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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week I had a very nice gift of a couple of different listeners writing to me with comments and questions and saying how much the podcast means to them. And that’s very special for me because you realize I’m sitting here recording this all by myself in the darkness of the early morning and it’s good to know that people are listening on the other side and getting something from this gnosis, so thank you very much.
I am going to address in this week’s episode a point that was brought up by one of the listeners. He wrote to say that he had been researching and learned of a fallen angel or a demon who asked Yahweh if he wished man not to sin and do the things he did not want them to do, then why didn’t he just take away their free will so they would obey? Apparently, this outraged Yahweh, and so he was cast out. Now, I don’t know this legend. If you happen to know who this fallen angel is, it would be good for you to write to me with his name and where I can find the original material in some ancient manuscript.
I think that the moral of the story is interesting. I did write back to him and say that of course, the Demiurge would be very angry at anyone suggesting he could remove the free will of humans. And the reason is because it’s not within the Demiurge’s power to give or remove free will. That power comes from the God Above All Gods. It’s part of our aeonic inheritance. We all have free will. All Second Order creatures that populate creation have free will because it’s part of the nature of the Father, and we are fractals of the Father. The Demiurge is not. The Demiurge, is a fraction, a portion, of one of the Aeons. It’s not within the Demiurge’s power to give or take free will from humans, and so the question that the archon asked the Demiurge embarrassed the Demiurge. It showed he couldn’t do something, and that’s why he got angry at the archon and cast him out. At least the legend apparently goes something like that. I haven’t read it myself, so I don’t know. But you could see why the Demiurge would be embarrassed by someone asking him about free will because he doesn’t know what free will is.
The Demiurge doesn’t like us having free will, because remember that the Demiurge can only control the material world through strings—through bonds like chemical bonds and physical bonds and willpower bonds, we could say. So that’s how it controls the material aspects. The atoms and molecules are run by laws, and they obey. If they didn’t obey the laws of physics, nothing would hold together in the universe. So the Demiurge is used to having control and having the objects that he controls obey him. And then along comes the Second Order powers and they don’t obey with that pesky free will. So it would really be embarrassing to him.
So let’s talk about free will today. I like to look at all of these issues as cosmogenic outgrowths of the origination, so that is why we always start at the beginning. Cosmogenic means how things got started, like genic as in Genesis. Cosmo, as in the cosmos, which, in the case of these spiritual matters, begins before the creation of our physical universe. That’s why we usually start with the Father and then the Son arose out of the Father as a monad of the Father—as a particular point of view—out of the Father. And then as soon as the Son emerged from the Father, he broke into all of the possible variabilities within himself. These are called the ALL or the Totalities—all of the characteristics of the Son broken out into their infinite number of variables. So the ALL or the Totalities were individuals, but they didn’t have their own will because they were fully subsumed into the Son’s willpower because they were so unified. All for one and one for all. I think of that as their motto.
When they all realize their individual points of view, when they realized that they were individual entities and not merely spokes in the will of the Son, they arranged themselves. They sorted themselves into what we now call the Pleroma, or the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. No longer were they arranged as the starburst pattern coming out of a middle where they all thought one thought, but they sorted themselves into a pyramidal shape—into a hierarchy where each of these things are now no longer known as Totalities. Now they’re called the Aeons.
The Aeons sorted themselves and each had their own particular place, position, duties, and point of view. They were fractals, which means the Aeons is the substance of the Son. The substance of the Aeons contains all of the characteristics and potential of the Infinity of the originating Son. The Tripartite Tractate says if the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each Aeon, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who himself is the ALL. From their assembled fullness they offered a glorification worthy of the Father, an image that was One and at the same time many because it was brought forth for the glory of the One, and because they had come forward toward him, who is himself the entirety of the ALL.
So, the him who is the entirety of the ALL is the Son. And the Son, then, is the Father of the Fullness, the Father of the Aeons. So you see, it says that they all have, in their assembled fullness, all of the characteristics of the Father. The Totalities transferred not only their knowledge, spirit, and consciousness to their offspring, the Aeons, the Tripartite Tractate says, “they became fathers of the third glorification, which was produced in accordance with the free will and the power they had been born with, enabling them to give glory in unison, while at the same time independently of one another, according to the will of each.”
