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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I read a very interesting article this week from Scientific American, February 1st, 2024 edition. It’s a brand new article by a science writer called Rowan Jacobson. It was interesting to me because it just so happens to uphold—finally prove, in essence—one of the hypotheses of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You know, my Simple Explanation theory of everything was written over 15 years ago. The blog‘s been up that long, and there’s a book by the same name. If you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s a secular version of what we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. But it is gnosis nonetheless, because I believe that the universe was setting up for me in the Simple Explanation theory of everything, a way that I would then be able to read and interpret the gnostic gospel. That’s why the latest book is A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, whereas the first book was A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.
And, in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was pre-gnostic gospel for me, I didn’t have a clear way to separate non-living material from living material. In my early diagrams, the hierarchy is a straight flow upward from the subatomic particles, on up through life, on up through cells. But, whereas in the gnostic gospel interpretation, there is a clear break provided to us by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there’s a clear break between the mud—that being the material that is not alive—and the meat—that being all of us animals, all of us creatures, everything that’s alive. Whether it’s a plant or a single celled organism or a human, every living creature is different in kind than the purely material objects. And the material objects are the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the aggregates of minerals on up to the hard rocky bodies, like comets and planets. According to the Tripartite Tractate, these are not alive. The bodies themselves are part of the Fall. They are the dead byproduct of the Fall. They don’t think; they have no consciousness.
What does have consciousness is the ego of the Demiurge, and so, at least here in our cosmos that we are familiar with, every material object that is not considered living, such as rocks and sand, well, those are extensions of the Demiurge. Those are extensions like a puppet master and strings, right? They are the Demiurge’s extensions of its consciousness, and it is not fully conscious because it is lacking the One’s Self that comes from above. Its One Self fled, that being the Aeon known as Logos. So, Logos and its ego have become separated and it’s its ego that has constructed this material cosmos in which we dwell. Whereas Logos itself, the Aeon Logos, fled back up to the Fullness.
Anyway, this is a long preamble to what we’re trying to actually get to here, and if all of this was just gobbledygook to you, you need to back up and become familiar with some of the terminology from the gnostic gospel that I present here. So I will put a link to a more basic type of introduction to these concepts right here in the transcript to this podcast.
Back to the Scientific American article. It’s called Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems, Simple Cells Can Do It. And the subtitle is Tiny clumps of cells show basic cognitive abilities, and some animals can remember things after losing their heads. So, what this article is about is a new branch of cognitive science called basal cognition, and they are coming to believe that the brain is not required for thinking. Well, that has been a tenet of the Simple Explanation going back 15 to 20 years now. The brain is not the origin of thought or consciousness, it’s merely like a radio that tunes it in. Your neurons are not where memories live. The memories are outside of us. What the neurons do is grow in response to the stimulus of those externalized thoughts, and some scientists are coming to recognize that fact now. They fought this all along. Most scientists, including most cognitive scientists who study the brain, keep looking for places in the brain where the memories live. But these basal cognition scientists now realize that the memory doesn’t live in the brain.
And by the way, to skip to the conclusion of the article—where the memories reside as far as they are concerned is in the electromagnetic grid that the creature emits or dwells in. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist who has for a long time been an outcast in the scientific community because he’s been saying that all along. His research and his books are about how our thoughts and our relationships with one another exist in a field around us and a field in between us. Like between two people who have love for each other, there’s a sort of a rubber band, I think he described it. A rubber band stretching between them, which is an electromagnetic field that keeps them connected.
So, let me read you some of the main points out of this article, and then I’ll make comments on it as we go by. The article begins with a description of the research that a scientist named Michael Levin has done, and he studies planaria worms. The neat thing about planaria worms is that if you cut them in half, the head half will grow a new tail and the tail half will grow a new head. And, they are genetically identical to one another as clones. Now the interesting thing is that even though you chop off the head and the tail grows a new head, that new head knows everything that the old head knew. And this is a form of proof that the memories and knowledge that were contained in that planaria worm didn’t live in the head. They were somehow living in the entire worm. That’s groundbreaking research, believe it or not. Quoting from the article,
“Until recently, most scientists held that true cognition arrived with the first brains half a billion years ago. Without intricate clusters of neurons, behavior was merely a kind of reflex, [and that is what most people still think]. But Levin and several other researchers believe otherwise. He doesn’t deny that brains are awesome paragons of computational speed, and power. But he sees the differences between cell clumps and brains as ones of degree, not kind. In fact, Levin suspects that cognition probably evolved as cells started to collaborate and carry out the incredibly difficult task of building complex organisms, and then got souped up into brains to allow animals to move and think faster.”
