Gnostic Insights Podcasts
Cyd Ropp explains basic Gnostic ideas, often narrated while walking the dog.
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Meet the Demiurge–Its Birth and Occupation
The Demiurge is the creator god of this universe we live in. To faithful Hebrews and Christians, the name of the Demiurge is Yahweh or Jehovah. Other world religions have other names for this creator god. Stories of Jehovah fill the Old Testament and carry forward into the New Testament. However, an interesting thing about gnosticism is the declaration that there is another God who is called the Father–the God Above All Gods in gnostic theology. And in gnostic Christianity, the God Above All Gods is actually the Father to whom Jesus prayed. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One,” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen my Father,” the God he is referring to is not Jehovah. The God that Jesus is referring to is the God Above All Gods.
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The Fullness of God–Consciousness Branches Outward
If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who Himself is the ALL. [verse 68]
For that reason they were drawn into mutual intermingling union and oneness through the singing of praise. From their assembled Fullness they were one and at the same time many, accurately reflecting the One who Himself is the entirety of the ALL. Out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the ALL gave glory to the Eternal One who had brought it forth. The glory given out of this perfect communion left the ALL perfect and full, as it was perfect and full to begin with, and the object of their glory was also perfect and full. [68, 69] -
Authoritative Discourse of the Nag Hammadi
Death and life are placed before everyone, and people choose for themselves which of these two they want. The soul forgets her siblings and her father, and sensual pleasures and sweet things deceive her. She has abandoned knowledge and has fallen into the life of an animal. A person devoid of sense lives like a beast, not knowing what one should say or should not say.
We are to be triumphant over the ignorance of those who contend with us, the adversaries who contend against us, through our gnosis, for we already have known the inscrutable One from whom we have come. We are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face.
The soul who has tasted these things has come to realize that sweet passions are fleeting. She has learned about evil, has forsaken these passions, and has adopted a new lifestyle. After her experiences, the soul disdains this life because it lasts for only a time. She seeks the kinds of food that will bring her life, and she leaves behind the food of falsehood. She learns about the light, and she goes about and strips off this world. Her true garment clothes her within, and her bridal gown reveals beauty of mind rather than pride of flesh. She learns about the depth of her being. She runs into her sheepfold as her shepherd stands at the door. In return for all the shame and scorn she experienced in this world, she receives 10,000 times as much grace and glory. -
How do we know what we know? A conversation with my brother about the scientific method, knowledge, gnosis, and truth
Aristotle and philosophers say that for something to be known, it must be true, must be believed, and must have evidence for it to be the case. The problem arises when trying to fulfill the evidence condition–what counts as evidence and how much evidence is enough. The scientific method can go only so far under the rules imposed by logic. Plato felt the evidence condition could never be met. Plato said that if one knows something to be the case, it must be inherent knowlege. In other words, it must be gnosis.
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Birds Don’t Buy Bentleys–A Conversation with my Brother About Evolution
There are just a couple of basic ways you can think about evolution. As commonly taught in school, “scientific” evolution explains the tremendous diversity of life on Earth as lucky mutations that add up to great results. Darwinism promotes the idea that mutations and mechanisms morph into increasingly sophisticated life forms, because genetic goof-ups allow the ones who change to better survive and dominate those who stayed true to form. These lucky mutations keep going in the same lucky direction until there are so many of them that they add up to a new and improved creature. And now they are “evolved.”
Gnostics have another way of looking at so-called evolution. Not only is creation preconceived in the Fullness of God, aka “conscious design,” but we are all there from the beginning because time is an illusion. -
Yearning for the Pleroma 2025
“To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought … with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 98, 99).
“What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die… For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 114, 115). -
All Is One–A Conversation with my Brother
The reason there is quantum entanglement is because there is no space and time. All potentialities exist within the mind of the Father and our consciousness notices one after another, giving the illusion of time and space. The Demiurge organizes the confusion of the Fall and that is the imitation. At the end of time, illusion drops away and all are redeemed into the ethereal awareness of pure consciousness.
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We Are the Second Order of Powers
These new creatures that were devised are better than the Deficiency because they come from the union of the entire Fullness, whereas the Deficiency came out of a mistaken solo effort by Logos alone. Out of this union of the Fullness and Logos came what are called the Second Order Powers, and these powers are better and greater than those of the imitation because they did not come into being out of ego and out of lack of thought. This new fruit of the Fullness and Logos was fitted purposely into the boundary that surrounded the Fall, and so because they were fitted to live within this boundary, they were able to have a cooperative structure the way the Fullness had a cooperative structure.
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Tessa Lena’s Letter to Fellow Dissidents
It’s not great to feel different from other people like this, and you honestly just want to fit in with your friends and not stick out like a sore thumb all the time. And you try to blend in. Oh, you try.
You work hard to be normal. You try telling yourself that you are probably crazy. You deny the evidence of your lying eyes.
It turns out that a life of compliance is not enough for you, though. Other people seem to be getting away with living shallow in a man-made matrix world, but not you. Your denial of the evidence of your lying eyes doesn’t go over well for you.
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Gnostic Memes of Jesus, pt. 2
We are to have peace no matter the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The Demiurge is always trying to rile us up. The job of the archons is to bedevil us and to make us feel horrible, to knock us off our game, to take the love and light out of our lives. The Demiurge wants to bring us down to its level, down to the level of the archons, which is ego, negative emotions, vice, addictions, anger, hatred. That’s all demonic. That’s all demiurgic. Christ said, I want you to have peace in this world, so be encouraged. I have brought you the peace.
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First Emanations of Consciousness
When their generations had been established, the one who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was not yet manifest, and he brought forth those within him.
For that reason the Father had also thought in advance that they should exist not only for himself, but should exist for themselves as well, that they should remain in thought as mental substance, but also exist for themselves. -
Gnostic Memes of Jesus
When we invite Christ in—let’s say you’re at a revival or you listen to an old Billy Graham sermon on the radio or you’re reading the book of John in the Bible and you have the urge to invite Christ to take over your life, that is what it means to invite Christ into your soul—and Christ is a different order of powers than we are. We are what’s called Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons; we’re the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ. And there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. That’s how it is that Jesus or Christ comes with your face and knows everything about you because Christ is an image of the perfection that you can be. Jesus was the first human that fully embodied the Third Order of Powers. Now it’s your turn…
When we invite Christ in, we invite the Christ to take residence in our souls and in our bodies. We invite the Christ’s Third Order Powers to replace our own Second Order Powers because we’re leveling up. We’re leveling up to a more powerful and loving Godly existence when we invite Christ in.
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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.