logos is not a bad character. I mean, in the beginning was Logos and Logos was with God and Logos was God. That’s how the book of John begins. That’s Logos. So that was one of the shocking things I read that I had to put down the Tripartite Tractate. Actually, after I did my hermeneutic research on it, I put it down for five entire years before I picked it back up because I wanted it to sit. I wanted the Holy Spirit to verify that I was on the right track and not being deceived. And then I picked it back up and here it is spilling out of me.
Tessa: I have a couple of questions. Thank you very much. It’s a fascinating story, Cyd. And you, of course, you have a very, very unique, beautiful, powerful mind. Two questions. One, for the people who know nothing about Gnosticism, I think it would be helpful to do a simple explanation of the cosmology, mainstream Gnostic cosmology and how it differs from the mainstream Christianity, the way you see that. And also I have a question. Have you studied ever… Traditional indigenous spirituality of any sort? Because there are lots of parallels and there’s knowledge that has been around for tens of thousands of years and of course everybody gets knowledge the way I see from the spirit, ultimately the way we understand the world is through the inside. And that’s only available as a direct experience. It’s not possible really to theorize. So we all have a somewhat unique understanding of the universe. Even people in the same tradition, if you put them in the room, and they’re honest and they’re saying their honest perception. They would give a slightly different explanation of different theological terms and what it means in practical ways and so on.
But so the second question is, have you studied any traditional indigenous philosophies, practices, anything like that? Because there are parallels for sure. And in what you’re saying, I recognize it to the prism of like my own understanding, which is through different systems and different terms.
Cyd: We all live in this universe, the same universe.
Tessa: That is kind of true. If we define it in a linear way. But first of all, let us talk about Gnosticism in the mainstream sense so that people understand, because you certainly know a lot about that. And I’m grateful. Thank you.
Cyd: Yeah, sure. The main thing about Gnosticism, and by the way, Tessa, this is why last time we spoke, I said you’re Gnostic and you said, “I am not.” Well, yes, you are, because what you have just said is very Gnostic. And that is this. The only way we learn the truth of consciousness, the truth of the Father, the truth of why are we here? and am I alone? and all those questions, where do we go after we die? The only way you can learn that, you don’t learn it by reading about it. You don’t learn it by sitting in a pew and having someone preach it at you. It has to come from the inside. It’s not exterior internalized. It’s being in direct communion with the spirit above or the spirits above. I actually commune with the Aeons and there’s an infinite number of Aeons above. So what Gnosticism is, it says there is one, we all call it no matter what brand of Gnosticism you practice, “the God above all gods” or “the one true God above god.” So it’s the God above all gods. And in what’s called the Sethian line of Gnosticism, they’re literally talking about Egyptian gods and Phoenician gods and any other God who walks the Earth or ever was mythologically claimed to walk the Earth.
Tessa: What is your definition of the word God so that we are clear?
Cyd: It’s just what you all think it is. Just what you all think it is. What does a person think of his God?
Tessa: Which is what? Because I want to be clear about definitions because it is so easy to get confused because the word God means different things to different people, especially when it’s plural. So what is your definition?
Cyd: I think everybody knows what God means. I disagree with you. I think everyone does know. Now, part of Gnosticism is that we are forgetful, is that we have fallen into forgetfulness because of the density of this material world and the errors we hear every day. But God, in the traditional sense, is the creator, the great creator, the one who built the Earth and the heavens. It is the builder, much more powerful than the humans. See, humans are not gods.
Tessa: What I was talking about, I’m sorry to interrupt you, what you were talking about, they are talking about Egyptian gods or Phoenician gods. In that sense, what is your personal meaning of the word God, plural? Because different traditions have different meanings for that. It’s fine with me that the different traditions define God as they want because it doesn’t matter. What is yours?
Cyd: I believe in the God above all gods.
Tessa: No, when you’re talking about Egyptian gods, Phoenician gods, what is your semantics? So for the audience, because what do you mean when you use a phrase that way? What is your meaning of the word gods plural?
Cyd: Well, I am not an expert on Egyptian and Phoenician gods, but let’s say… All cultures have gods or god. Some have many more than others. Hindus have a lot of gods. Everybody believes in their god. They worship their god. They’ve got their little altars and they burn their incense and stack their oranges.
Tessa: Spirit who is not human. That is your semantics, right?
Cyd: Well, yes, although last week’s episode on Gnostic Insights and The Gnostic Reformation was about aliens, was about extraterrestrials. Are they angels? Are they archons? Are they Aeons? And I do a deep dive on that subject. So anyone who wants to see what I’m talking about, they can go to that.
But I’ll give anyone credit for whatever god that they’re worshipping. I have a very good friend who’s Hindu, and I’m not going to argue with him about whether he’s worshipping the proper god or not. He worships God. However, those are more mythological projections of human need. They might have powers. I don’t know.
But the one who really has the power is the God above all gods.
So the God above all gods was the uber consciousness. Let me define that; that is something I can define. The God of all gods is what Jesus called Father. So when you say the Lord’s Prayer, my Father who art in heaven, it’s the God above all gods that is actually being prayed to, even if they think they’re praying to Jehovah, which is, I’ll go ahead and spill it now. That’s one of the big heresies. That’s one of the main reasons why the Tripartite was taken out of the New Testament is we Christian Gnostics don’t actually think that Jehovah of the Old Testament, the God of Israel, is the God above all gods. We think it’s yet another tribal God like Baal, or any other God that the Hindus worship or the Buddhists or whomever, or your Native Americans, I don’t, I know.
And the answer is that no, I haven’t read any Native American stuff. I read, my spiritual background is biblical and not necessarily churchy either. It’s biblical, it’s Chinese because I’m very familiar with the Tao Te Ching and I’ve done a lot of translations of the Tao Te Ching and it’s in line with this Gnosticism, by the way, it works.
Tessa: Oh, I didn’t know that you speak Chinese.
