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Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp.
It’s kind of funny to call this gnosis a simple explanation, isn’t it? Because if you’ve been listening for any time, you see that it’s becoming more and more complex. But, what I mean by simple is that I’m not trying to hide the gnosis from you. I’m not trying to obscure the truth so that only the worthy can mine this gnosis. We are all born with this gnosis. We are all representations of the Fullness of God, and I think it’s my calling to share this gnosis with you and show you how you can mine your gnosis. The Tripartite Tractate from the Nag Hammadi is the book I’m using to do that, because it’s a very straightforward.
We are looking at not only cosmology of the ethereal realm, which means the study of the cosmos, but its a cosmogeny as well. And cosmogony means the beginnings of the cosmos. Cosmogeny is the study of the origins of our universe, and that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic insights.
I hope you are enjoying these insights that I’m sharing with you. The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book will be a really great reference piece. Everybody who’s interested in Gnosticism will want to have this book as a reference. The glossary alone is worth the price. The Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you here isn’t the obscure historical Gnosticism of the past. I’m attempting to bring it into our modern vernacular.
And, if this is your first time joining us, it was very simple in the beginning. It started with a single concept—the consciousness we call the Father. And then it has rolled out steadily as the Father generates consciousness until it winds up with you.
On with today’s episode, which I’m calling As Above, So Below. Gnosis means knowing. And to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. And the gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate out of the Nag Hammadi codices. But more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God. That is my claim, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above. What I’m attempting to do here on the Gnostic Insights podcast is to share the insights I’ve gained through reason and contemplation, and to explain some of the more obscure passages in the Nag Hammadi scriptures.
As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council in the 300s AD under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope. And none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which scriptures are holy. And this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirits’ leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray.
Emperor Constantine
For over ten years now, I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In a Simple Explanation, there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along because they help to illuminate this gnostic gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ. We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings, because in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression: as above so below.
The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called the roots. The same is true with us humans and all other Second Order Powers. We share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform. Each lives their own life and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ.
Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father in the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if I instead turn inward, I am as near to God as the center of all of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering and grounding. When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man, I look at that shared zero point field that is at the center of our fractal units of consciousness.
Fractals are defined as fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which at least approximately is a reduced size copy of the whole. That is a property called self similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. What this means is that fractal iterations can extend infinitely. The simplest way to think about it in my mind is with broccoli.
If you go to my Simple Explanation blog December 11, 2018, there is an article there called A Simple Explanation of fractals, the broccoli fractal video demonstration. In that video, which is posted on my blog and YouTube channel, I demonstrate fractals using an ordinary head of broccoli. Have you noticed that you can hold that head of broccoli in your hand and you can peel off one of those flower heads of the broccoli and it looks very much like the broccoli flower that you were holding in the first place, only it’s much smaller. And then you can take that smaller piece and peel off another flower and it looks just like the previous one that you peeled off only it is again much smaller. You can do this broccoli exploration down to at least 7 iterations. In the end you have an extremely tiny little broccoli flowerette, but you can still see that it has more little broccoli flowers within it. They just become too small physically to pull apart.
So that’s what a fractal is. It’s a larger thing that can be reduced, reduced, reduced, reduced and each one of those reductions looks just like the piece you started out with, only smaller. And you can just keep splitting it off smaller and smaller and smaller. And if this were a purely mathematical fractal rather than a physical one like broccoli, you could go down or up through those fractal splits, pretty much infinitely.
I’m suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son; that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self aware, and it turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness sorted themselves into a hierarchy, giving themselves names, positions, places, powers, and duties, and we call this sorted Fullness the Hierarchy of the Fullness, or the Pleroma of God. The Aeons are fractals of the Son of God, and the Son is a singular expression that completely encapsulates the Father.
The Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness. The Father is illimitable—without limits, not confined to a shape or place. The Father is not walking round in robes with the long white beard. That is not the Father of the ALL. When Jesus said I and my Father are one, he’s not referring to the personified God known as Yahweh or Jehovah that walked through the Old Testament. That fellow’s name in Gnosticism is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen ego of the Aeon named Logos. It was this egoic part of Logos that overreached and fell, resulting in this material plane. It is the Demiurge who created the heavens and the Earth. He is the chief Archon of the Cosmos. But he is most assuredly not the Father of the ALL, the Aeons, and the Christ.
