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Today, we’re going to talk about how the ego of Logos led to the Fall and the Fall broke open into what became the Deficiency, also known as our universe. Our material universe is a deficient copy of the ethereal plane of the Paradise that the Aeons dreamed of. The great thing about this episode is it introduces another character to the play, and that one is called the 2nd Order of Powers. I’m inserting this at the beginning so it might pique your interest in what comes. We are the 2nd Order of Powers. The 1st Order of Powers are the Aeons, and we are their fruit. All of us living creations down here within this universe, we are all the 2nd Order Powers. We are fruits of the Aeons. We are their children.
The purpose of these podcasts is to explain to you what gnosis is in the simplest possible terms. My primary source is one of the codices that was in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts called the Tripartite Tractate–Tri, meaning 3; partite meaning parts; tractate means book. So it’s the three-part book, and it’s a very clear explanation of Gnostic cosmology. And cosmology is simply origins—the beginning of the cosmos, the story of our existence, how everything goes together. That’s what cosmology is.
In 2019, I wrote a book based upon the Tripartite Tractate called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and over the past couple of years many people have suggested it would all be so much easier to understand if it were explained out loud in the form of a podcast. So this is what I’m doing. And I’m rolling out the Gnostic cosmology in chronological order, as it were, starting at the beginning and then going one step at a time because I think that that is the easiest way to grasp this.
So far we’ve discussed the origin of the Father and the nature of the Father. That is the originating consciousness. We’ve discussed the Son, which was the first localization of the Father. We have discussed the Son manifesting his various attributes, and that is called the ALL. We’ve moved beyond the ALL and we have discussed how the ALL became the Fullness or the Pleroma when they became self-aware. And each member of the ALL became a person, so to speak—a thought, a variable, that was self-aware.
Now we’re at the point where one of the self-aware aeons has decided to strike out on its own and plug back into the Father and because of this, that Aeon fell. One of these Aeons, the most perfect and complete of the individual Aeons, was named Logos, and he crowned the top of the Aeonic hierarchy. The Aeons sit there in a hierarchy that looks like a pyramid. This single Aeon consisted of all of the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled into one individual. And because of this, this Aeon named Logos mistook itself for the entirety of the Fullness. It forgot that it was sitting there at the top, crowning pretty much an infinite number of Aeons that represent the Fullness of the Son of God, which represents the Father, the originating consciousness. This one Aeon thought it was the be all and end all, and so it launched itself up, trying to plug back into the originating consciousness. It tried to exit the Fullness, thinking that it was the Fullness. Logos decided to give glory to the source of its awakening and launched itself from the hierarchy in an attempt to reconnect with the Father. Logos believed his personal will was sufficient to reach the Father without the will of the united Fullness to add to its own.
Now, the Fullness always worked as one body. So, these were individual consciousnesses, but the Fullness is one entity and Logos was just the very tippy top of that entity. Logos imagined he could build the paradise that was being dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and he possessed all of the necessary talents because he was essentially every one of the Aeons rolled into one. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father.
And we’ve also discussed what glory means. Glory means that you are only focused on praise and wondrous adoration of this object of devotion. The Aeons were only supposed to give glory to the Father, not to each other, not to themselves as a whole, but only give glory to the Father alone. So they were all in a kind of eyes upward type of orientation.
Logos thought it was good enough that he could take care of this on his own. As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering itself to bits. This is the original Fall. It’s not Eve handing Adam an apple in the Garden of Eden. That’s way down the line. This is the Fall: when Logos reached for the Father and he stumbled and fell. Here’s how it’s put in the Tripartite Tractate.
“Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness now there was a division and a turning away. The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths and he faltered. What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existed from something that itself was deficient. Because of that, what was perfect in him left and went upward to its own in the Fullness, leaving the sicknesses behind in the darkness.”
So, I’ve been describing the illustrations that accompany these concepts that I’ve put into The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. And if you remember from prior podcasts, the Fullness sits there like this great golden pyramid of individual golden orbs. Logos was sitting on the top and what he looked like was a little small pyramid made up of tiny little golden orbs. He was like a replication of the overall Fullness. When he decided to go out on his own, this was the first manifestation, you could say, of ego. It was the first time a consciousness acted outside of the will of the ALL or the will of the Fullness. You could say that the Fall was caused by ego.