Cyd: Well, I don’t speak Chinese. I use a translation matrix. Any pictogram in Chinese can be translated many different ways. And so if you look at a translation chart of Chinese for the Tao, it’s it gives you maybe 20 different choices of words for what the symbol can mean. So you’ve got all these Chinese symbols, but everybody’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, even popular English translations, they’re cherry picking which way they’re going to translate that pictogram. So I translated using my simple explanation.
Basically retranslated in my simple explanation way, the Tao Te Ching. But anyway, aside from that, I’m also very familiar with yogic philosophy. I’ve read all of Paramahansa Yogananda’s books. And I signed up for all of those classes that Paramahansa taught. And I’ve read his big books. And he’s got a big book translating yoga into Christianity and so forth. Those are basically the streams of religion I come from. I haven’t read much in the way of other people’s modern translations. I don’t go around reading other people’s translations because mine, I am trusting, comes from Gnosis. I’m trusting my Gnosis. I mean, God told the Father or Logos or the Aeons told me all about this. Just while I’m making fruit salads. So I don’t need to read some other PhD’s versions of it.
Tessa: So your definition, again, when you’re talking about gods in your way, I’m not asking your interpretation of Native American spirits that they’re working with. So when you use the word gods, plural. So I’m trying to understand Cyd’s cosmology and also make it clearer for the people who are viewing this. So it is spirits, it is? What is it? So how do you see, or if you just want to go about and give an overview of Gnostic cosmology, different types of beings, the way you see that, that could help.
Cyd: Well, to tell you the truth, see, I don’t believe in those other gods and I never have. So I can’t tell you from within myself who and what they are. I leave that up to the devotees of those practices. But the devotees of any of those practices can actually turn to the God above all gods. They don’t necessarily have to abandon their familiar practices if it puts them in a mind of worship.
Tessa: Well, in fact, in indigenous traditions, there’s a concept of the creator and it has been in existence for, again, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. So I think it’s a Western, kind of, you know, the same people, the same way you talk about the institutional theologians trying to mix things up about Christianity, the way you see, same thing has been done about indigenous traditions. And so there has been created this concept that for some reason they don’t really interact with the, like they don’t have the creator or they worship the devil. It is just pure propaganda as far as I’m concerned. So they don’t really need to turn to anybody outside of what they already do because it’s a part of what they practice to the best of my knowledge and the traditions that I’m familiar with. But speaking of, because we’re talking about you and you get your downloads and your visions, how you see that. Can you please describe the cosmology, how you see that?
Cyd: I would love to thank you. Absolutely. Because it’s the amount of time it takes to get from here to there, usually. That is our measure of time. Time is something that passes. Before the fall, before this material existence, before the universe was created,
we know the universe is at least, is it four and a half billion years old? So before that, so this God above all gods predates at least four and a half billion years now. It predates the fall because it was the fall that created material. It was that broken pleroma of Logos of the Aeon who fell away from sitting in the Fullness of God that created the quantum foam that then builds up into our particles, atoms and minerals and the Demiurge. The Demiurge is a construction of the fall.
Tessa: Let me clarify, let me clarify. So the way you see that is everything up to the fall was subatomic particles and plasma and…
Cyd: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Forget about subatomic particles and plasma. It’s ethereal. It’s only spirit.
Tessa: Well, that’s what ether consists of, to the best of my understanding. But you use different terms. So whatever preceded atoms was before the fall, and then in your understanding, the fall created atomic matter.
Cyd: Yes. Yes.
Tessa: Okay. Thank you for the comparison.
Cyd: Yes. Probably in the manner of the Big Bang. I know the Big Bang is not a popular theory at this point in time, but I’ve never found anything better I don’t read religion and interpretations, but I do read science and physics. Because imagine an ethereal creature. Let me get back. Let’s go in order.
You’ve got the Father, which is a limitable consciousness. It is the matrix of consciousness. It is the base state of everything that will follow. It has no form. It has no countenance, no face, no way to present. No way you can connect to that illimitable God. He’s much more powerful. And in fact, that’s what impelled the fall.
Logos thought he could plug back into the Father. He wanted to go upstream to the Father, but the power of the Father essentially repelled him, knocked him clean out of the space. And that is what caused the fall. He wasn’t trying to become God. He was trying to reunite with the Father. Okay. So you have the Father.
Tessa: Can you please go into that? Because it’s, you know, like it in itself can be a very long conversation. So can you please tell the story of how, like who he was, how he came about in your understanding of Gnosis and how it all happened?
Cyd: All right. And by the way, for the enlightenment of the audience, all of this, I’ve got over 300 episodes. So if you go to my website, you can hear the entire cosmology in depth that I’ve been rolling out for six years now. So to try to do this in an hour is a fairly impossible task, but I can do this.
So you have the illimitable Father. The Father wanted, let’s say the Father was lonely, just to use our human terms. I don’t know. But the Father emitted what I usually refer to as the bucket dipped into the sea. So if the Father’s illimitable consciousness was like a vast ocean, the Son is the bucket holding some of that ocean water. It’s the same exact quality. The Son is a monad. The Son is the One—a monad that emerged from the otherwise illimitable Father. And the Son we can relate to because we are monads too.
A monad is a being or an entity that has a singular point of view. I’ve got my point of view. Tessa’s got her point of view. We’ve all got our point of view, not only related to where we’re literally standing, we’ve got a different point of view, but our mindsets, our ideologies, those are different points of view as well. The Son has exactly the same point of view as the Father, has all the same knowledge of the Father and a bucket that is infinite dipped into an illimitable sea has just as much power and consciousness as the Father.
But the Son can be related to. Now the Son, immediately, as soon as the Son was formed, He stays plugged into the Father, by the way. He’s the only thing that exists that stays part of the Father. So it’s not like the bucket dipping into the sea and then He wanders off. He stays floating in that sea. So He always is up to date and vice versa.
And because the Father is infinitely creative, the Son is also infinitely creative. And the moment that the Son was formed, That’s when He broke out into all the variables.