OK, pause now. I’ll rerun, soon, my episodes concerning evolution because I don’t think evolution works that way. Evolution clearly does not work by things happening in the way that Darwinian evolution says they happen, that this works out well for an organism, so more of that organism survives, and then they breed, and now all of that organism is like that one that was successful. That’s the way Darwinism works.
What I claim is that the patterns are inherent. The patterns come from above. They are in fact from the Aeons of the Fullness. They are aeonic that way, and these patterns are brought down with the creatures that instantiate them. We are all born with our aeonic pattern intact, and it has nothing to do with evolution down here. And, by the way, it can look like things are evolving, but that’s simply because we 2nd Order Powers were sent down one by one, from the simplest to the more complex. It even says that in the Tripartite Tractate. You know, that book is over 2,000 years old and how it can describe such things is really phenomenal. So yes, maybe the oceans were populated with single celled animals at first and then the jellyfish and whatnot, but then that’s because they were the ones that were first sent down from the Fullness. In my opinion, they did not evolve from each other. There’s no clear links between species and types of organisms in the way that Darwinism claimed, and they still haven’t found any. So, although Levin is working with these planaria to show that the thoughts don’t reside in the brain, he still thinks that they evolve from clumps of cells. I don’t think so. Back to the article.
“That position is being embraced by researchers in a variety of disciplines, including roboticists such as Josh Bongard, a frequent Levin collaborator who runs the Morphology, Evolution and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Vermont. Quoting Bongard, ‘Well, brains were one of the most recent inventions of Mother Nature, the thing that came last,’ says Bongard, who hopes to build deeply intelligent machines from the bottom up. He says, ‘it’s clear that the body matters, and then somehow you add neuronal cognition on top. It’s the cherry on the sundae, it’s not the sundae.’”
OK. Well, isn’t that funny? They even used the expression bottom up. Now, if you’ve been with Gnostic Insights for any amount of time, you realize that the bottom up is demiurgic. The bottom up is what I was describing in my preamble there. That’s your particles, atoms, molecules, elements, etcetera. Bongard still thinks that the cognition grows out of the bottom up development. And since he is a roboticist, he’s going to build clever enough machinery out of molecules and elements that’s going to pop out cognition. It’s not going to happen, because cognition and consciousness comes from the top down. And you see, he said in this paragraph I just read you that somehow you had neuronal cognition on top. Well, yeah, on top somehow. That is the Holy Spirit of God coming down and attaching to the material. But it’s not going to happen at the whim of a roboticist.
Carrying on now,
“In recent years, interest in basal cognition has exploded as researchers have recognized example after example of surprisingly sophisticated intelligence at work across life’s kingdoms, no brain required. For artificial intelligence scientists such as Bongard, basal cognition offers an escape from the trap of assuming that future intelligences must mimic the brain-centric human model. For medical specialists, there are tantalizing hints of ways to awaken cells’ innate powers of healing and regeneration.”
And, yeah, I’ll give them that. On the medical side, and again, jumping to the big conclusion at the end of the Scientific American article—the patterns reside more in the electromagnetic sphere than they do in the material. We can rule out the material; they do not exist in the atoms themselves, but the pattern of electricity that surrounds a cell does contain its aeonic memory. It’s possible that the DNA double Helix is the basic antenna that brings in the cognition from the Fullness.