The way I picture this is that little pyramid sitting on top of the big pyramid, launching itself out into the inky blackness toward the over-encompassing Father above and instead of going up, he takes a nosedive and falls. And that’s why it’s called the Fall—and he smashes into bits. This is metaphorical language because of course there isn’t anything, there’s no material yet, there’s nothing to smash against like a rock. He just crumbles apart and all of that beautiful little golden triangle of which he is made all rolls out into all of these dark little balls. The golden balls all turned dark in my illustrations. I depict the Fall of Logos as these super dark blue balls rolling out and spreading.
The Tripartite Tractate calls the ego presumptuous thought. And isn’t that what egoic thought is? It’s presumptuous; presumptuous thought. Egoic thought means that the focus of the thinking is on one’s self—is on one’s own plans. What am I going to do? It’s all me, me, me is what presumptuous thought is. And the Aeons, they’re not me type of creatures. They were not egoic. They all lived for one another. All for one, and one for all was their motto, I say. That’s not in the Gnostic gospel, but I think it’s a good motto for the Fullness. And so, what I read to you was that what existed from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance. Ego is called arrogance to think that he had the plan and he was going to build this paradise that they had all been dreaming of together. He was going to do it on its own, but he was inadequate to the task. And he left the sicknesses behind in the darkness. And in my illustration that’s those blue balls rolling all over the place.
The Tripartite goes on to say in verse 77, “from the faltering and division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is. Presumptuous thought and arrogance replaced wisdom.” Verse 78 says, “those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble, in fact the Fullness of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows and illusions deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings more beautiful than the names of their originals in the Fullness, though they are only their shadows.”
Many of the books in the Nag Hammadi, instead of identifying this character as Logos, they identify this character as Sophia. Sophia means wisdom, and Logos means knowledge. I am working off of the Tripartite Tractate which identifies this Aeon as the one called Logos, not the one called Sophia. Personally, I prefer thinking of Logos rather than Sophia because Sophia in the other Gnostic books is a female character and I prefer not to replicate the Adam and Eve story by making the one who brings evil into existence a female.
The Aeons are not men and women, they are thought forms. The act of the beautiful Aeon reaching for the Father out of love, stumbling and falling and breaking apart into horrible little imitations called the Deficiency—it really doesn’t matter if that person is called Sophia or Logos. We’re calling it Logos. Logos was the final Aeon born from the will of the Son. And the singular being possessed the latent characteristics of the ALL, including the full variety of personalities, proclivities, powers, positions arrayed in the Fullness. Each Aeon of the Fullness was an individual who was also an integral part of the larger whole. So too Logos embodied all of these parts precisely situated within the whole that was himself.
When Logos overreached because of presumptuous egoic thought and fell into the darkness that is ignorance, he shattered into a confusing jumble of disconnected parts. These pieces of the Shattered Aeon were sicknesses—small dark, ignorant, divided, roiling with chaos. They reflected neither the glory of the originals and the Fullness, nor the ecology of the hierarchy. Because they were no longer arranged in the pattern of the hierarchy, they forgot their functions and their names.
Here’s how the Tripartite describes that in verse 80, “Those who had come into being did not know them themselves nor did they know the Fullness from which they had originated. Nor did they know him who had become the cause of their existence. That is, Logos, for since the word was in such an unstable condition, he no longer attempted to bring forth offspring in the form of emissions of glory. Instead, what he brought forth were feeble and small creatures, infected with the same sicknesses with which he himself had been infected.” [And that is egoic thought—me, me, me; what do I want? What do I want?]
“Because Logos had been reaching for the heights when he fell, the imitation born of the Fall continued to be motivated by a desire to reach the unreachable. But now that upward drive was divorced from the goal of reaching for the glory of reunification with the Father. With no recall of who or what came before, this upward drive was entirely self-interested, for those of the imitation had no cooperative arrangement amongst themselves. What had been an upward pull to reunite the Fullness with the Father became an upward push arising out of each singleton, not for the glory of the Father, but for the vain glory of the individual.” [Vain glory is a word that means false glory.] “For they desired to command one another and to Lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that was acquired from their striving became the cause of the structure that was to be.” That’s verse 79 of the Tripartite.