The way I pictured in the mind and the way I illustrated in my books is the Son is like a sphere, this glowing infinite sphere, but it’s still a monad. And the Aeons are like rays, rays of light coming off of a central sun, S-U-N. Let’s not confuse S-U-N and S-O-N. But anyway, so they were an infinite number of variables. And these variables are personalities like angels. They’re Personalities, you know, like Logos and Sophia. They’re personalities like Tessa and Cyd. Everything is up there. They’re categories like dogs, cats. They’re individual dogs like Gaucho and Zoey.
Everything that could ever come to be is part of the Aeons of God. So this is an error that I think most Gnostics make,–that they think you can number the Aeons, that you can describe the Aeons, that there’s 32 or 36 or 1005 or whatever. They come up with all these things. No, not in my view, because they’re the Aeons of this Fullness of God. So it’s got to be, by definition, the Fullness of God. So those are the Aeons.
Now, the Aeons… They arose giving glory. When they broke out of the Son, all they did was sit there and sing. I love God. I love life. I love the Son. Everything’s beautiful. And it’s all song. It’s literally music. And they’re all in harmony. They all sing as One. And it was through the singing—and I think this is for all of Gnosticism, not just Christian Gnosticism—it was through the singing that they became self-aware. It’s like you and I become self-aware by having a discussion, right? I might learn more things about myself or more things about you. I become self-aware through relating. And the relating that the Aeons were doing was glory to God. And it was this awareness that brought self-awareness. And immediately… They sorted themselves. They were not put into a hierarchy.
The Tripartite Tractate says the moment they became self-aware through the singing of songs, they ordered themselves. They stacked themselves into a hierarchy and hierarchies by definition are always pyramids. They’re always pyramidal shape. That’s what a hierarchy is. More at the bottom, fewer and fewer as you go to the top. And those are all Aeons. And everyone’s equal. Everyone’s just as important as everyone else. It doesn’t matter if you’re a smallie at the bottom or if you’re the big guy at the top. Everyone has their position, their place, their duty. And they are all in relationship to one another. They don’t move around. They’ve got their address.
Then the last Aeon to be formed in the Tripartite was Logos—because this is really cool. Logos was able to take the entire Fullness of God and understand it and know it and recapitulate it, which I have interpreted as fractals. It is my belief that at the bottom the Fullness of God is shaped like a pyramid. And this has got nothing to do with Egyptology or any of that. This is no secret symbol, even though I’m forming a pyramid with my hands. It’s a pyramid. And the capstone to the pyramid is the Aeon known as Logos. And he looks just like the whole pyramid. And his internal parts, his pleroma, pleroma is another word for Fullness, the pleroma of Logos is a fractal. So he’s exactly like the pleroma of God, but he’s a fractal.
Being the Fullness of God himself, even though he’s a fractal level down, he doesn’t quite have all the power of the Fullness of God. He’s not the Fullness, but he made a mistake. He’s sitting there at the top. He’s the king of the world. He’s got all the Fullnesses tucked up inside. And that’s why he thought he could reunite with the Father. He thought he could swim back upstream through the Son and plug into the Father the way the Son stays plugged in with the Father. But instead, he was repelled by the Father. And I think this works with Sethian as well, but it’s Sophia’s. Although they put in a whole other layer of mythology that I don’t care for. So I’m not even going to say it. If you want to be Sethian, be Sethian. But this is the way Valentinian Gnosticism works.
Logos fell. He fell. He made a mistake, but we’re not to blame him for that. The Tripartite Tractate says the fall was necessary for the second economy to come about.
The first economy is that pleroma before the fall. The first economy, or you could call it ecology, is that entirely ethereal space that has no distance, no time. Everything happens instantaneously. It’s all immediate because there’s no passage of time. Passage of time only happened after the fall and then the material world changed. The big bang happened. And then next thing you know, we’re riding the big bang wave out. And you can plug that right into our normal cosmology of this physical universe.
And Logos was, though, at the very beginning there, he was aghast. He was horrified. It actually says horrified in the Nag Hammadi. He was horrified at what had happened.
And the Fullnesses above saw what happened and they prayed for him. They helped pull him back up to the Fullness. So they brought him out of this material existence and back up into the Fullness. But the material that was left behind were the shadows. And that’s a word that’s used a lot in Gnosticism. All forms of Gnosticism talk about the shadows. Those are the archons. So the shadows are not only the materiality of our world that literally cast shadows, but they are the archons, which are like the negative version of the archangels. They’re personalities, but they have no consciousness of their own.
As the universe was forming and everything was put into order, a negative version of Logos himself emerged, and that is called the Demiurge. In Sethianism, that’s called Yaldabaoth, and it’s the illegitimate child of Sophia. But in Valentinian Gnosticism, it’s the fallen part, the presumptuous thought is what it’s called. It’s the presumptuous thought of Logos that stayed behind. And it was only the best part of Logos that returned to the Fullness.
Tessa: So let me clarify so that the audience has a clear idea about, well, as much as possible in this. So you’re saying that the universe was created when the Logos fell from the top of the pyramid, trying to unite with the Fullness of God? And that’s what created the universe?
Cyd: No, no, he’s already the capstone of the Fullness of God. He was trying to reunite with the Father itself, with illimitable consciousness.
Tessa: Okay, so that was the point where the universe and the material universe was created according to Cyd, right? And so then as far as the shadows and the archons in your vision of things, can you please expand on what exactly happened there?
Cyd: Yes. You know, the Fullness is very orderly. Everyone has their position, their place, their duties. Logos’ fractal was also very orderly because it was just like the Fullness. So his little sub-selves, you know, some branches of psychology, we say we have sub-selves, you know, you’ve got the singer, you’ve got the cook, you’ve got the lover, you’ve got the whatever, right? Those are sub-selves. So his sub-selves were these fractal versions of the Fullness itself. When he fell, everything fell out of order. There was no order anymore. He was no longer shaped like a pyramid. He was shaped like quantum foam boiling in and out.
Nothing would build. Nothing would level up. It was wrong. It was horrid. And Logos at first tried to put it back together. He tried to make them orderly, but they resisted Logos’ attempt. And he’s like, hey, I’m your unit of consciousness. I’m the god of this pleroma! Get in order! But they wouldn’t. And so he abandoned that roiling chaos down below. And that was the originating point of our universe. So he fled back up. So he split just like we do.
