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How you can help out
Say, do you realize that I basically pay for this entire podcast and these books, everything having to do with Gnostic Insights, all by myself? except for some generous contributions from my sister-in-law, Barbara, and my brother, Bill, and a couple of other people who have been sending in donations since the beginning of the podcast. Fortunately, God has blessed me with a very successful Airbnb property, and many people come and enjoy staying here in this cute little village that I live in, in Oregon. That is the method by which God is funding Gnostic Insights. If you are being touched, if your life is being changed, I’d like to hear about it. I wish you’d send me an email or comments, because whatever you are being blessed with becomes a blessing for other people.
If you can contribute financially, that would be helpful. I do have ongoing monthly expenses, such as the cost of the media service that hosts and distributes the podcasts. And nowadays, I am attempting to help the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, float up into everyone’s awareness. Right now, it’s hard to find that book, because there are so few reviews. So, if you’ve read the book, or started to read the book, or even if you listen to this podcast on a regular basis, you are qualified to leave a review. It doesn’t have to be a long review to say, I never thought much about God or religion, but I’ve found that this material is helping my life. These are very important comments to make, where other people can see them, because that will encourage them to join us here.
So, please, make the contribution that you are being moved to make, whether that’s money, one time or monthly, or whether that’s comments at Amazon, or comments here at Gnostic Insights, and at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Many of you listen to the podcast only and never visit the website. If you visit the website, the transcripts for all of these podcasts are there, episodes that you can re-listen to, that you can read and contemplate. But all of the material is found in a very clear and simple way in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.
The expenses for getting the book publicized are mounting. Praise God, I have the money because of this Airbnb that I’m running. So, hospitality and housekeeping is my main job, other than putting out these weekly podcasts, writing an article every week, recording it, editing it—you know, I’m a one-person factory here. I can’t afford to hire an editor. I can’t afford to hire a webmaster or podcast producer. I have to figure out how to do all of this on my own. But it would be nice to be able to hire some help.
I have hired an illustrator for the children’s book, because I know I can’t illustrate a children’s book. So, that’s one thing I can’t do on my own. It’s really neat that I’ve been given the various gifts that I’m able to do all of these things and put together Gnostic Insights. I believe that this is my purpose in life, finally. And everything I’ve learned, formally and informally, God is using it to put together these broadcasts.
I put in an application this week at the Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University in order to teach the Gnostic Gospel. And if they allow me to teach this to their students, then I’m going to be videotaping those lectures. People have often said, hey, you really need to put out more on YouTube. You know, there are some older lectures there on YouTube, both from before the Gnostic days and then after the Gnostic days. The earlier ones are lectures that were given publicly concerning A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. But in the past couple of years, I’ve had occasion to talk about A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And so, you can find those videos already.
This new course I’m putting together will be 10 episodes long. And each one of those can be a standalone YouTube video. Maybe those could be monetized. You know, I don’t like monetizing anything. There are no paywalls here at Gnostic Insights or at the Gnostic Reformation. You don’t have to subscribe with money to hear these podcasts.
I’m very glad that you do subscribe and get it as an email, for example, or on your podcast host. But soon people will be able to see it on YouTube. It would be really neat if we, and I say we because you’re part of this effort, if we could afford to have an animator for that show, actually have a video producer that would put together a neat-looking Gnostic Insights series, not simply me sitting there talking to the camera. You know, I see all of this in my head as moving images. I see the movie. I just can’t animate it for YouTube. But if you’re an animator, you could offer to help as your contribution.
So, this has been a big long pitch to help with the effort. I think the Gnostic Gospel is a very important message that everyone can use, and we need to put it in front of everyone. They need to be able to come across it when they do searches, and they can’t do that unless you start leaving more reviews, more comments, thumbs up, Like, subscribe, all that stuff.
Part of the expense lately has been my decision to purchase professional reviews and have those reviews publicized. One of the reviews I purchased is through Kirkus Reviews, where a good review is highly coveted by authors and publishers. The review was so favorable that Kirkus has chosen the book to be featured as an article in next month’s printed magazine that is distributed to librarians and booksellers. Their sales department then talked me into buying an accompanying marketing campaign to place advertisements on all of their platforms for a couple of months. Here—I’ll read you the Kirkus Review:
A 21st-century Gnostic explores the seminal text of her faith in this nonfiction work.