In this manner, egoic striving for vain glory replaced glorious longing for the Father. In other words, ambition replaced God’s will. The offspring of the presumptuous thought, as they came to be known, recognized neither Logos, the ALL, nor the Father as their progenitor.
“They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. for this reason they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence.” Verse 78.
Now remember, Logos means literally the word in Greek: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God. “ That’s “In the beginning was Logos and Logos was with God.” So when the Tripartite says the word, it’s another name for Logos. So here in verse 80 it says, “The word then was the cause of these things coming into being, and he became increasingly desperate. He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection, he saw deficiency. Instead of unity, he saw division. Instead of stability, he saw disturbance. Instead of rest, upheaval. Logos was unable to bring their love of disturbance to an end, nor could he destroy it. For Logos had become powerless when his wholeness and his perfection had abandoned him to become the Deficiency. The Deficiency took on an imitation of life on its own, becoming the cause of the things that do not exist on their own account from the beginning.” That’s verse 80.
Now the things that exist on their own account from the beginning, these would be the Aeons, the expressions of the Fullness are facets of the Son of God and the Son being a sampling of the Father exists from the beginning. So, the consciousness, the originating consciousness, is that which exists from the beginning, and its offspring are the Son. And then the Son’s offspring is the ALL and the Fullness. These things that came out of Logos did not exist from the beginning because they are a product of the Fall, and once the Fall occurred, there is a line in history where the things that exist from the beginning are before the Fall and the things that came into existence from the Fall are after the Fall, and these are the deficiencies—the small and feeble replicants of the originals. And the Tripartite Tractate says these irrational things were condemned by Logos.
“Because of that, what was perfect in him left and went upward to his own in the Fullness.” [That is, the best part of Logos left the Deficiency and went back up into the Fullness.] “The one who hastened on high,” [that is Logos] “and the one who drew him to himself,” [that is, the Son] “did not remain idle, but they brought forth the fruit in the Fullness, with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the Deficiency.”
So a plan was immediately hatched to gather up these broken bits of Logos that are rolling around out there, lost and egoic and not knowing who they are and where they came from. I keep thinking of these little blue balls rolling around in the darkness and a whisk broom and a dust pan trying to sweep them back up. Here’s what happened next. The Fall of Logos gave rise to what is called a Boundary—a wall between those who remained with the Father and the imitations that spilled forth from the fractured one as Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness. The Boundary hardened, containing that which had been produced and separating finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness. Here’s how the Tripartite puts it.
“It was not without the will of the Father that this word had been brought forth, nor that he should rush forward. Rather, the Father had brought him forth for the things that he knew must take place. For this reason then it is wrong to condemn the movement of Logos. Rather, we should speak about the movement of Logos as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.”
This is a very interesting aspect of the Tripartite Tractate. They’re not calling the Fall sinful. What the Tripartite said was that the motivation of Logos was noble and true. It was out of boundless love for the Father that Logos launched out into space, trying to reunite with the Father. The Fall, as far as Logos is concerned, was an unintended consequence. However this verse just said that it was not unintended as far as the Father was concerned. The Father allowed this movement of Logos out of the free will of Logos in order to make an ordained economy come to pass—the will of God—come to pass.
It goes on to say in verse 77, “For the Father and the realm of the All now withdrew from him in order that the Boundary should be firm that the Father had fixed. For it does not exist to prevent the unreachable from being reached, but because of the will of the Father and also in order that the things that happened should be for the sake of an economy that was to come about.” And, sitting here as we do in creation, we must assume that the economy is this creation, this material world being formed out of what was completely insubstantial and immaterial, ethereal. The Boundary serves the purpose of holding the Deficiency away from the perfection of the Father and the ALL. This ensures the purity of the origin so that none of its glory is diminished by the Fall.