Now, this is all, by the way, I want to point out that this particular Gnostic vision is applicable to every human as well. As above, so below. We have two sides to ourselves. We’ve got our noble nature. And when we’re in alignment with God, when we’re in a worshipful state, we are aligned with the One or with the monad or with the Father or with the Fullness—however you want to put it—we’re in the light of glory. And that is the pure consciousness with all of the truth and correction flooding down upon us. That is a very rare thing for most people. What normally we are is our egos, isn’t it? It’s our ego.
So what I have done is instead of going into the mythology of Yaldabaoth being
the Demiurge, I’m saying the part that was left behind was the ego of Logos. It was the overreaching part. It was the part that says, hey, I’m all there is. I’m going to turn back into the Father. I’m as good as the Son. It was whatever Logos was thinking. That was called the presumptuous thought, according to the Tripartite Tractate. And so I think, well, what’s a better modern translation for presumptuous thought than egoic thought or egoic behavior?
And get this, this is a very fascinating point. In the Fullness, all those Aeons that are sitting there in their stack—I think of it like a stack of glowing golden orbs, like cannonballs. That’s what I picture when I think. I think of a pyramidal stack of golden glowing cannonballs is how I think of the Aeon when I picture it. Oh gosh, I just got into picturing it and I lost my train of thought. Oh, that’s funny. That’s so funny.
Tessa: So we can get back to the cosmology then and the creation.
Cyd: Yeah, I was going somewhere.
Tessa: And then Demiurge, according to you, is according to your version of Gnosticism, is the egoic side of love.
Cyd: That’s it. Thank you. That’s what I was trying to say. That’s what I’m trying to say. And he was not, and he didn’t get everything into proper order all the way up to God. In fact, he doesn’t remember anything. He’s a shadow. The Demiurge is a shadow of the Fullness. We always talk about shadows.
Tessa: The role of Demiurge in Cyd Gnosticism is comparable to the Satan role in mainstream Christianity, in terms of being the confuser, being kind of the negative, envious, jealous.
Cyd: Yeah, it is. However, that’s a little bit further downstream, because literally, according to Christianity, isn’t it Jehovah that brought order to the world? Isn’t Jehovah the creator of, you know, this universe and the heavens and the Earth and all that walk thereon? So I would say, and this is the gigantic heresy, this is what gets you tarred and feathered, is that Jehovah is the Demiurge.
Tessa: So according to you, the being that in the Old Testament has the name of Jehovah, according to you, that is the negative character that in Gnosticism is called Demiurge.
Cyd: That’s right. And it’s not just me. It’s all Gnosticism thinks that. So that’s the most giant heresy. And the thing is, when you look at the God of the Old Testament, he’s very egoic. Thou shalt have no other God before me. He’s a trickster. He plays tricks on people. Hey, Abraham, go up the mountain with your son and don’t take a goat to sacrifice. And then when he gets there, sacrifice your son. Ha ha, just fooling. The Father doesn’t do things like that. First off, the Father is illimitable. The Father does not walk the Earth or sit beside campfires, and doesn’t torture someone like Job by killing off his family and taking away everything he had just to see what would happen. Those are the kind of tricks that the Demiurge plays.
Tessa: I have a question here and that’s a philosophical question. I understand the emotional thinking behind it. And I would hope also that the Creator God does not do those things. That is my hope. The contradiction to that is that we as human beings cannot possibly know what God is or is not. So whenever we say, and I’m guilty of that myself, when I say, oh, God is this or God is that, I cannot really be saying that or any other human being because we don’t know. Like for all we care, God could be anything. So we hope that God is not this or not that, but we don’t even know. No, no. Because when you actually, first off, we can’t know the Father, not even Logos. That’s what I’m saying.
Cyd: No, but that’s what the Son was for.
Tessa: No, but that’s what I’m saying. So when we human beings say the Father is this or the Father is that, all of us, no matter what we say, at best, we are hopeful. We cannot make such claims because the creator God is so much, the creator God is so much vaster than us that we can have a feeling, you know, you can have a feeling, I can have a feeling, we can have a feeling of what that may be. But all we are left with is the feeling and our interpretation based on who we are and our ideas. So we get downloads, like you get a download, I get a download, anybody else or their books, people can form opinions. But it is my opinion that at best what we can do when talking about the creator is provide our theory, Or our opinion, our feeling, and our hope because it’s simply not possible. We are too limited in our human perception to say, I know this.
It’s like no human being can know that.
Cyd: Well, guess what? You know what gnosis means? Do you know the word gnosis?
Knowledge. It means I know. Gnostics claim to actually know. My faith is not a hope. It’s not a theory. I disagree with your basic premise. If you have gnosis, if you are in touch with, and here’s the thing, all those differentiations become more and more accessible as above, so below. I can infer the character of God by the noble thought. We’ve got the egoic thought, which is all self-centered, me, me, me, I want this, I want that, you’re terrible, you’re terrible, whatever. That’s ego. But when you step out of ego running you, and it’s not even all the time, it’s just all the time for most people, but if you are on a spiritual path, you step out of ego and you pray for the Father. You pray to be in alignment with truth, with truth. Pray for Gnosis. Then it comes. It’s a subjective feeling and it’s not an emotion. Emotion is demiurgic. Emotion is glandular.
Tessa: I think we are talking about the same thing and we can have a difference in opinions. I respect you deeply. You’re a beautiful human being. At the end of the day, both of us die, and then we find out probably both of us will go, oh my God, what was
I thinking?
Cyd: Right. Then we give each other high fives. Right.
