Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:37 — 44.8MB)
For regular Gnostics Insights, subscribe here. Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS
The purpose of this podcast is to help us all achieve gnosis, which is knowledge of where we come from and who is the originating consciousness, and what is our relationship to that originating consciousness. So far, we have discussed the nature of the Father, which is the originating consciousness, and the Son, which is that originating consciousness made into a particular entity—that is called the Son. It is not the generalized diffuse, no thought consciousness of the Father, but rather like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father, but contained within the bucket. So it’s exactly the same as the Father, but it is a particularity. It is a singularity.
As soon as the Son was formed, it then also created more entities out of its own Self. In the same fashion that the Son came out of the Father, the Fullness of God, the ALL, came out of the Son. And it was said that this wasn’t like a throwing off, like the way a fungus casts out spores that then grow into their own little fungi—it was more of a spreading out. So the Son and, by extension the Father, remain completely within and inhabiting the branches that they send out.
In my description of the Fullness, it’s like the rays of a star, with each of the rays being part of the ALL, but each one of them expressing a slightly different characteristic of the Son out of which they are spreading forth. So my imagery for the Son is that the Son is like a diffuse cloud that’s sitting in this great inky blackness which is the Father, and out of this cloud comes a starburst. And each one of the rays of the star is the ALL.
As soon as the ALL came to know itself and to recognize its own consciousness, it became a they, and each one of the rays became its own singularity. And once they did that, they immediately formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, or the Holy Spirit, or the Pleroma. And Pleroma simply means everything that is possible. All possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God.
And the Fullnesses sorted themselves into what’s called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack with many more being down at the bottom and fewer and fewer as you go higher and higher. I’ve identified a principle in Gnosticism called the higher, the fewer. And so they sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names—indicating that they each had their own individual point of view, and they each had their own place in the hierarchy of creation.
Today’s episode will be discussing the Fullness of God and the idea of fractals. Every now and then I talk about fractals, and if you don’t know what a fractal is, I would like to explain it to you. It’s not to be found in the Gnostic Gospels; it’s not to be found in the Nag Hammadi or in the Qumran manuscripts. It is a mathematical term. And it’s something that’s all around us all the time. Fractals are a basic principle of mathematics and of this manifested universe, but unless it’s pointed out to you, you may not ever notice it because fractals weren’t even noticed or formulated until the 1970s. So they were overlooked for many years, well, for all of time until the 1970s. It was actually in 1975 that a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in the first published paper on fractal geometry.
I talk about fractals a lot on my Simple Explanation blog. You can find the fullest explanation of fractals in my article that I wrote and published in January 6th of 2011, called The Fractal Roots of Consciousness. So if you’d like to study more about fractals and see imagery of what fractals look like, go to my Simple Explanation blog and look up the fractal roots of consciousness in the topical index over on the right hand side. But you don’t have to do that. I’m going to explain it a bit right now.
First off, let’s see what are fractals that you’re familiar with. You know the branching structure of like a river delta where it goes into the sea? So you’ve got a river and then it branches, and then each of those branches, branches, and each of those branches, branches and they send out more and more branching structures. You can see them on Google Earth all over the world. Each of those branches are called fractals.
Here’s a funny story. I was trying to explain to my sister-in-law what a fractal is, and I told her, “Imagine your hand. And then imagine on each one of your fingers and on your thumb there’s a little hand and it’s got fingers and a thumb. And then imagine each one of those fingers and thumbs has its own little hand on it, and they also have fingers and thumbs, you see. So it’s the same pattern. The hand with the fingers and thumb and then five more hands with fingers and thumbs, and each one of those have five more hands with fingers and thumbs. That is the pattern of a fractal—the branching structures.”
The funny part of the story is that I was explaining this to my sister-in-law, and then we parked the car and we went into a little variety store. And as soon as we walked in the store, there was a display of a toy and what the toy was little hands that you could stick on each one of your fingers so that your hand becomes a fractal branching structure of more and more hands. Which is funny because I’ve just been explaining that to her, and that was the very metaphor I was using. So I was actually able to show it to her about two minutes later in physical form. Jung called these kinds of coincidences synchronicities. Anyway, back to the story.
As the roots of a plant send out finer and finer tendrils at each level of fractal branching into the soil—see, roots are the same kind of thing—you’ve got your one stem of the plant, but then each one branches out and branches out and branches out as it goes into the soil, searching for nutrients and water.