So, simply because there was a Fall and material creation is about to come into being, this in no way diminishes the originating consciousness, or the Son, the ALL, and the Fullness. The Boundary also serves the purpose of containing a space wherein an economy can emerge. And, economy here means an orderly management or arrangement of parts, an organization or system. What we would also call an ecology. You see, if you think about it, if there is no bounded space, if there is nothing but Infinity, then there is no containment so that things can be in relationship to each other. Those little blue ball pieces of the broken Logos would just keep rolling outward and never interact with one another. It requires a Boundary in order for material to be able to work together in a kind of ecology. In other words, the Boundary was established so that a hierarchy patterned after the Fullness would have a space to take root and grow.
The arrangement of the hierarchy of the Fullness shows up throughout creation. Every small thing in our universe reaches out laterally to others to form clumps or aggregations of the next level up. Subatomic particles form atoms, atoms reach out and form molecules. Molecules reach out and form elements. Elements form aggregations of building materials, always according to the simple rule of the higher the fewer. This is why hierarchies look like pyramids at each level of aggregation—there are fewer instances of things forming the next level up.
The cooperation amongst the ALL is the prototype for the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule. In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another. And when we’re talking about physical objects like atoms and molecules, loving is the way they are joined. I call that loving. It’s the force of holding together. In the same way that the ALL sits in unitary perfection while they are singing their same song of praise, so all of creation instantiates the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when it works together for the greater good without selfish motive. So too the Fullness, though differentiated into units of consciousness of individual stations and ranks, dreams of a paradise where everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all.
This was not occurring at the point of the story where we are now. The Deficiency was illogical. It was egoic. It was selfish. It was not working together. And so the Boundary was thrown up in order to push them together so that they would work together to form an ecology. The virtues of the original Aeons did not remain within the Boundary. That fled to the Fullness when Logos retreated from the Deficiency, leaving behind small, weak imitations of the original. These phantoms of the imitation did not exist from the beginning, and so they possessed neither the love of the Father nor the originating consciousness of the Son and the ALL. Those of the imitation do not know the hierarchy of the Fullness, nor do they have assigned roles and places there. Lacking the ALL’s cooperative design, they exist in a state of perpetual disturbance driven by self-centered ambition. The Tripartite Tractate says, “exalting themselves in lust for dominion. Each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.”
See, in the Fullness, each of these personalities, each of these Aeons of the Fullness, is a pure pattern of some aspect of God. The Logos itself, before it fell, it was smaller versions or fractal copies of all of the other Aeons. It had all of the traits of the Aeons inside of itself. But then, when it broke open, all of those copies rolled out. And they were already small because they were just copies and now they weren’t even part of the hierarchical structure here, and so they knew nothing but lust for Dominion. They each thought that they were an Aeon, because each of them was patterned after one of these Aeons. But they weren’t. They were the imitations of the Aeons. The Tripartite says that those of the imitation give rise to “fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, and other such disobedient types, driven by the will to dominate.”
Left to their own feeble devices, those of the imitation strive against each other in a state of darkness, woe, and misery. The imitation arose from the broken body of Logos. Logos gathered himself up the best he could and returned to the Fullness to lick his wounds, leaving behind the shadows and phantoms of the Fall contained within the Boundary. The illustration I use for this is those dark blue balls now contained by a dark blue circle around them, so it looks kind of like a microscope slide of dark blue balls.
Verse 81 of the Tripartite says, “Logos regretted the Fall and the phantoms born of the Fall. Regret turned to condemnation of the irrational things he had produced. This condemnation became a judgement directed against them, aiming at their destruction. Logos and the one who drew him back to the Fullness did not remain idle, but they brought forth the fruit in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the Deficiency. Now all his prayer and remembrance were numerous powers also produced in accordance with the Boundary mentioned. These powers are much better and greater than those belonging to the imitation, for the imitation have the substance of darkness having come into being from illusory imitation and a vain and presumptuous thought. But these, on the other hand, are from a thought that had known them in advance (Verse 82).