Tessa: So, I mean, I’m all cool with having all sorts of theological agreements and disagreements. But I guess what I’m saying is this, in indigenous traditions that I’m familiar with in a sensory manner, there are procedures, and some people get it just like you get it probably, but I mean, you can connect to different spiritual… You can connect to the spirit, the all-knowing spirit. You can connect and get those feelings. Again, feeling is an imperfect word for it. But it feels like I know. But what I’m saying is that at the end of the day, it’s a strong feeling because we cannot, through words, in my opinion, again, we can disagree and I still love you, but speaking for the creator, Which again, I have my own understanding of how that works. We’re interviewing you, so we’re talking about your view because that’s what we’re here for. But I have my own path, my own downloads, my own feeling, my own perception, my own theory around it. And this is my life. And, you know, there are other people who have their own process and their own version of that. And it’s so beautiful. But what I’m saying is that if we are gathered in the room, probably our versions will be much different or at least slightly different if we’re in the same tradition. And it has nothing to do with intellect. It has to do with downloads that we get as knowledge. Okay. Different because we process it for ourselves. So when we come into the room, I don’t think it’s like a human being,
I don’t think is really authorized to say like, all knowing God is this, because all we have is my understanding of all knowing God is this. And this is a fair thing to say, I think. Okay. But saying, you know…
Cyd: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I agree with you. Point well taken. And what we call that feeling—Gnostics call it Gnosis. So it’s not an emotion because emotions are worldly. They’re lateral. They’re not up and down. So we call it Gnosis. Okay. But having said that, this is Christian Gnosticism that I share. And so Christ is involved. So let me get back to the Gnosis as a whole.
So we have the fall. We have the Demiurge waking up down there, forgetting that he’s just the ego of Logos and the actual monad of Logos has gone back up to the Fullness. And the Fullness and Logos really, really want to clean up the mess down there that Logos made during the fall. So they pray for a solution, and their solution is creating what’s called the second order of powers. They’re the first order of powers. They send the second order of powers down here in the universe to remind, basically, to remind the Demiurge, hey, dude, you may be God down here, but there’s a better God up there. You got to get over yourself. Because it’s all ego down here, including the God. He’s all about control. The Demiurge controls through strings of powers. So he’s in charge of the material, chemical bonds, physical bonds, the bonds between layers of molecules and their orbits and all that kind of thing. Those are the bonds of the Demiurge. He’s 100% of a dictator.
And here we come, we second order powers. We are children of the Aeons. We in Gnosticism, we are the children, the direct children of the Aeons. I have my earthly parents, but I’ve got Aeonic parents too. And my Aeonic parents thought Cyd would be a good model. And so here I came and I was born. [So that’s funny, I just lost my train of thought again.] Okay, but we’re down here. Oh, second order powers. All living creatures are second order powers. The Demiurge could not bring life into its creations. It’s only good up to the mineral level. So the hard and rocky places, as I put it, those are all demiurgic. So the planets—I don’t worship crystals or planets or Gaia as the earthly part of Gaia. But all the soft and squishy parts, those are aonic. Those are the children of the Aeons. All the plants, even the bacteria, the slime molds, the dogs, the cats, the cows, the birds, everything, the humans, we’re all second order powers and we all have aonic parents.
Tessa: Can I ask a question? Sorry, the distinction between the hard elements and the squishy elements, is it mainstream Gnosticism or is it Cyd Gnosticism?
Cyd: No, it’s mainstream, well, I think it’s probably mainstream, but I haven’t ever…
Tessa: So this is what you arrived at?
Cyd: Yes, it’s what I’ve arrived at through reading the Nag Hammadi, but I’m not sure if somebody would disagree with me. I pretty much think that this is correct.
Tessa: And also, can we go into, because we’re talking about semantics, and I respect your opinion so much. The word worship, in my understanding, is largely over, like, it is a confusing word, because when you interact with your parents, is it worship or is it love? Like, what is worship? And the Earth, whom I love, because we all come from earthly elements, our body is a living being, as far as I’m concerned, and I love. I feel love. I think worship as a hierarchical thing to me is not really helpful. Like love to me is helpful. Worship in a hierarchical sense, not so much. But let’s compare notes.
Cyd: No, no, no. And I know that there are certain animists who believe that there’s consciousness in all things. Do you worship rocks? Do you?
Tessa: I do not worship rocks. Anything I have love for, love, feelings, relations with the creator. And I believe everything is alive and everything is a community, including our body is composite. Our soul is composite. So I don’t use the word worship. It’s not in my inner vocabulary. It’s love.
Cyd: Love works. And when people ask me, what do you mean by glory? Oh, you know, that’s such an old fashioned term. Who wants to give glory? Who wants to worship? I think of it as tremendous love focused on a noble thing because there’s vain glory where you’re worshiping a sports figure or an influencer. But true glory is the feeling that a mother and father have right after the baby was born, and they’re holding the baby for the first time, and they’re saying, oh, what a gorgeous thing. I’ve never loved anything this much. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. That’s worship. That’s love.
So worship is love kind of concentrated, concentrated love.
Tessa: So you are against feeling concentrated love for Earth, but you are not against feeling concentrated love for a plant.
Cyd: Yes, but I would feel concentrated love for everything that coats the Earth, you know, all of the living things. And by the way, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, my theory of everything from 20 years ago was a pan-animistic thought. I did think back then that all of the particles and atoms and molecules were alive and conscious. And I attributed to them thoughts just like we have, you know, like H2O becomes water because two H’s go, hey, let’s join up with this O and make water. I mean, it’s like that. Now with the Gnostic refinement, let’s say, it’s only the living things, the second order of powers, because power implies animism, actual animism. I’ve always known, even when I wrote the simple explanation originally, there’s a difference truly between a molecule and a dog. And it’s not just that the dog is bigger. The dog has wants, needs and so forth. The molecule, not so much. The cell, yes. So I think, life according to Cyd, I believe that the second order powers begin at the cellular level. Because—have you ever watched that video, The Inner Life of a Cell, that’s been on YouTube for many years now?
Okay, so the inner life of a cell, I highly recommend it to everyone. It shows you the great complexity within a single cell. Huge complexity. So many parts, moving parts, interconnected parts, parts that need to work together, ratchets, machinery. You know, there’s ratchets and clicks. There’s all kinds of stuff. There’s those little walking, what are those little proteins called? Walking proteins. Anyway, they’re little protiens that walk with feet carrying their loads of amino acids across the cell. I mean, it’s incredible to watch that video. So once we get inside the cell, I would say, although that could just be the machinery of the parts being run by the consciousness of the cell. I don’t know.