But what they are discovering is that, and this is coming from the end of the Scientific American article, if you stimulate tissue with even a digitally copied “memory” or electromagnetic pattern and apply it to tissue that never had that electromagnetic pattern, the tissue will take on that pattern. It will become cognitively identical, you could say, to the thing that was copied. But you see, we’re still talking about imitations, aren’t we? The Tripartite Tractate refers to the fallen world as the imitation and the deficiency. And so, if you take a living cell and you copy its electromagnetic signature and then apply it to a dead cell, what do you have? You don’t have a living cell. What you have is a zombie. Right? A ghoul. It’ll be moving around and replicating that first cell, but it’s not a truly living creature because it has not come down from the Fullness. It doesn’t have the spark of the life of God in it. It is a copy. It’s an imitation in the manner of a reflection—a very good one at the electromagnetic scale. Now, what I’m saying is scriptural according to the Tripartite Tractate, I’m not just spinning theories here. And if you read my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, it’s all laid out step by step very carefully. The book is almost 300 pages long. It’s as careful and logical and simple, though complex, as you could want it to be, and I do explain everything fully. Back to the article.
“And for the philosophically minded,” it says, and that would be us, “basal cognition casts the world in a sparkling new light. Maybe thinking builds from a simple start. Maybe it is happening all around us every day in forms we haven’t recognized because we don’t know what to look for. Maybe minds are everywhere.”
And we would say, yes, of course they are. All 2nd Order creatures embody the Fullness of God. Back to the article. I’m jumping; this is not the entire article. It’s in order, but I’m skipping.
“Plants can sense their surroundings surprisingly well. They know whether they are being shaded by part of themselves or by something else. They can detect the sound of running water (and will grow toward it) and of bees’ wings (and will produce nectar in preparation). They know when they are being eaten by bugs and will produce nasty defense chemicals in response. They even know when their neighbors are under attack: when scientists played a recording of munching caterpillars to a cress plant, that was enough for the plant to send a surge of mustard oil into its leaves. Plants’ most remarkable behavior tends to get underappreciated because we see it every day. They seem to know exactly what form they have and plan their future growth based on the sights, sounds, and smells around them, making complicated decisions about where future resources and dangers might be located in ways that can’t be boiled down to simple formulas. As Paco Calvo, director of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia in Spain and author of Planta Sapiens, puts it, “Plants have to plan ahead to achieve goals, and to do so, they need to integrate vast pools of data. They need to engage with their surroundings adaptively and proactively, and they need to think about the future. They just couldn’t afford to do otherwise.”
And, of course, you realize that me saying plants are 2nd Order creatures—all living things are 2nd Order creatures—so plants embody the Fullness of God, just like we do. They’re Aeons. Quoting the article again,
“The orthodox view of memory is that it is stored as a stable network of synaptic connections among neurons in the brain. That view is clearly cracking. Levine says some of the demolition work has come from the lab of neuroscientist David Glanzman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Glanzman was able to transfer a memory of an electric shock from one sea slug to another by extracting RNA from the brains of shocked slugs and injecting it into the brains of new slugs. The recipients then remembered to recoil from the touch that preceded the shock. If RNA can be a medium of memory storage, any cell might have the ability, not just neurons.”
OK, time out a second. Let’s hope this doesn’t get us banned. However, RNA and mNRA, anyone? Let’s just leave it at this: don’t believe the line that says that mNRA do not carry inherent changes to your DNA and to your hylic structure, to your body. People are being amended. Let’s leave it at that. Back to the article,
“Levin’s research has always had tangible applications such as cancer therapy, limb regeneration, and wound healing. But over the past few years he’s allowed a philosophical current to enter his papers and talks. ‘It’s been a sort of slow rollout,’ he confesses. ‘I’ve had these ideas for decades, but it wasn’t the right time to talk about it,’ he says.”
[Of course, I’ve had these ideas too, and I’ve been talking about them for decades.] Quoting the article,
“That began to change with the celebrated 2019 paper entitled The Computational Boundary of a Self in which he harnessed the results of his experiments to argue that we are all collective intelligences built out of smaller, highly competent problem-solving agents. As Vermont’s Bongard told the New York Times, ‘What we are is intelligent machines made of intelligent machines made of intelligent machines all the way right down.’”