So here we have an explicit comment that the free will has passed down now from the ALL into the Aeons. That free will conferred upon those Aeons their individuality and their cooperative structure, so they sorted themselves. I think that’s interesting to note. The Aeons sorted themselves into the hierarchy of the Fullness. They were not placed there or told where their position and jobs were and what they needed to do. They sorted themselves, which is an expression of free will right off the bat.
This reference to the third glories, by the way—that’s the first glory is the Father. The second glory is the Son. And the Third Glory is the ALL, which then becomes the Aeons. The Aeons of the Fullness are also known as the First Order of powers. And we creatures down here below we are the Second Order of powers. Powers are different than glories. Glories are pure images of the Father’s reflected glory. The Son loves the Father and the Father loves the Son. And these glories bounce back and forth as they give each other glory. And the ALL gives glory to the Son and the Father. That’s why they’re called the third glories. But the powers are actually expressions of free will. Powers are different than glories. Glories refers to giving glory. Powers are expressions of will and self-awareness. The First Order of powers, the Aeons, arranged themselves into a hierarchy, and quoting the Tripartite Tractate, it says, “minds of minds which are found to be words of words, elders of elders, degrees of degrees which are exalted above one another. Each one of those who give glory has his place and his exaltation and his dwelling and his rest, which consists of the glory which he brings forth.”
So the basic purpose of the Aeons was to further give glory to the Father and the Son. The heavenly realm is glorious. It exists to bounce this light around, just being so happy to be conscious and aware and alive. And the way they do that is by giving glory. That is how they use their free will.
Carrying on in the cosmogeny now, Logos was one particular Aeon in the Fullness of God. He was the last Aeon to be produced, and he was placed at the very top of the aeonic hierarchy. The Tripartite Tractate says of Logos, “For 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 when he wanted it. Because of that, he had received a natural wisdom enabling him to inquire into the hidden order, being a fruit of wisdom. Thus the free will with which the members of the ALL had been born caused Logos to do what he wanted, with no one holding him back.” That’s verse 75 and 76 of the Tripartite Tractate.
So you see the free will here again is being explicitly passed down. All of the Aeons have free will, but Logos was different in that he was one of those who had been given wisdom, which shows us that all of the Aeons have different talents and different expressions. They don’t all have wisdom. And Logos was given the ability to inquire into the hidden order. So this ability, combined with the free will that all of the emanations of the Father possessed, allowed Logos to act all by himself, to act unilaterally. Now, if the Father had not wanted an individual Aeon to have the power to act all on his own—to enact his free will to do whatever he wanted—he wouldn’t have given Logos the free will and power to do so. But these Aeons are expressions, they’re natural outpourings of the infinity of possibilities possessed by the Son, and the Father before the Son.
So, back to the original question that started off this episode, when the archon asked the Demiurge, Well, why did you give the humans free will? Go ahead and take it away, it doesn’t work that way. The free will flows down from the top and comes into everyone and every living thing as an uninterrupted stream of consciousness and willpower. Now, as you’ve heard by now, according to the Tripartite Tractate, Logos used that free will to reach for the Father all by himself. He wanted to plug back up into the Son and the Father and give glory on his own. Swimming upstream in that manner is not a possibility for the Aeons. And so instead of going up to rejoin the Father, which was a good and noble and glorifying thing that he tried to do, he fell out of harmony out of unity with the pleroma of the Fullness, and he broke apart into this solitary place that he found himself in. And that’s where we get our material world. The material world is the fallen world that was brought down when the first mistake occurred, that being Logos’s idea that he could swim upstream. Instead, he fell. That is the “original sin” that creates our entire universe.
And as you know, the Tripartite Tractate says that Logos was horrified at what had happened. This is not what he had intended, and this was not where he expected to wind up. So it says that the best part of Logos fled back up to the Fullness and the fallen part of Logos remained behind. And according to this Gnostic Valentinian type of Gnosticism that we talk about here at Gnostic insights, the part that fled back up to the ALL was the Self that is the fractal of the Son that everybody possesses. That all of the Aeons continue to possess. That’s their core is their reflection of the Son—the package within them. That’s what fled back up to the Fullness, but the part that remained behind is what I’ve identified as the ego of Logos.
The ego is the part of us, as well, that reflects our individual points of view. It’s the monad part that is not the eternal One but the individual. And the Aeons have egos also, but for them it’s merely their address in the hierarchy. It’s their name and their place and their position and their job. The place from which they give glory. That’s their ego. But their essential Self is all the same. That’s the One. So the part that remained below, according to this particular Gnostic legend that we share here, is the ego of this fallen Aeon.