I’m not going to argue about it. But I would say from the cells on up, surely these all count in all living things as second order powers and up in the Fullness of God. There are those guys, all those cellular parts all the way up. So everything that exists,
and this is one of the ways we can get a glimpse into God or the Father is because as above, so below, which means that so below as above. So you can infer the nature of God. You can infer the love of God by God.
The love I have for my baby or the love I have for my dog, you know, or the love I have for my parents. We infer because love is, see, once the second order powers are sent down here, we’re not cut off. We’re not like the Demiurge. We come down with carrying the Fullness of God within us. Every cell, every part of ourselves, everything in the forest, carries the Fullness of God throughout it. Literally. And that’s where the intelligent design comes along. It’s not, and let’s not get into evolution, but I don’t believe in evolution, but let’s not get into that because that’s a long topic.
Oh, so I was bringing up the Christ. OK, so we second order of powers were sent down to populate the Earth with the love of God, with the Fullness and cooperation in the simple golden rule, which is one of my major points that I invented that I don’t see anywhere else, but I put it into Gnosticism. And it’s that this the simple golden rule says we reach out to others with love, with information, and with assistance to work together on a project that none of us could accomplish on our own. Without ego, we work on the project in the middle. And this works for everything. This is how I this is how the simple explanation conceives of the structure of physics and chemistry. They all build upon each other. You know, the cells. The skin cells all reach out to skin cells and they make the organ known as skin. The heart cells all reach out only to heart cells and they make the organ known as the heart. And that works out throughout our bodies. And then all those organs reach out to other organs and they make the organism. And here you got it. Here we have an organism.
Tessa: It is interesting because we’re talking about morphic fields and the research done into that. It starts with a morphic field that is a blueprint for everything. And out of that morphic field, all other things know how to talk to each other and form. But that’s a whole other conversation.
Cyd: Exactly. I’m a fan of Rupert Sheldrake. I am a fan of Rupert. And I read him many years before I wrote The Simple Explanation. So I’ve had many experiences of this morphic field. But that’s another topic.
Tessa: His work is beautiful. He’s not even the first one who came up with it, but that’s the whole of the matter.
Cyd: So we were sent down to demonstrate love and cooperation in the simple golden rule to the Demiurge, except we come down and what do we do? We start fighting with each other and we start being lost and we forget. We lose contact with the Father. And unless you remember the gnosis that you’re born with, because we all carry with us in every cell of our bodies and in our larger aggregate, you have to turn to the gnosis and the gnosis leads you to the Father.
Well, we have failed. We failed in that project for the last however many thousands of years humans have been around at least. However… the Fullness up above and Logos and the Son now got involved and he’s still plugged into the Father. This is the mythology of the of the Tripartite Tractate. They all pray together directly to the Father for a solution for someone now to come and save us. You know, it’s like when someone goes into river to save someone who’s drowning and then they start drowning and then someone else has to go into the river to save the guy who went into the river, which was a sad news story I saw just a week or two ago that that happened. So who do they cook up? That gigantic aggregate of everything in the Fullness, in the ethereal realm, that is the Christ.
So the Christ, and of course, Christians hate us putting the the in front of it, the Christ. The Christ is the most powerful emanation that exists. And it has all the mojo to come to Earth to save us second order powers. And then the Demiurge as well. So this is why it’s Christian Gnosticism, because we preach Christ. And I say, as a Bible-believing Christian, that Jesus, he was a human who was in, you know, they say Jesus was fully human and fully God. Okay, we’re all fully human. And by the way, we’re all fully God because we’ve all got the Fullness of God inside of us. But Jesus was sent with a special mission by the entire aggregate of the Fullness to not forget. And here he comes and he preaches. And when he says, I and my Father are one and all the things that Jesus says in the red letter editions of the New Testament. They’re all Gnostic. He never referred to God as Jehovah. He’s always talking about my Father. The Lord’s Prayer isn’t dear Jehovah. It’s my Father who art in heaven, my Father.
He’s Father of us all, whether or not you recognize it and whether or not you follow a lesser God. That’s not going to cut you out of the pack.
Tessa: Two separate questions. One, so your own Cyd distinction between Gnosticism, Christian Gnosticism and mainstream Christian traditions are the ones is that mainstream Christian traditions recognize Jehovah is the God of Old Testament as the same as the God that Jesus is versus in your opinion, the Father is the God creator. And then Jehovah is not. Am I correct?
Cyd: Yes, you’re correct about that. Although Jehovah did put everything into order using the strong strings of power.
Tessa: And what is the definition of a lesser god? We’re back to the same thing because I want to have clarity.
Cyd: Well, you know, I don’t know if these lesser gods have any power. I don’t know.
Tessa: What do you mean by lesser god? I’m just here after semantics. What do you mean by lesser god?
Cyd: Like Baal or… See, I don’t even know the names of the lesser gods. All those gods in Hinduism. There’s a ton of gods in Hinduism. Just look up any of the names of gods. Or in Shintoism.
Tessa: So you mean by the word gods, plural, you mean spirits who were created by the creator, who is mysterious and who we don’t know? Then how does it…
Cyd: They might be… From all I know, if they’re false gods that are evil, if it’s a god that you’re worshiping, like Baal, then that supposed god… Is in favor of child sacrifice and the sacrifice of virgins and all sorts of various nefarious things. The Father above is all about love and life and preservation, never about death and destruction.
Tessa: I have a question, an existential philosophical and logical question that comes up often. So if at the end of the day, the mysterious creator God created the very possibility of the universe and everything that came after, then by logic, absolutely everything that is in existence in any shape or form, in any dimension, originated from the creator God,
whom we don’t know because the creator God is mysterious. So this way, everything was created by the creator God. So it’s not possible to say something was created or slipped through the cracks or…
Cyd: It’s free will. We’re not predestined. We all have free will. And in order to have free will, you have to have the opportunity, the personal opportunity to not follow the
will of God, but to follow your ego. It’s ego. And, you know, the Father and your free will, you know, angel on one shoulder, devil on the other. Your free will is the way you go. And I think most people are on the wrong path. And that’s why we have so much evil.