OK, I’m going to stop quoting here now because I think it’s leading people astray at this point. Now, as you can hear, they’re still making the basic error that materialist scientists make, and that is equating our consciousness now to machines. Oh yeah, we’re no longer consciousness in neuronal structures. Now we’re machines. That’s right, but we’re not machines. Machines are demiurgic. Machines are built by the Demiurge. You see, the Demiurge cannot control living matter, it is out of his purview. Try as the Demiurge might, it cannot bring things to life. It can only, at the closest, make simulations and imitations of living things. Living things are called the 2nd Order of Powers. We are a Power that comes from the Aeons above. All living things—whether it’s these planaria or whether it’s the slime molds, whether it’s plants, whether it’s animals, whether it’s us—we are living creatures that embody the Aeons of the Fullness. We have aeonic inheritance. We are not imitations of the Aeons. We are the embodiment of the Aeons, just as Jesus was not an imitation of the Christ, Jesus was an embodiment of the Christ Aeon, fully and completely.
Life comes into the universe at the cellular level, not the atomic. The Demiurge has the power to dispel the quantum chaos and bring order to the mud, but much to its chagrin it cannot control the meat. That’s why the Demiurge, who is the God of the Old Testament stories, the Demiurge controls through laws and edicts, and demands absolute and strict adherence to the law. When Jesus came, he said he did not come to dispel the law, he came to fulfill it. We are no longer under the law. Those who believe in the Judeo-Christian lineage are no longer under the law of the Demiurge, is what it’s saying. We get our inspiration directly from the Fullness of God, directly from above. And because we are 2nd Order Powers that are sent down from the Fullness, we carry within us a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God. That is what, in other circles, even New Age circles and those outside of New Age, because this is not New Age, folks, this is thousands of years old—they call that the One, this fractal of the Fullness of God that we carry within us. That’s what’s referred to as the One with a capital O. We also, in Gnostic Insights, call it the Self with a capital S. And we use the capital letters to indicate the holiness and reverence we have for the Father above.
Living organisms develop through the pattern of the Fullness above, as directed by Logos because we are actual fractals of Logos and our powers do not come from the Fall or fractals of the Demiurge. The fallen fractals of the ego of Logos comprise the material level only—from the bottom up. But we of the remembrance, what is called the psychical, psyche for psychological, for mind—we are the psychical. We are the thought-filled part. We come from the top down.
Therefore, we can conclude that the roboticists are not going to be able to stimulate, even if it’s made from cells, even if they take cells away from a creature; they’ve been using frog cells for this purpose—they take the cells out of the creature, which removes it from the overall structure of the frog. Now it only has the overall structure of the cell of the frog, and this is why what are called organoids can’t be stimulated to become frogs again. Once you remove a cell from the creature that you removed it from, as scientists have been trying to take, let’s say, brain or heart cells out of living creatures, the heart cell may still beat because it’s inherent in the heart cell to contract and expand. That is something a heart cell knows how to do without being embedded in the larger heart. But when you take that heart cell away from the heart or that brain cell away from the brain, you’ve decreased their scope of influence to the cellular level. And no matter how many of those removed cells you put in a Petri dish or you smear across the surface of a 3D printout of a brain or 3D printout of a heart, they never do level up to the organ or to the organism. All they can do is just be gigantic clumps of beating heart cells or gigantic clumps of, God bless them, brain cells that have cognition but they’re just pinging around amongst themselves, probably saying, What the Hell’s going on here? And they are to be pitied like lab rats. They are to be pitied, these organoids, but they’re not going to level up. They’re not going to become walking around homunculi. (A Homunculus is a man-like creature, a thing that looks like a human.) The robots are not going to come to life. In Battlestar Galactica, remember, the Cylons had developed living Cylons that were cellular overlays on top of machinery. That isn’t going to make them humans. I don’t even think they’ll become Cylons in the future.
OK, I’ve been pinging all over the place. This might seem like a very disjointed episode, but if you’ve been with me for a while, I think you’ll follow. Please leave me some comments, saying, Oh my God Cyd, this was over the top, or whatever. OK, tell me that you get it or not. I’ll put links in here to important previous episodes and articles on organoids leveling up and whether or not robots can become alive or AI will ever gain true consciousness. I’ve discussed all this at length previously, and also it can all be found in the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. The official Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel should be available in its full color, glorious form any day now.
OK. Thanks for spending this time with me. God bless us all. Onward and upward.
We’re nearing completion of the publication process for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it. The color edition will be available very soon.