In other words, the newly produced offspring, fruit of the Fullness and Logos, were patterned after the originals in the Fullness, formed to fit within the Boundary rather than that pyramidal-shaped hierarchy. And we can think of the Boundary as around the universe, if you want to believe in The Big Bang and an expanding universe. And whereas those of the imitation, “are like oblivion and heavy sleep, like people who have troubled dreams in which someone pursues them and they are surrounded, these others, however, are for him like beings of light who are waiting for the rising sun, as when the dreamers have been able to see dreams in their sleep that are truly sweet.”
I picture these original broken pieces of Logos as quantum foam. Quantum foam is the lowest level of instantiation in this universe of ours, and quantum foam is characterized by randomness and chaos. It does not work together. That’s why it’s called foam because it’s popping in and out, popping in and out, and nothing is building. Nothing is able to reach out and make anything. They lack the Golden Rule of cooperation because they came from the Deficiency rather than from the Fullness. So now the Fullness and Logos are trying to put the Golden Rule into this broken chaos that has been formed.
These newly formed beings, “did not have more substance, nor did they have a greater glory, for they are not equal to the pre-existent ones” [that is the Aeons]. “If, on the other hand, they were superior to the imitations, the only thing that made them elevated above them was that they were from a good disposition, for they had not come out of the sickness that arose.”
In verse 83 it goes on to say, “He sowed in them an inclination to seek and pray to what is glorious and pre-existent. And he also sowed in them an ability to think about it and a power of reflection to make them realize that something greater than themselves existed before them, but they had not understood what it was. Bringing forth harmony and mutual love by means of that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since to unity and unanimity they owed their existence.”
So Logos and the Fullness cooked up a scheme to correct the Deficiency, and they created a fruit to put inside the Boundary with those quantum foam roiling chaotic self-centered entities that had come about from the Fall. And when it says he sowed in them an inclination to seek and pray to what his glorious and pre-existent, and the ability to think about it, what are they saying is that these things are conscious—they do exist from the beginning because they are the fruit of the Fullness and Logos. And when the fruit of the Fullness is produced in unanimity with the ALL—you see, it was a concerted effort that they all put together—then those fruit have the characteristics of the Aeons. They have logic and wisdom and the ability to think. They are conscious and they’re able to cooperate according to the Golden Rule.
In a previous podcast episode, we talked about what is a fractal. A fractal is a geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is approximately, not exactly, but for the most part, a reduced-size copy of the whole, and this property is called self similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Natural objects that are approximated by fractals include lightning bolts, coastlines, various vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli, river deltas, the veins in a leaf or roots of a tree. You see, they keep splitting into smaller but almost identical objects.
So, we previously defined the Son as the first iteration or fractal of the originating consciousness of the Father, and then out of the Son came its fractals that became the ALL and the Fullness. Logos was a single Aeon that contained within itself fractals of all of the Aeons. The phantoms produced by the Fall are not fractal iterations of the Son. They are broken code. The phantoms cannot replicate on their own. They lack activation by the source at the center. They were generated away from the universal consciousness.
The fruit of Logos and the Fullness discussed today does represent the 4th iteration of the fractal pattern of the Father and Son. We know this because fruit refers to the legitimate offspring of Logos and the hierarchy of the Fullness formed through the will of the originating consciousness. So, at this point in the Gnostic Gospel, new fractal iterations of the originals of the Fullness are entering the Deficiency. They’re bringing the perfection of the Fullness down into the bounded space of the Deficiency. These new beings are called the 2nd Order of Powers, which is another indication that they are self-aware entities because they are called powers rather than imitations. They are not identical to the Aeons of the Fullness, for they are offspring made to fit within the contained space of our universe. They are called Powers of the Remembrance for they represent the values of the originating source, whereas those of the imitation remember neither the values, the hierarchy, nor the originating conscious.
In my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can read as the blog out there on the blogspot or as the book of the same name, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, in terms of that we would call the 2nd Order Powers “units of consciousness” because they are each a unit of the originating consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Fullness, and in that sense they are consciousness fractals.
It’s a lot to think about, but that’s how we get gnosis.
Onward and upward. God bless. I’ll see you next time.
The publisher is almost finished with my next book, 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.
p.s. A listener has suggested a children’s version of the Gnostic Gospel story. I like that suggestion! Are any of you artists who would like to illustrate a children’s book? Please contact me.