But the definition of evil in the Tripartite Tractate is simply ignorance. The Demiurge isn’t evil. He just doesn’t remember where he came from. He thinks he’s God. But he’s not. He’s the chief archon of the shadows of the fall. And he does a good job of running the Earth.
But then we all came down with our pesky free wills, I call it our pesky free wills because the Demiurge doesn’t allow free will. If your molecules and your atoms had free will, the universe would not hold, would it? That’s what those constants are, the cosmological constants. The speed of light has to be a certain speed. The size of the smallest subatomic particle is always the same size. If they weren’t uniform and performing exactly as designed, there wouldn’t be a universe; it would fly apart. That’s a scientific given.
Tessa: This is interesting because even on the level of subatomic particles, the latest science, even not so latest science, found that they behave conscious. They behave conscious as in they choose what to do. Yeah, not chaotically, but unpredictably from the standpoint of view. If they were mechanical, they would not behave in how they behave. They became as conscious beings.
Cyd: Well now, but you see, it’s the Demiurge that puts order into the universe. In the beginning, at the inception of the material universe, it was absolutely chaotic. The Demiurge started building the universe. He didn’t just snap his fingers like in Genesis and say, let there be Earth, let there be water. No, he had to build, he had to construct the whole universe out of the roiling chaos of the fall. So there is an appearance of consciousness, but it’s all through the Demiurge. The hard, rocky places have the demiurgic consciousness, but not their own. I don’t remember now if it’s explicitly stated in other books. But in any event…
Tessa: So this is fascinating. I mean, there’s so much. And people can go find if they’re interested in your version of Gnosticism and your version of Christianity.
Cyd: Yeah. Yeah. May I hold up books? Let me show you. This was the first book I wrote when I came to Gnosticism. It’s called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It’s very short. It’s very simple. And it’s got big illustrations that take up half of the page. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.
This is the straight through version for anyone who wants to learn. And again, we avoid saying learn. We say, remember that if anybody wants to remember the Father or remember the Aeons and how things work, this is not my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. This is the Tripartite Tractate put in simplest possible terms.
Now, You have to have a heart for God to want to do any of this. If you hate God, forget about it. It’s not going to do you any good. Then after that, it’s like 10 years later, I wrote A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.
And this is where, you know, it’s a lot quicker just to say something. It takes a lot longer to explain it, doesn’t it, Tessa? So this is the explanation of this book. And it’s also a mashup of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything with the Gnostic gospel. So this is very much Cyd’s gospel.
And this is what I share. This is my Gnosis that I’m sharing. And we do all have our own Gnosis, Tessa. This is one of the major things about Gnosticism. That’s why you can’t sit and learn it from a teacher. Don’t follow gurus. And I don’t try to be a guru. I’m nobody’s guru. And I’m not going to call myself a bishop or a priestess or any woo-woo thing. What I do is share my gnosis and suggest ideas that might stimulate your own gnosis. Then you have to sit in a contemplative state and pray to the Father for connection.
And the Christ comes into it. You can pray directly to the Christ. And if you’re a Christian, you can actually pray to Jesus. Jesus, show me the way to the Father. Jesus, show me the way to Christ. The Christians have conflated three major characters. They have conflated, which means stuck them all together and they think they’re one: the Son, the Christ, and Jesus. They are certainly not the same person or entity.
First of all, Jesus is a human being. So how could that have existed from the beginning in the ethereal space? It’s pre-human. Humans don’t come around until the second order of powers come to Earth. The Christ is what Jesus is based upon. He’s like the interior pleroma of Jesus when he came to Earth. That’s why he knew what to say and he knew how to stay in contact with the Father and he never strayed. But the Son is the one who stays plugged in, who’s still there, who has never changed because he is the Father made manifest.
So it doesn’t matter if we can’t grasp the illimitable. It keeps getting more and more discreet of a package until we find what we can grasp. And in the Tripartite Tractate, it says the Christ comes to Earth with the face of everyone who prays for assistance, who prays for salvation, who prays for help, get me out of this mess. When the car is crashing. You know, it doesn’t just have to be raising your hands for Jesus and going forward and saying the sinner’s prayer. That isn’t what this is about. This is about when the plane is going down and you’re about to die, you reach out to the Father. They’ve often said there’s no such thing as an atheist on a crashing plane. It’s that moment of intense need to reunite with the Fullness of God that you jump over all those other steps and whatever the thing is you can latch on to, that’s what you latch on to. And for Christians, it’s Jesus. That’ll work. Jesus will pull you up. If you’re not a Christian, you pray to the God above all gods. And if you don’t even know the God for all gods, but you have a heart for God and you want to go home, please, God, take me home. Please, Krishna, take me home. Please, Jehovah, take me home. Whoever that lesser God is that you’re praying to, that will translate into the God above all gods because he knows that’s who you really mean.
So all the years I was a Christian and having been taught that it was Jehovah I was praying to, yet I was a sincere Christian, sincere. I’m an innocent. I’m a true believer, they call it. I had a professor once when I went to graduate school who pulled me into his office one day to have a sit down and he said, you know, your problem, you’re a true believer. I’ve never met a true believer before. You’ve got to lose that. You’ve got to stop all this God nonsense or you’re never going to make it in graduate school. He told me that.
Well, I didn’t believe him and I did not fall away, but being a true believer is a rare commodity. So I’m an idealist. I’m a philosopher. That’s why I’ve been doing this since I was five years old. I’m a true believer.
So if you’re a true believer, if you love God, if your heart is in the right place, That’s who you’re praying to, even if you have another name on it of one of the lesser gods. And by the way, the last thing about Gnosticism, everybody’s going home. The universe, when it rolls up, there is no hell. We’re not going to Gehenna. Nobody’s being left behind.