Another good way to see fractals is to take a stalk of broccoli. And I performed this experiment on my YouTube channel. So if you go to Cyd Ropp on YouTube and look for Simple Explanation videos, you’ll find one that’s called Broccoli Fractal Demonstration. Broccoli, when you bring it home from the grocery store, it’s one big clump, right? It’s a big stalk, and you’ve probably noticed this before that if you take one of the larger clumps off of that stalk, it looks just like that first stalk you were holding, only it’s smaller. And then you can take another clump off of that smaller stalk and it looks just like those two larger stalks, only smaller. And you can keep breaking off fractals of broccoli, at least to the 7th—what is called an iteration—to the 7th iteration. You can keep breaking off the broccoli. So it’s a nice little demonstration of what a fractal is, if you want to understand it in your mind.
I suggest that the consciousness of God is fractal in the same way that the broccoli stalk is fractal. So we can imagine that the root of consciousness, the Father, is, for example the mother plant. The Son is that first flower off of that mother plant—that first broccoli stalk if you will. And then the Son—all of its variables, all of its potentials, the entire blueprint of our universe, because it is, after all, the mind of God—each one of those Totalities is also a fractal. And each of them all replicate the original Son, who is also an iteration of the original consciousness.
Now, one thing about consciousness fractals, or as I call them in my Simple Explanation theory, units of consciousness—so the Father is consciousness itself, but off of that are fractals that are each a unit of consciousness—so the universal unit of consciousness is the largest fractal of which we are aware. And it holds all of the blueprints and all of the potentialities for our entire creation, as did the originating father’s consciousness. And each one of the fractals that comes off of that universal unit of consciousness also holds the potentiality of the Son and of the Father, but they aren’t necessarily expressed. So they’re there in potential.
It’s like your DNA. Did you know that your DNA is you, right? You know that by now. But did you know that your DNA also has, like, at least 95% of it is unknown—what they call junk DNA simply because scientists haven’t defined what is in that DNA. It’s not junk! It’s just that we don’t know what it means. All the rest of that DNA holds potentialities that are not being expressed by you because you are only about 5% of your DNA algorithm. That other 95% is unexpressed, but it’s probably, in my opinion, a fractal of the originating consciousness. So I think that our DNA probably holds all of the creation in it, but it’s only expressed as us, one person at a time, one creature at a time.
I hope I’m not hopelessly confusing you. I’m trying to explain what fractals are, because now and then I mentioned fractals. So, just to run it past you real fast: the Father is originating consciousness. The first fractal is the Son of the Father. The Son quickly became a father itself by branching out into the fractals. That is called the ALL and that was that original starburst kind of branch. And as soon as that iteration was branched out, it became aware of its own Self and sorted itself into the pyramidal hierarchical shape that is called the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma. And each one of those little cannonballs—those little glowing golden cannonballs, as I described them in a previous podcast—each one of those is a full fractal of the Son of God, but it only expresses its place, position, rank, function, and point of view. Much as our DNA only expresses us, we’re only a bit of the unexpressed DNA that we carry.
So each of the Pleroma, and those are called Aeons, once they’ve become those little cannonball shapes, those are your Aeons. That’s what they are known as. Each of them is the Fullness of God but it only expresses its job, its point of view, its position, place, and power. As I explained in the previous podcast, when we were talking about the Fullness of God, the Fullness sits in perfect harmony, perfect cooperation. So they are now individuals, but they are also one single organism called the Fullness or the Pleroma. They sing and dream one song, one dream. And that dream, by the way, is what we call Paradise. It’s our foretaste of paradise and it is the dream of the Aeons as they’re sitting there in the Pleroma. They all sing one song, but they sing it in harmony. Perfect. Beautiful.
The ongoing cooperation amongst the Fullness is the prototype of the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule, which you can read about over on the Simple Explanation blog. The Simple Explanation puts this way. In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information with each other; they need to assist one another’s efforts; and they need to love one another. That’s the basic Golden Rule. In the same way that the ALL sat in unitary perfection together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when we work together for the greater good without selfish motivation.
So too the Fullness, though differentiated into units of consciousness with individual stations and ranks, dream of Paradise where everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all. That is the loving pattern of the universe. When ego doesn’t get in the way, units of consciousness can hold hands and work together in order to make things work for the benefit of all. Like all of the cells in our body, they are not selfish. They all work for the entire body. If they didn’t, then we would die. Sometimes we have renegade portions of the body that have their own egoic agenda, and we call that cancer. And there’s that cancer growing out of control, taking over the body, taking over what should have been its original job, and now it just wants to grow itself. It’s kind of a definition of ego. And that has to be removed because it does not express the Golden Rule. It is not working for the benefit of all.
Now, let’s get back to the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I’m translating out of the Nag Hammadi. And we’ll get back to our storyline. Prior to the Fall, the Aeons of the Fullness sat in perfect equilibrium in their hierarchy of ranks, stations, and names. They were a “congress of one accord,” meaning that they agreed on everything and they cooperated together to bring about a single dream of Paradise.
