Gnostic Insights Podcasts
Cyd Ropp explains basic Gnostic ideas, often narrated while walking the dog.
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Video Chat This Friday
Join us for a video chat this Friday, May 9, at 10 AM PST. Go to this transcript for a meeting link.
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The Father of All Consciousness
I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is cosmogony, which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives.
Then we can ask, why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live? And after that, we can finally consider the final roll-up of the universe and what happens after we “die.” All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This sort of knowledge is known as gnosis.
Today we begin at the very beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed.
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Ego, Self, Body–Who Are You?
We are not just one big clump of consciousness but are made up of different sub-selves. In other words, who are you? When you say “I” what is that I? Who is that me? What is the difference between your ego and your Self or what people call your soul and spirit? Who runs the show? What’s the difference between being selfish and selfless? How is ego related to selfishness? And finally, is having a strong ego a bad thing?
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Gnostic Easter Message 2025
Salvation is meant to bring you back into alignment with the glory of God. Jesus is our exemplar of a blameless life. Jesus is the first of the Second Order Powers that came fully loaded with the Third Order of Powers. That’s why he’s called Jesus the Anointed. He walked with the truth and spirit and love of the Father at all times, and through the power of the Christ we are to emulate Jesus. The presence of Jesus is not simply a fairy tale as so many people claim, plugging Jesus into history in the creation of a false religion. It’s really not even possible in my mind because there’s too much truth and beauty in the New Testament to be a fable constructed by a pack of religious liars.
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Earnest Lies of History
What Christianity has become by virtue of the histories written by it is another tale of those in power—those in power wielding Christianity this way or that, whereas the way Christianity started was a different story that needs to be retold in every age, because it’s about nameless people and disenfranchised people whose world has been invaded by Christ. We don’t hear from those disenfranchised people in history. We only hear about the big people. We only hear from the famous historians, the famous theologians, this king or that king, or Emperor Constantine taking Gnosticism out of the Gospel for the sake of power.
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We Are the Children of the Most High God
Here is an odd thing about Christians and the New Testament. There are many things that managed to slip by the Nicene Council when they were purging the gnosis from scripture. There’s plenty of gnosis still in the New Testament, but Christians kind of skip over that part. The Bible says we are the “sons of Elohim,” usually translated as “children of God.” In the modern vernacular I use in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, we are the fractals of the Spirit of God. We are the fruit of the elohim above, who are themselves the divisions of the Adonai Elohim (Lord of the Fullness and Son of the Father God Above All Gods). So when Jesus said we are elohim, sons of God, he was saying we, too, are the fractal elohim of God. Jesus was not the only son of God. We are all the sons of God, or the children of the Adonai Elohim.
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Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry-Jello Universe and Free Will
This Cherry-Jello Universe hypothesis resolves the philosophical conundrum of how an all-knowing God can exist alongside subjects with free will.
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The Gnosis of Virtue
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.
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Units of Consciousness, Free Will, and the Cosmic Simulation
Most units of consciousness perform their work as expected. They do their part. They work according to plan, and that’s a really good thing because that’s what holds everything together. The material controlled by the consciousness of the Demiurge is foundational. If the Demiurge did not control the material, the material universe would not hold together and it would completely and very rapidly fall apart. On the other hand, Second Order Powers, who are fractals of the Aeons above, have complete free will to either fulfill or contradict their responsibilities. Most units of consciousness do their job according to the job they were given to do and, overall, things work according to plan. There is enough redundancy in the system so that when the odd unit of consciousness decides to go rogue, things still hold together.
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Dreams–Parables of the Night 2/26/25
While we are sleeping, we are open to the leading of the Father and the Fullness of God, because our egos are asleep, and so we can align with our true Self and with the Father more easily. Our ego in sleep relinquishes the control it exerts over our waking lives, and when our hearts are quieted in the hush of sleep, our governing unit of consciousness, our Self, is better able to commune with the Father and the Pleroma.
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Is Any Sin Unforgiveable? Blaspheming the Holy Spirit
The Third Order Powers of the Christ are the most powerful force in our cosmos, far more powerful than we are and infinitely more powerful than the Pleroma of the Demiurge. This is how it is that once we accept the Christ and invite our personal Third Order Powers to enter into our soul we immediately feel the love of the Father and are no longer powerless to resist the wily temptations of the archons of the Demiurge. The Third Order Powers see through the lies and phantoms of the imitation. They cannot be deluded by the deficiency. They are not affected by the never-ending war. And we share that enlightenment to the extent that we accept the indwelling of the Third Order Powers.
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Tongues of Fire–the Coming of the Holy Spirit
Jesus was the first of the human Second Order Powers who to be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Of course, Jesus is more than a Second Order Power. He’s always been the manifestation of a Second Order Power plus the Third Order of Powers. And we call that the Christ. We say Jesus Christ, but he’s actually called Jesus the Anointed, and the anointing was the Holy Spirit. To be anointed signifies a special set-apart status for fulfilling a particular purpose or calling. And the calling of Jesus was to round us all up and bring us home.
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Eternal Life, Guardian Angels, and Spirit Melding to Mud
Last week’s episode was a link to an interview I had just given on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. That interview on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio was called “Gnostic Psychology and Preparing for Death,” and that was posted on January 29, 2025.
As we so often do, my brother and I chatted after the interview was posted and after he had had a chance to watch it, and we discussed some of the finer points of the Gnosis shared there in that episode. I gave Bill an important piece of Gnosis during that conversation, and he gave me an important piece of Gnosis during that conversation, and I thought I would share those with you today. This is part of our ongoing process of mining our Gnosis. -
Gnosis, Gurus, and Meditation
and a conversation with Bill Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The first half of this episode is about choosing the higher road to find your…
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Beatitudes of Jesus, Book of Mark
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. You know, this podcast is an odd space where it’s both Gnostic and Christian, because what I’m teaching is what…