In Simple Explanation terms, the enclosure of our material universe is a very large toroidal pattern at the outside edge of creation. I have identified that with the border that is spoken of in the Tripartite Tractate. It is said that after Logos fell he remembered the Aeons and the Father, and his better part quickly returned back to the Fullness. The Father drew a boundary around what was left behind of the broken Logos down below, and that boundary encloses our so-called material Universe. We humans are particular fractal emanations of the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos. We are Second Order Powers fruited down here to work within the material boundary, yet we are patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. Because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of aeonic life apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of as above, so below. So, when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons, such as the Fall and redemption of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well. Logos fell because he forgot his place and proper function in the Fullness.
When Logos fled home to the ethereal Pleroma, Logos left behind the darkness and the shadows. The deficiency he left behind arose from his ego’s presumptuous thought and overreaching, because that’s what Logos was doing as he fell. When Logos fell, he left the Fullness. He was no longer in perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. Logos went out on his own with his own project, and it was the ego that caused the Fall. And because of his presumptuous thought and his overreaching, now every one of the fractals that he gave rise to down below are the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, and they all overreach. They are all built on ego. Therefore, the imitation is characterized by this presumptuous thought and overreaching, combined with the inverted traits of Logos.
Previously on the Gnostic Insights Podcast, we have discussed the values on the Left, or the material values of the imitation, and these are in direct opposition to the traits of the Fullness. They are the other side of the dialectic to the values of the Father. Those values on the Right, which are the spiritual emanations of the ethereal plane—so hate versus love, impatience versus patience, lust versus chastity, greed versus generosity—those sorts of dialectics. We 2nd Order Powers bear the likeness of the 1st Order of Powers, which are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are also called those of the remembrance, because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son, and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the Hierarchy and their dream of Paradise. We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the Pleroma, whereas the Phantoms of the deficiency are shadows of the fractals of the broken Pleroma of the singular Logos. They are smaller and of a lesser order. They are not fractals of the Aeons, they are imitations of fractals of the Aeons.
The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy.
At this point in the story, we can begin to see human nature emerging because, well, this has been told as a creation story. It’s also the story of every human being. We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect Paradise as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for Fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father other than an expectation of feeling loved, or that we should be loved. And we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way.
Those of the imitation defend and embrace the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. Those of the remembrance may or may not be religious folks, but they do all seek a higher consciousness. Religious folks call this higher consciousness God, and the memory of the Fullness, Heaven. Those of the remembrance who are not part of a religious body or the meme bundle of religion are still spiritual because they do seek reunification with the One while rejecting the man-made institutions of religion. Others who heard the still small voice of God but can’t quite bring themselves to believe in “fairy tales” are seekers that wind up exploring podcasts like this as they search for something to believe in.
At some point during everyone’s life, each person decides for themselves whether to continue trusting their own presumptuous ego or whether to heed the call from Above.
At this point, I think I should explain a little better what a meme is, as I use the term, so I’m going to read a couple of pages out of my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The importance of memes is that a huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we collect and hold onto. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the memes we hold dear as well as the memes we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of, and we are repelled by means we disapprove of. The Sanskrit word for these provocative means is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the ego that interfere with soul consciousness.
The memes each of us cling to, both those that we like and those that we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now. When we unthinkingly lock on to a meme or set of memes, it is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular bundle of memes. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters.
We like people who share the same memes as we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with each other and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme chords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes. Democrats share liberal memes. Republicans share conservative memes, and progressives share socialist memes. All subcultures share their subculture’s memes. Some types of memes are more important than other types, and it’s the important memes that matter the most. If we agree on the meaning of the word justice, we can probably overlook disagreement over the meme of whether the toilet paper should go over or under the roll.
We each carry our own bundle of memes. These are the things we believe in, both for good or ill. And, depending on what we believe in, this limits our ability to think and arrive at gnosis. So, if your meme bundle contains many values on the Left—material values like live fast and die young and leave a beautiful corpse, that is a meme bundle from the deficiency that encourages fast and reckless living and leads to misery. Contrast this with living a life that is on the aeonic, virtuous side that embraces the memes of the Fullness of God.
