Gnostic Insights Podcasts
Cyd Ropp explains basic Gnostic ideas, often narrated while walking the dog.
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Logos–Ego Led Him Astray
It is a unique feature of the Tripartite Tractate that the book does not describe the Fall in terms of sin and blame, but rather as an event that was destined to come about in order to usher in a “new economy” that differed from the ethereal Pleroma where the Aeons dwell. This is our archetypal story, our pre-history as fruit of the Aeons.
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The Aeons Give Glory and Generate Logos
The Aeons mingle and combine with one another to give Glory to Father. All possible combinations of Aeons are needed in order to express the complexity of the otherwise ineffable Father. Each and every Aeon combined and recombined, and the glory they gave the Father was returned to them as additional Aeons, earning their designation as the Fullness of God. Logos was the final Aeon produced through mingling, and he was placed at the top of the Hierarchy. Logos contained a fractal representation of all of the other Aeons.
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Fractal Consciousness Becomes Self-Aware
The Tripartite Tractate says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.” Meaning that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. That is all they knew: that they had a benefactor. Somebody cared for them and wanted only good for them. They awoke to Self realization because someone loved them. This beneficence was their first knowledge.
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Heavenly Pleromas
This Pleroma of ours is called the Second Order of Powers, and we proceed out of the Pleroma of Logos. We Second Order Powers were created through the Totalities of the original Fullness giving glory to the Father alongside Logos. Together, they prayed with an intention to send life into the fallen world below. We came forth as fruit from the Pleroma of Logos, and the Pleroma of Logos was itself a fractal of the Fullness. We are called Second Order Powers to distinguish us from the First Order Powers—the Aeons of the Fullness—out of which we are fractal iterations, twice removed.
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Free Will, Redemption, and the Economies
Free will is at the core of our being. It was the free will of Logos that caused him to leave the Fullness and fall. It was the free will of the restored Logos and the Totalities that created the Second Order Powers. And it is the free will of the Powers, by way of our Aeonic inheritance, that directs ours lives here below. It is our own free will that causes us to forget about the Father and the Fullness of God from which we come. It is our own free will that allows us to bow to the rule of the Demiurge and dig our own graves. Because of the nature of free will, we turn to an outside source to assist our remembrance and salvation. This Aeon is known as the Christ.
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Overcoming Death
It’s best not to wait until death to discover your gnosis. This is the actual reason to pursue gnosis or to meditate upon the Father or to pray to the Son or to your personal deity, Jesus Christ. You prepare to transcend death while your body is still alive. Do remember that it is not through our act but through the Christ’s act that we are saved. The Christ has done its job; all Second Order Powers will return to the heavenly realm above. We are all redeemed. We will all return to some form of Paradise, but it may take you a while to get there if you don’t believe that.
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Our Hylic Third
We are eternal life and consciousness. We do not die; we return home to the ethereal realm. Our bodies do not die either, for they were never alive to begin with. We need not mourn the passing of the hylic particles, for we are returning to eternal consciousness and they were merely shadows of the Fall.
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The Tripartite Nature of Humanity
“To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.”
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Gnostic Psychology part 4–Meme dropping
Your karma and your meme bundles pretty much determine how much gnosis you’re able to tap into. In our earthly realm we have generated a lot of memes, and the Demiurge has generated vices to counteract every Aeonic virtue. Vices are always demiurgic and are designed to entrap you and lead you away from gnosis. Vices are always built upon lies. And the problem with human-generated memes is that some of them are true and some of them aren’t true. Some of them are lies and some of them are hurtful, whereas the information that comes down to us directly from the Fullness of God, the gnosis, is all true. It’s all helpful, it’s all loving, it’s all good.
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Human Nature–Gnostic Psychology part 3 Ideologies and Worldviews
Our worldview, or ideology, is the larger frame through which we view the world. We humans are built to make sense of the world around us. When things don’t make sense, we feel puzzled, lost, even frightened or depressed. We humans all need to believe in something—anything. I would say it’s in the nature of us Second Order Powers, because we were created as reasonable beings. A worldview is the scaffolding upon which we hang our observations and expectations. It is a very big framework because we need to be able to make some sense of the world in order to discern our reason for living.
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Human Nature–Gnostic Psychology part 2
First and foremost, each of our Selfs is an almost identical fractal of the Fullness of God. But, as is the case with DNA, although our master pattern is identical, not every facet is activated to the same extent in everyone, and the facets that are activated are turned on in different relative strengths. These facets of the Fullness are what we call the Aeons of the Fullness. Each Aeon represents a particular talent, name, function, power, and so forth, of the Son. If you imagine that golden pyramid I use to illustrate the Fullness, our unique personality reflects a slightly different pattern overlaid upon those glowing, golden balls. It’s like a stencil overlaid on top of the fractal Fullness—each one of us has a slightly different stencil obscuring the Fullness that allows a unique pattern of lights to show through.
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Human Nature–Gnostic Psychology
The more we identify with the Fullness and our One Self, the less we identify with our Ego and our memes. The more we practice the values of the Fullness known as virtues, the less inclined we are to practice the values of the fallen Demiurge—the vices. And, ultimately, our release from all earthly karma and memes takes place as a gift given to us by the redeeming nature of the Christ, who frees our Self to return to its Aeonic home above once we stop holding onto all temptations that this realm presents to us.
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Embrace 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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Army of the Christ
“Not only did the aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, … but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.”
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Christ and the Third Order Powers
“Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.” The Gnostic Gospel calls this new fruit the Christ.