“Valentinian Gnosticism is a form of proto-Christianity,” writes Ropp in the book’s introduction, asserting her belief that “it is the true, original form of Christianity.” Focusing on the third- or fourth-century Gnostic work the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices, the author explores an alternative branch of Christianity that was deemed heretical and “wiped out” by Catholicism. In contrast to Roman Catholicism, per Ropp, Gnosticism “encourages a personal relationship with the “God Above All Gods,” eschews hierarchical leadership and rituals, and holds that no church or earthly institution “can give you gnosis” (mystical knowledge). Aiming to “demystify” the “arcane language” of the Tripartite Tractate, as well as to connect the work to the more well-known themes articulated in the Christian New Testament, Ropp systematically walks readers through the major ideas posited in the Gnostic text. Unlike other biblical books, according to the author, the Tripartite Tractate is closer to a philosophical rumination than a collection of myths, as it establishes a thesis about a divine Father before working through the logical implications of that proposition. Ropp’s analytical approach informs her emphasis on applying Gnosticism to modern life, as the author deeply believes that “Gnostic faith is not blind faith but reasonable faith.” Holding a doctorate in classical rhetoric, Ropp is the host of the Gnostic Insights podcast and author of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated (2019). Here, she offers readers a scholarly exploration of the Tripartite Tractate that challenges popular assumptions, such as the claim by many that Gnosticism is a New Age religion. Her academic approach, backed by scholarly references, is balanced by an engaging writing style geared toward readers unfamiliar with the esoteric nuances of Gnosticism. The work’s accessibility is further supported by a lengthy glossary of terminology as well as the inclusion of full-color images, diagrams, and other visual aids. Even readers unconvinced about the veracity of Gnosticism will find a stimulating reflection on the nature of meaning, knowledge, and truth. A well-researched, impassioned case for Gnosticism. [Kirkus Reviews]
Pretty good, huh? Next week I’ll read you some of the other professional reviews. Okay now, let’s get on with this week’s episode.
Generation of the Aeons
Yesterday I was reading Chapter Three out of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and the quotes from the Tripartite Tractate are so beautiful. To me, they are indescribably beautiful. It’s hard to imagine who this human was at least 2,000 years ago, who saw all of this, and who wrote all of this down. It is clearly from the God Above All Gods. So, I want to share some of Chapter Three with you today, because it’s really beautiful.
This begins on page 25 of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and it says,
We have heard about the Father being indescribable, and about the infinite number of facets that form the body of the Son, and the Totality of the All. 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 its relationship with the Father, and then through the Aeons. The fractals of consciousness that emerge out of the Son and the All, 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.
And I’m adding this in to understand the nature of consciousness, because remember, whenever we talk about the nature of the Father emanating through the Son and then through the Totalities, we’re also talking about the emanation of consciousness itself. Back to the book.
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. The Tripartite Tractate says,
They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them. When their generations had been established, the one who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the, and there’s a missing word, and he brought forth those, again, missing words, him. But since he is as he is, he is a spring which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it. (Verse 60 of the Attridge and Muller translation.)
Generations, as the Tripartite Tractate uses the word, means to create, to generate. Here it’s saying that when the Son was formed, all of the Totalities making up the body of the Son were formed along with him, and their formation or generation did not lessen the Father or subtract anything away from the Father’s essence. The word deficient, as used here, simply means not yet manifest.
Deficient can’t indicate any shortcoming or inadequacy because the Son is a complete embodiment of the perfection of the Father, and his Totalities embody the perfect Son. So the passage likely reads,
When their generations had been established, the one who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was not yet manifest, and he brought forth those within him.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the Tripartite Tractate says of these Totalities,
While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depth knew them, but they were unable to know the depth in which they were, nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father. They did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed, so that it has been discovered that they were like a fetus. (Verse 61)
And so now in this unfolding process of spreading out the Father’s consciousness, we have these potential entities existing like seeds within the Father. They don’t know themselves, and they don’t know where they are. They don’t realize that they comprise the body of the Son. In that sense, they are like a fetus that is still inside the womb, blissfully sleeping. The Tripartite Tractate says,
For that reason the Father had also thought in advance that they should exist not only for himself, but should exist for themselves as well, that they should remain in thought as mental substance, but also exist for themselves. He sowed a thought as a seed of, and there’s some missing words, in order that they might understand what kind of Father they have. (Verse 61 from the translation by Thomason)
In other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading awakened consciousness throughout the entire body of the Son. He doesn’t want the All to remain unthinking constituents of the Son. The Father wants them each to have their own existence and their own realizations, their own consciousness, their own self. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as “seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth and faultlessness.” That’s from verse 62. 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.”
This means 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. Someone cared for them and wanted only good for them. The Totalities began to awaken to self-realization because someone loved them. This beneficent thought was their first knowledge. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say,
The one whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the one from whom they take their name, he is the Son who is full, complete, and faultless. He brought him forth mingled with what came forth from him. (Verse 62)
This again confirms that the Son coexists with the Father and the Totalities coexist with the Son. “This is not yet his greatness they have received. Rather, he exists only partially in the manner, the form, and the greatness that he is.”
The Totalities are waking up in stages. They know they are loved, but they do not know the details of who loves them.