Even the Demiurge comes home because all of these machinations is to roll up this second economy and to usher in the final third economy, it’s called, wherein Christ, who’s called the third order of powers, is king. Literally king. He’s the head of the hierarchy at that point. So we all roll up.
This world, this universe will end. The entire cosmos, the entire giant torus will zoop back to the beginning. And nothing will be left behind except thosethings that were not from the beginning… We are from the beginning. That being all the aeonic emanations, because we’re ionic emanations. We are the children of the Aeons. We go home because logically, think about it. This is a thing I say to many people, Tessa, get this. If all of the creatures were not saved and going back to heaven when they die, the Fullness would no longer be full. The Fullness of God implies restoration. So we’re all going up to the Fullness again. Otherwise, the Fullness would have lost a vast majority of itself.
No one’s going to hell. And that’s another one of the modern Christian heresies is that you can be saved or redeemed because we’re going to all repent. When you get face to face with truth, when you die, nobody’s going to say, no, I wish I was in hell. No, I want to evaporate like a puff of smoke. No, I want to go into oblivion and blackness. I don’t even want to be alive with everybody I’ve ever loved. No, nobody’s going to say that. That’s a silly thing. They may think that now, but when they die and they come face to face with their final reckoning, and there is a judgment day for everyone. And I think that those YouTube videos we watch of near-death experiences—have you ever watched some of those? People’s experiences that they have when their body is dead and there they are walking around in some strange, interesting space, overwhelmed by love and light and consciousness.
That’s our final reckoning. And we will come face to face with all of our error and we will not be punished, but we will be regretful. I know that I’ve hurt many people’s feelings in my life. And I’ve accidentally killed a few critters here and there with my car or whatever. And I regret all of that. And so when I come back after death, when I’m rolled up, even if I’m wrong about this whole Gnostic line of thinking, even if my theology is all wrong, even if I’ve led thousands of people into error, God is not going to abandon me because Jesus said, I came to save everyone. It says that over and over in the New Testament. Jesus said, I came to save everyone. That doesn’t mean that is only those who know Christianity. That is only those who are baptized. That is only those who go to church and have communion. That is only those who are Catholics and believe the Pope. Jesus didn’t say any of that. He said, I came to save everyone. So if you don’t know that before you die, you will certainly know it afterwards and you will be saved because otherwise we’d have more power than Christ. If you have the ability to make yourself go to hell when Jesus said, no, I came to save you, well, then you’d have more power than Christ.
Does that make sense?
Tessa: You have a very interesting mind. I, you know, I, I enjoy this conversation. We have our agreements and disagreements, but what I really value about you is that you are sincere. You are a real believer and you try to make the sense of things, you know,
to the best of your ability, like, you know, like we all do, I do the same thing. And again, our conclusions are not identical, but I really treasure you as a fellow seeker, you know, as a fellow spirit, as somebody who is, doing one’s best to understand the truth and to spread the love.
You know, we could have many arguments about things and we would just go like, no, it is like this, no, it is like that. But I really value you. I really value you because you’re a seeker and you’re trying your best and you have your gift and you’re sharing it with the people and you talk about the community. So I really appreciate it. And actually, like yourself, here we’re in agreement. I do think, and I want to use the word know, but probably think with some degree of knowledge would be more appropriate. The logic when people cross over is different and healing is baked in the process.
This is what I learned when my mom went back home or I relearned it. Healing is how this world is made. And all we argue here, you know, this is correct, this is correct, you know, this book, that book, whatever. You know, it kind of, it’s always like children playing in the sandbox. We’re just putting things together, trying to understand something. But I, the way I say things when we go back, our knowledge becomes so much faster. And again, it’s still a process. It’s not like we go back and we just know everything. It’s a process. It’s a process that is infinite. And at the same time, time doesn’t exist, blah, blah, blah, all that.
Cyd: And we won’t have that. The reason why we’re going to know easier and better, there will be a process, but there’s no obfuscations. There’s no material in the way. We are deluded down here by all of the everything, by the linear words we speak. But up there, it’s all going to be like that. We’re going to get it.
Tessa: Well, I think it could also be a process. It could be also a process depending on what we did over there. And besides, the universe is so vast. There’s so many dimensions and ways of being. Some of them we cannot even imagine or comprehend. And it’s completely outside of human perception, like completely. Yeah. My understanding of things. But at the end of the day, I think what matters is that you and I are capable of sitting together, having theologies that have some similarities, some total differences, and we’re capable of having this conversation heart to heart with respect. And hopefully, if people learn anything from that, is that it’s possible to do that. We can just have a wonderful, respectful conversation spirit to spirit, just compare the notes.
Cyd: And this is the kind of conversations I’ve had all my life with my brother. We don’t always see eye to eye, but we have respectful conversations until we are able to come up with something that works for us or for both of us generally. And so and I love you, too, Tessa. And you do the same with your with your broadcasts. You spread the truth and the life and the love as you know it to be, and I highly value you so much.
Tessa: Oh, me too. So, you know, Mutual Admiration Club. Yes. So thank you.
Can you please talk about your Substack where people can find you?
Cyd: Yes, I’m Cyd Ropp. I’m on Substack. And the name of that Substack is The Gnostic Reformation. And my mothership is GnosticInsights.com. And there is where you can find the entire backlog of all, you know, the entire archive, I guess we call it. Of all of the episodes. I’m going to say one more thing since we’re like children.
Did you see this? Did I ever show this to you? I wrote a children’s book a couple of years ago and I’ve published it myself and I paid to have it illustrated. And I have taken that Gnostic cosmology that I described to you today and simplified it for five-year-olds on 32 pages as a children’s picture book. So if you think Gnosticism is too difficult, at least you can get it off of this book.
Tessa: Oh, thank you, Cyd. Well, thank you for being a brilliant seeker and an honest person and a person who has love and who cares. I really appreciate you. Thank you. It was a wonderful conversation.
Cyd: Onward and upward. Thank you. Bye-bye.
