Podcasts
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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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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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The Demiurge and the Boundary
Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The book of Genesis attributes these actions of the Demiurge to Jehovah when it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down. -
Logos—His Birth, Inheritance, and Fall
The final Aeon, Logos, found himself sitting on top of the Hierarchy of the Fullness. And, since he contained within himself a copy of all of the other Aeons, he became confused as to his proper role and function and he mistook his own will for the will of the Fullness. Sitting up there on top, Logos had no other Aeons as his direct neighbors on either side, unlike all of the other Aeons within the great pyramidal shape that forms the Hierarchy. Nor was there any Aeon stationed above his location. Logos was positionally exalted above his peers, as if he were the King of the Hierarchy. There was no one and no thing above him other than the Father. Logos overreached and Fell.
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The Generation of the Aeons and Logos
It is said that although the Father put an unquenchable thirst to align themselves with the One into the minds of the Fullness, he did not reveal to them the Father’s ineffable nature and the impossibility of reuniting with him and surviving to tell the tale. This was doubtless to keep alive the hope of reunification with the Father as a motive for continually giving glory.
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Introduction to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel
And then around 2016, I read a copy of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. At first I found the ideas shocking. These were the very heresies my conservative Christianity had warned me away from. According to Christians, these beliefs were excluded from our modern versions of the Bible to protect the church from theological misinformation. I discovered that radical repackaging had removed from the New Testament a type of spiritual belief that was well- known to Jesus and his followers. This belief system, commonly called Gnosticism, describes Christianity differently than does our modern Church. Gnosticism makes sense of most of the more mysterious aspects of Christianity, including humanity’s role in the great scheme of things, and common questions such as “why is there evil in the world?”
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The Son, Part 2: The Generation of the Aeons
Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we’ve hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself. This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through the Aeons, which is to say, through the fractals that come out of the Son. As we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son.
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The Emanation of the Son and the ALL
The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son.
And yet although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, or the Totalities, arose at once. The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father.
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The God Above All Gods
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?” 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.”
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Redeeming the Demiurge and Creation
This episode finishes up our deep dive into the Tripartite Tractate’s explanation of the Third Order of Powers. We learn about their relationship to the Christ, the ALL, the Fullness and the Father, and how they go about their job of redeeming us Second Order Powers and the Demiurge.
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Third Order Powers–the Army of Christ
“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.”
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Praise and Glory–Aeonic Romance
The Father loved and admired the Son, and the Son loved and admired the Father. These two were well pleased with themselves, and they gave praise and glory to one another. From their exchange of “kisses,” the ALL arose.
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“Why Are We Here?” A Listener Question
Why did the Fullness of God find it necessary to create the Second Order of Powers and send them (us) down here to redeem the demiurge? Why wasn’t the demiurge simply abandoned after the Fall?