And that ego is all by itself down here. And it woke up to darkness and disorder and chaos. Not knowing who or where it was.
The Demiurge started to organize the chaos around it. And that is the entity that in the Old Testament of our Bible is identified as God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. That is not the Father or the Son or the God Above All Gods. The creator of the heavens and earth is what we now call the Demiurge, the architect of our universe. And he doesn’t remember where he came from. He doesn’t remember anything. But he does have within himself that characteristic that was given to Logos when Logos was placed at the top of the hierarchy. That characteristic of being able to look into the hidden order of all things. And it’s that ability to grasp physics, basically, that gave the Demiurge the blueprints to create our material universe.
The material Universe is the fallen bits of Logos, the shadows of the Aeons. And we call those shadows the archons. The Demiurge is composed of his archonic sub-selves, the same way that the Aeon called Logos was composed of little aeonic fractals of all the other Aeons down below him in the hierarchy. Those Aeonic fractals have become archonic fractals of the Demiurge. It’s an inverse world, an upside down world down here. And those archons don’t have free will. They are extensions of the consciousness of the Demiurge. So the Demiurge needs to control his material universe with very strong strings of power. Physical bonds. Chemical valances. These are the strings of power of the Demiurge that keep things holding together—that keep things working down here in this universe. The physical laws, the chemical laws and whatnot of this universe.
Back up there in the Fullness they decided to try to remind the Demiurge who he is and where he comes from because he doesn’t know that. He woke up and thinks he’s God. He woke up and thinks that everything emerges from him, and indeed it does down here below, but he doesn’t remember the Father and he doesn’t remember the Fullness of God or where he came from. He doesn’t remember that he is part of an Aeon known as Logos. He thinks he’s the big guy. He doesn’t want any other gods before him.
In their attempt to remind the Demiurge of who he is and where he came from, the Aeons of the Fullness came up with a plan to send down creatures into the otherwise dead material creation that’s ruled by the Demiurge. And so they fruited us. All Second Order powers are the fruit of the First Order powers and as their fruit we carry their inheritance—their DNA, so to speak.
Everything that is living, everything that is alive, everything that’s gestated and is born into this world is a Second Order power. And we come directly from the Fullness. We bring down the remembrance of the God Above All Gods. We bring down with us the remembrance of love and glory and our aeonic parents who are in heaven. So we have all of these memories that the Demiurge doesn’t even know about. And what else did we bring down with us? We brought down the free will of the Aeons and the ALL and the Son because we are of that direct lineage that flows downward into this material universe.
So we bring down free will, along with the love and the remembrance of the Father. This free will and life energy is melded onto the material of this world. The spark of life that creates the creatures when that creature is conceived, bonds to the molecules that make it up, and then it drives the organism that is formed. That is our aeonic inheritance, and it guides our creation. The Demiurge doesn’t guide the creation of the embryos, the Fullness of God guides the creation of the embryos. Intelligent design.
So here we are with all that free will, and the Demiurge doesn’t know what to make of it. He cannot make us obey. Creatures do what they want to. As far as the Demiurge is concerned, we’re all some sort of pesky vermin that have infected his domain. We have a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the Demiurge. That’s why we grow old and get sick and die in this world. But our spirit is eternal. And when our bodies die, our life energy pops out and is now immaterial once again. We came from above. We return to above.
In this theology, our free will often leads us to do things that aren’t the best for us, right? All the sadness and disappointment in the world, the vices, the addictions, the betrayals. This doesn’t come from our aeonic nature. It comes from us, down here, being distracted and forgetting to give glory. If we were giving glory to the Father and the Son and remain focused on the virtues and the love, then things are good. When we instead look around us, we forget about our glorious inheritance and truth and beauty and love and the knowledge of the virtues that make us happy. That’s the fallen state, and we can get back up.
We can remember the Father. Remember the glorious place. Remember our aeonic inheritance of the Fullness. When we use our own free will to stop looking around us at the garbage and instead look up at the glory. Let’s get glory, not garbage. There’s a bumper sticker.
So that’s what the whole Christian thing is about, that has been misunderstood and I dare say perverted by a couple thousand years of wrong theology—having lost and forgotten and buried the gnosis. Repentance is deciding this world ain’t all that. I no longer wish to serve the Demiurge and my own egoic selfish desires. We repent and look upward instead.
