Gnostic Insights Podcasts
Cyd Ropp explains basic Gnostic ideas, often narrated while walking the dog.
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Pascal’s Wager
Best known of his ideas is Pascal’s Wager, and here is how it goes. Facing uncertainty in a game of life with such high stakes, he argued, it makes far more sense to believe in God’s existence than to not.
“If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He is.”
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What Is Gnosis?
If I love my dog, I ought to love my neighbor, my human neighbor. But I really love my dog with affection, right? My human neighbor, maybe not so much. Maybe they irritate me. Maybe they have a political sign posted on their lawn that I think is just horrible. But I’m called to love them. And how can I do that? The only way to love them is to take my ego off of the throne, off of the center of my considerations, off of the center of my unit of consciousness, and remember to re-enthrone Christ.
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As Above, So Below pt. 2
Our mission is to bring love into the world and to ultimately remind the Demiurge of its origins in the Fullness above. The Demiurge doesn’t know this, of course, and it thinks we are simply more material for it to control. It doesn’t know we are conscious, and it thinks we are chaotic because it does not understand the free will we bring into creation.
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As Above, So Below
Remember, the Demiurge does not know love and has no affection for humans and their pesky free will, whereas the Father and the Fullnesses love us and passed along free will as a God-given part of our 2nd Order nature.
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Are People Inherently Evil?
So, we do not have an inherent sin nature. We are children of the Aeons of God. We are children of the Fullness, and it’s actually an insult to the Fullness and to the Son of God to say that their children—for are we not the children of God? Are we not brothers and sisters of Jesus?—it’s a big insult to the Aeons and the angels and the Son of God that made us to say that we’re inherently evil. And it’s not because we fell. The Fall was instigated long before the humans came along. The Fall is the nature of our material universe, that’s all. It’s basically metaphorical language for moving from a different realm, a different home—from the ethereal non-material space of heaven, we might call it, or the Fullness of God.
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Redeeming the Demiurge
The redeemed Pleroma of Logos, redeemed by the Christ, is the final resting place for the Demiurge once it remembers and recognizes its brothers in the Fullness and the Father of them all through the power of Christ, because it took that power of Christ coming in to this material world through us in order for the Demiurge to remember. The Third Order of Powers is called the aeon, the place, the thought of the Logos who returned to his stability. It’s known also as the synagogue of salvation, the storehouse, the bride, the kingdom, the church, the image of the light. It is set above the Second Order and the deficiency. It has the form of matter, but the constitution of the Christ, each one containing the Pleroma of the All.
These are the manifest images of the living visages, not arising from division, but from the unity of the aeons of the Father and the good original thought that existed prior to the rise of ego. While the Second Order Powers, us, each arose at the countenance of a single aeon, the Third Order Powers are in harmony and resemble the entire assembly of indivisible light.
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Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding
The Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there.
Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a Son. -
I am not Me–Your Self (2024 edition)
That the you that exists between material incarnations is nothing but your karmic record is proved by one of our basic assertions that all units of consciousness are fundamentally one and the same, and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect echoes of the Fullness of God. Then it follows that I develop as a result of my choices and the choices of others. I am my perfect unit of consciousness, enshrouded in karma and the memes that my karma attracts.
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We Are the Children of the Aeons and other musings
Jesus becomes the first human exemplar of the indwelling of the Christ. But we all have the potential to have the indwelling of the Christ. That’s the ultimate goal, is to allow the Third Order Powers to replace our Second Order Powers. That is the only way to live a truly righteous life that is outside of the Law, but through grace. But this all has nothing to do with salvation, because all will be redeemed because that is the job of the Christ, sooner or later. And it will be later for most people who do not acknowledge the Christ.
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What Is Your Worldview?
“A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.” (JFK)
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God is Goodness
The God Above All Gods is consciousness itself. It is the ultimate consciousness. It’s not only consciousness, but the God Above All Gods is the fountainhead of love. So all consciousness flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods, and all love flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods.
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Fractals of the Fullness–Our Ethereal Origin
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.
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. -
Archons–What Are They?
Logos allowed his ego to stray on its own and his arrogant thought brought about the Fall. His egoic output was deficient because it came from presumptuous thought and arrogance. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him. And again, that which was perfect was his big S Self, his true reflection of the Aeons of the Fullness.
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Awakening Consciousness
The Father is consciousness itself, and off of that initial consciousness come fractals that are each a unit of the Father’s consciousness. The Universal Unit of Consciousness holds all of the blueprints and all of the potentialities for our entire universe, as thought arising out of the originating Father’s consciousness. And each one of the fractal iterations that come off of that Universal Unit of Consciousness also holds the potentiality of the Father as expressed by the Son. These fractal potentialities are first expressed as the combination of traits called the Pleroma of God, also known as the Fullness of God. When the Fullness sits in its unified perfection, ALL of the traits of the Son are on full display.
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The Nature of the Gnostic God
The Father is the ground state of consciousness, and so this is why we begin to build out from the Father the flow of consciousness.
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?” After that, we can finally consider the termination 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 knowledge is known as “gnosis.”