The Aeons of the Fullness were all given wisdom, which is the ability to reason with logic and prudence. Prudence means doing the right thing at the right time. You have your logic, which is how things unfold, right? A leads to B, and B leads to C, and and if A = B and B = C, then A = C. That’s what logic is, right? Prudence is knowing how to apply rules as appropriate. So, the Aeons were given logic and prudence.
They were also given a thirst to seek after the originating consciousness of their creator, and a desire to align themselves with the Father’s will through the process of giving glory. And we’ve previously explained that giving glory is when you focus on an object of adoration. That’s what giving glory is. You are building up that object that you are glorifying. And in so doing, you are aligning your will with the object of glory. That’s why it’s important to only give glory to God. If you give glory to material objects or sports figures or movie stars, they will let you down because no human is worthy of being glorified, although we tend to glorify others all the time.
The Aeons were all creative geniuses able to dream up a fully functioning mental Paradise where whatever they willed in the Father’s name happily happened. It’s very much like our depiction of heaven, where you can fly around among the clouds and the buildings are all made of precious jewels and the streets are paved with gold. So that’s what the Pleroma does when they’re sitting there in their little cannonball shape—they’re actually dreaming that they’re flying around in the clouds and so forth.
In their desire to give glory to the Father—that is, in order to align themselves with the will of the creator—the Aeons of the Fullness were required to follow these rules. And these are listed in the Tripartite Tractate, verse 74.
- They were to give glory to the Father and not to themselves. Give glory to the Father and not to the Fullness. The Aeons were to remain aligned with the Son who is their father and not shift their focus to the Fullness as a whole. So eyes up, not eyes around.
- They were to give glory to the Father and not to individual Aeons. Aeons were to remain always mindful of the Father and not to give glory to themselves and to their talented neighbors as individuals.
- They were to give glory to the Father to the best of their own ability. An Aeon was to give glory from its own location in the Fullness. They weren’t supposed to sidle up next to a different Aeon who seemed to be closer to the Father because they were higher up in the hierarchy in order to borrow that Aeon’s station in order to give better glory. Oh, that wasn’t what they were supposed to do. Rather, the individual was to develop its own voice and talents through the process of giving glory to the Father.
So that is how you manifest your potential, by giving glory to the Father, not by looking at others and not by looking at yourself, but through eyes up. And that manifests your greatest potential because you are a fractal of the Father, as we’ve been discussing.
It is said that the Father put an unquenchable thirst to align themselves with the One into the minds of the Aeons of the Fullness. He did not reveal to them the Father’s ineffable nature. Ineffable meaning: unable to be grasped. And the impossibility of reuniting with the Father and surviving to tell the tale. They didn’t know that. They didn’t know the Father couldn’t be grasped and couldn’t be reunited with on their own. They were to always be seeking after the Father by giving glory. That was obviously to keep alive the hope of reunification with the Father as a motive for giving glory.
The Tripartite Tractate says it this way. I’m going to read this straight out of one of the popular translations of the Tripartite so that you can hear. It’s difficult to understand, it’s an arcane language, and this is the whole purpose of the Gnostic Insights and of my own book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated—to simplify this sort of language. But in order that you might hear it directly, this is what it sounds like. This is from verses 75 and 76 of the Tripartite Tractate.
“The Aeons have brought themselves forth in accordance with the third fruit by the freedom of the will and by the wisdom with which he favoured them for their thought. They do not wish to give honour with that which is from an agreement, though it was produced for words of praise for each of the Pleroma nor do they wish to give honour with the Fullness. Nor do they wish to do so with anyone else who was originally above the depth of that one or above his place. Except, however, for the One who exists in an exalted name and in the exalted place, and only if he receives from the One who wishes to give honor and takes it to himself for the One above him, and only if he begets himself, so to speak, himself. And through that One begets himself along with that which he is, and himself becomes renewed, along with the One who came upon him by his brother, and sees him and entreats him about the matter, namely he who wished to ascend to him. So that it might be in this way, the One who wished to give honor does not say anything to him about this, except only that there is a limit to speech said in the Pleroma so that they are silent about the incomprehensibility of the Father, but they speak about the one who wishes to comprehend him.
“It came to one of the Aeons that he should attempt to grasp the incomprehensibility and give glory to it, and especially to the ineffability of the Father. Since he is a logos of the unity, he is one, though he is not from the agreement of the Totalities, nor from him who brought them forth, namely the One who brought forth the totality—the Father.