As for the parts in which he exists in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for them to see him and speak about what they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them, because it is possible for them to comprehend him. He, however, is as he is incomparable.” (Verse 63)
In chapter 2, I used the analogy that the Totalities are to the Son as the cells that make up our bodies are to us. We wear them like a garment over ourself, and they wear our eternal self over their little cells. We go everywhere they go, and they go everywhere we go. At this point in their embryonic development, the Totalities have knowledge that there is a mysterious being who loves them, but the Father wants more for them.
In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself, even in his ineffability, hidden and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore, the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness. (Verse 63)
This passage is saying that the manner by which the Totalities become awakened is through the process of praising the Father by singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. In other words, they come to selfhood by giving glory to the Father through song.
And just as the admirations of the silences are eternal generations and they are mental offspring, so too the dispositions of the Word are spiritual emanations. (Verse 63)
The admirations of the silences, which is to say the quiet glory and kisses exchanged between the Father and the Son, brought forth the generation of the All as their mental offspring. Afterward, the glory and hymns offered up to the Father by the developing Totalities became the dispositions of the Word that conferred upon them a spiritual emanation from the Father by means of his reflected glory pouring over them and bathing them in the Father’s consciousness.
Both of them, admirations and dispositions, since they belong to a Word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring and roots which live forever, appearing to be offsprings which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring to the glory of the Father. (Verses 63-64)
Remember, the Father’s consciousness and spirit flow out from him in an unending stream. It is this reflected glory initiated through their singing that disposes the Totalities to grasp their individuality, appearing to be offspring which have come forth by themselves. The passage also says that the Totalities are the Son’s seeds and thoughts and that they will live forever along with the Son. The Totalities of the All are now complete in mind and spirit, possessing the conscious powers of the Son.
The Totality of the All, however, remained an indivisible unity. Though now endowed with individual self-awareness, they nonetheless continue to act as a single being, being themselves the Fullness of the Son.
The births of his words, his commands, and his members of the All are innumerable and indivisible. He knows them, for they are himself. When they speak, they are all in the one single name. And if he brings them forth, it is in order that they may be found to exist as individual qualities, forming a unity. (Verse 67 from the Thomason translation)
This Fullness of God and the progression of consciousness through the Son is found in the New Testament, although its original meaning has been lost. For example, speaking of the Son in the book of Colossians, Paul writes,
The Son is the image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation, because in him were created all things in the heaven and on Earth, the visible as well as the invisible, whether thrones or lordships or archons or powers. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and all things hold together in him. For in him, all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross through him, whether the things on Earth or the things in heaven. (Colossians 1:15–20 out of David Bentley Hart’s translation)
And like the son before them, the All began to generate offspring. Quoting again from the Tripartite Tractate,
But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, beginning everything which they desire. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they’ve come. According to their mutual assistance, they assist one another like the unbegotten ones. (Verse 64)
This mutual assistance carries forward throughout creation as another as above, so below cooperative pattern, as we shall soon discover when we look at the Simple Golden Rule. As soon as the Totalities of the All came to know themselves and to recognize their own individual identities, each one of the rays birthed a singularity that reflected both the Totality of the All and their own individuality.
Now all those who had gone forth from him, that is the Aeons of the Aeons, being emissions born of a procreative nature, also procreate through their own procreative nature to the glory of the Father, just as he had been the cause of their existence. For that which they glorified, they bore. (Verse 67)
The All’s offspring immediately recognized their self-identities and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, commonly referred to as the Pleroma of God. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible; all possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These newly formed Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher.
In my illustrations, I picture the hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannonballs, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannonballs on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid. There is a hierarchical principle in Gnosticism that I have identified as the higher the fewer.
Using that principle, the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own point of view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven.
And that, my friends, I’m dropping this in here, was the birth of what is called ego, because ego is not a negative term. It’s merely your position, power, place, rank, station, and name and where you fit into the hierarchy of creation. That is your ego. It identifies you. It’s your self-identity. Our underlying Self is a fractal of the Fullness of God. Our ego is that hierarchical principle that happened up there when the Totalities of the All became self-aware and came to realize their own personal identity. That’s our ego. So we, like the Aeons, because we are fractals of the Aeons, also have a personal identity. As above, so below. Okay, we’re going to stop there for today because that’s about all the time we have.
We made it up to page 33 in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I say again, the Tripartite Tractate is a beautiful book. People often say it’s the most difficult or one of the most difficult books in the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Not necessarily. I try to explain it as clearly as I can, and I hope you are coming to appreciate it. Let me know if you enjoyed this episode.
If you’re listening through the podcast, pop into the website gnosticinsights.com and leave a comment underneath this episode transcript. Or, if you’re listening through Substack, you know you can leave a comment there in Substack. Or, if you’re reading this as an email sent out by Substack, I believe you can click on Comments at the bottom of the email.
Love you all. God bless us, and Onward and Upward!