These virtues and these vices are each important spiritual memes. When we speak of the never ending war within our personalities and against the imitations of the deficiency, these are wars embracing the values of the Fullness as opposed to the values of popular culture. We cannot fake the meme bundles we hold because they affect our lives and every choice we make. Pretending may fool others, but that does not fool the Father. Our hearts need to be in authentic alignment with the Father and the Fullness in order for the love and gnosis of the Father to flow through us. And that’s why true repentance is necessary. We need to embrace the values of virtue, the meme bundle that flows from the Fullness of God. Embracing the meme bundle of popular culture gets us into trouble and holds us away from instantiating our true Self. Fortunately, the Christ imbues us with more power than the deficiency can wield against us, and it gives us the ability to overcome the imitations memes. So gos the never ending war.
Repentance involves pushing away the deficiency’s memes. Repentance means you no longer try to get away with whatever you can get away with. Repentance means I don’t want to do that anymore. Redemption means dwelling on the Right side of the virtue and vice ledger. And again, this isn’t to take away our fun. It’s because joy is only found on the virtuous side of the ledger. We are fractals of the Fullness of God, therefore in order to be truly happy, joyful, we shed the demiurgic memes. This tuning gives the spirit of the Christ permission to redeem us. Then we are able to embrace the Father and the Fullness.
The gnostic call for redemption goes like this: because the 2nd Order Powers have gotten all gummed up chasing after the Archons and each other in endless war, another fruit was required to bring peace to this universe. The Fullness and Logos prayed to the Father individually and collectively, for a champion to end the war, and this champion is called the Christ. Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate puts it:
“The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one to whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help, as well as the one who brought it to him.”
In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is the correcting algorithm for the 2nd Order fractals that no longer ring true. The Christ replicates all of the qualities of the ALL—that is, the full attributes of the originating consciousness in their pure form that existed prior to the Fall, with all of the confounding memes stripped away. We recognize the Christ when we encounter it, because it went forth in many forms that look just like us, so that when we pray for help, we recognize the one to whom we pray. When we accept the gift of the Christ, we invite a correction to our ego’s deluded meme bundle so that the best functioning of the universal unit of consciousness may be reestablished within us. The Christ also provides a homing beacon to the Son via a rooted love connection that flows into us from the ethereal plane.
Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from Above and that our Father is in heaven and to heaven we shall return. That’s all. Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of Ego and the meme shroud of the imitation that we cling to and are trapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines from within. That’s all. You cannot be taught gnosis. You must discover it for yourself. What we are doing here at Gnostic Insights is opening your mind so that you remember the gnosis that already lies within your One Self. You do not need to memorize this gnostic cosmology or the names of various characters we discuss here. You don’t need to punish yourself with sacrificial acts to achieve righteousness. You need only to remember and acknowledge the inherent immortal consciousness that flows from the Father.
The ancient book called the Tao Te Ching describes it this way in verse 27:
“The sage is always on the side of virtue, so everyone around him prospers.
He is always on the side of truth, so everything around him is fulfilled.
The path of the sage is called the path of illumination.
He who gives himself to this path is like a block of wood that gives itself to the chisel. Cut by cut, it is honed to perfection.
Only a student who gives himself can receive the master’s gift. If you think otherwise, despite your knowledge, you have blundered.
Giving and receiving are one. This is called the great wonder, the essential mystery. The very heart of all that is true.”
(And that is from the Tao Te Ching translation by Jonathan Star, 2001.)
Here at the Gnostic Insights podcast, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis. I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within myself. You have this gnosis within yourself, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already within yourself, along with the remembrance of who you are and where you come from. Embrace virtue.
If you come away confused, please write to me for clarification.Feel free to write to me privately using the Contact Us form at gnosticinsights.com. Or you can write to me via Comments at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Public comments are encouraged at the Substack page so we can start up a dialogue on these things. I really appreciate the listeners who have written to share their stories with me.
The publisher is almost finished with A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it.
Onward and upward. I’ll see you next time. God bless.