“This Aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom so that he could become preexistent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit. For the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired with no one to restrain him. The intent then of the Logos, who is this one, was good. When he had come forth, he gave glory to the Father, even if it led to something beyond possibility, since he had wanted to bring forth one who is perfect from an agreement in which he had not been, and without having the command.
“This Aeon was the last to have been brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude. And before he got anything else for the glory of the will and an agreement with the Totalities, he acted magnanimously from an abundance of love and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory. For it was not without the will of the Father that the Logos was produced. Which is to say, not without it will he go forth. But he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being.”
Well, that’s what it sounds like when you read the Tripartite Tractate directly. Seems a little difficult to me, so don’t worry if you got lost. Here’s what I take from what I just read to you.
The last Aeon that was made by the will of the Father was placed at the very top of the hierarchy of the Fullness. Picture a star sitting on top of a Christmas tree. That’s this guy. The reason this final Aeon was given such a position of honor in the hierarchy was because it carried within its singular consciousness all of the traits of all of the other Aeons. This was a very talented and capable Aeon because it had the potential to manifest the Fullness of God, but all by itself. In fact, this particular Aeon was called the perfect single one, produced by the Father, who had desired him and was pleased with him. That’s from verse 77.
Now here’s what happened. It turned out that this “Aeon was one of those who had been given wisdom with ideas first existing independently in his mind, so as to be brought forth whenever he wanted.” He had also received a natural wisdom enabling him to inquire into the hidden order. And this Aeons’s name was actually the very personification of wisdom: Logos. Logos means wisdom or knowledge. Or the Word.
In the Bible, it says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That word in the original Greek is logos and in the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God.”
And here is the cause of the Fall: Logos mistook his singular Self for the entirety of the Fullness because he had the entirety of the Fullness manifested within his own Self. It’s as if you, as a human being, had all of the talents of every other human being that’s on the planet, and you were aware of it. You can do anything that anybody else can do. Therefore, you might mistake yourself for all of humanity. You might think that you were the only one. Logos mistook his singular Self for the entirety of the Fullness.
And I depict this in my illustrations as that golden pyramid that depicts the Pleroma. What I have is a little golden pyramid sitting right on the very tip top and the rest of the pyramid blackened out. It’s all in shadow because the little pyramid at the very tip top can’t see the rest of the Pleroma anymore. He has taken his eyes off of the glory of God, which is always focused upward, and he has now focused it upon himself, and not only doesn’t see the Father anymore, but he doesn’t even see the Fullness anymore.
And then he broke the rules. He acted unilaterally, and he acted without authority; it was not part of his job, what happened next. Because the Father had withheld the impossibility of singletons reaching the realm of perfect glory, Logos launched himself upward toward the Father like a rocket ship, thinking he could plug himself back in to the originating consciousness, because that was his desire. Which is why the Aeons all look upward when giving glory—they all desire to plug themselves back in. Logos was sitting right on the top, and he launched himself up. He left the Fullness, reaching toward the Father. And as he reached for it, he stumbled and fell.
Here’s what it says in verse 76 of the Tripartite Tractate. “Thus the free will with which the members of the ALL had been born caused this one to rush forward, to give glory to the Father on its own. And before he had yet produced anything to the glory of the will and in the union with the members of the All, he acted presumptuously out of an abundance of overflowing love and rushed forward toward that which surrounds the realm of perfect glory.”
The Tripartite Tractate doesn’t hold this against him. It actually has a very loving and forgiving attitude toward the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate points out that the Fall of Logos was not due to bad motives on its part. On the contrary, Logos was attempting to give glory and reunite with the Father because of love when he fell. Again, from verse 76:
“Now the intention of this Logos was good because he rushed forward to give glory to the Father, even though he undertook a task beyond his power, having desired to produce something perfect from a union which he did not share and without having received orders.” He was no longer part of the Golden Rule where he would have been holding hands with the other Aeons and working together with knowledge and love to build something better. He did it all by himself. That’s what it means. Presumptuous. He presumed that he could do this all by himself.
And then verse 77 of the Tripartite Tractate says, “Furthermore, it was not without the will of the Father that this Logos 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 that is Logos. Rather, we should speak about the movement of Logos as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.”
And this is where we will take it up in our next podcast. We’re going to talk more about the Fall, which has nothing to do with Adam and Eve and an apple. The Fall happened long before humans came about, so we are not the cause of evil. So, we’ll talk about this more in our next episode of Gnostic Insights.
I also recommend again that you purchase my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, by Cyd Charise Ropp. You can buy that anywhere. You can certainly buy it off of my own blogs, or you can buy it at Amazon or any online bookseller. In this way you can find the simple story going forward without all these bigger explanations and diversions. You also see all the illustrations that I’m talking about.
Until next time. Onward and upward and God bless.
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.