And then there is a Third Order of powers that came after us. And that is the Christ. The Christ is not exactly the same as the Son in Christian theology. The Son and the Christ and Jesus have all been smushed together, but they are actually three different things. The Son is that direct monad of the Father. It is uncreated. It is at the very beginning.
The Christ is the Third Order of powers, which means it came after the First Order of power—that being the Fullness, and the Second Order of powers—that being all of us down here. It was created after us, not before us, back when the Son was born. It was created after us, with the express purpose to bring us home. It’s the gatekeeper for us to get back up out of this material world, but we can only get back up there when we have done our part.
And our job is to bring love into this world. Our job is to remind the Demiurge that there is a power greater than it, that being the Father, the God Above All Gods. Our job is to bring love into the world, to show the Demiurge there is such a thing as love. And we can cooperate with each other using free will rather than force, coercion, and authoritarianism. The forces of coercion and authoritarian political structures are demiurgic. The forces of God are built upon love, glory, life and light. They’re coming from above, not from below. So we need to repent of the forces down below. We need to turn our eyes upward to the Third Order of powers that was created to bring us all of us home.
And that is the best use of our free will. We can have all the free will we want down here. It’s no problem using our free will, but our free will often gets us just into trouble in a bad way. If you’re tired of the trouble you’re in, use your free will right now, at this very moment. Free will means you always have the ability to exercise a choice in the here and now. That’s what free will is–exercising choice. Not feeling as though you are a helpless victim of destiny. Not feeling as though you were destined to be downtrodden, you were destined to become whatever you have become. That is a lie. That is not true.
Free will gives you the ability at any moment in the here and now to make a decision. To make a different choice. And that choice is to accept the redemption that comes through the Third Order of powers. And once you do that, you can be on that glory path again. You can remember the Father. You can remember what your true position, name, rank, and duties are, not what you’ve been taught down here they are.
You are no longer a cog in a heartless wheel. You are part of the glorious plan of redemption. To bring love into the world we’re down here. When we begin to exercise our free will for righteousness rather than for sin, we can enact the simple golden rule, which is that we reach out to other units of consciousness—Second Orders powers—to hold hands. Using our free will to hold hands with each other and then we can cooperate with each other to build something bigger and better than ourselves.
We come in as a single cell imbued with life from the Holy Spirit, and then we build ourselves up into organisms. And we do that by our cells are holding hands with other cells and sharing information, physical assistance, love, and coherence, and that’s what builds up creatures using our aeonic powers. It’s the simple golden rule of cooperation. Our cells are not slaves to our bodies. They are willing, loving, cooperative agents who have devoted their lives to keeping you and me alive.
Love only comes from the top down. From the bottom up it’s the forces of strong material control. The Demiurge’s strong bonds of no choice, no free will, stops at the molecular level. Above the molecular level, when life comes in, that point onward uses the simple golden rule. The Demiurge doesn’t act out of love. The Demiurge doesn’t remember the Father. It doesn’t remember the Fullness, it doesn’t remember its true self or Logos. It doesn’t remember what love is. The Demiurge is pure ego, but it’s also built upon the pattern of the Fullness of God. But he doesn’t know where the pattern came from. He thinks he made it up.
There’s a famous and long-standing conundrum in philosophy that says, how can we reconcile the concept of an all knowing God, if we subjects have free will? How is it that our actions aren’t controlled by destiny if God already knows what’s going to happen? Well, the way I answer that is that the All- knowing God Above All Gods has pre placed all possible choices in front of us. It’s like that multiverse theory in quantum mechanics. He has placed all possible choices before us, but it’s our individual free will that navigates the course between all of these choices.
I’ve made the analogy that it’s like a gigantic bowl of jello. This universe of ours with all possibilities in that bowl of jello and that bowl of jello is studded with an infinite number of cherries, and in our lifetime we swim from cherry to cherry to cherry. Those cherries represent choices.
I think that time is an illusion. The universe is static, but infinitely large, studded with all of these cherries. Time is our awareness of swimming from one choice using our own free will to the next choice, using our own free will. So in a real sense, the entirety of our lives is already conceived in the Fullness of God. It’s our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity, a line of passing time. That’s my theory.
At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potential of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are represented within the universe. Free will is driving our consciousness through these potentialities and leaving behind the collapsed potential of history. So it’s open in front of us, but behind us it’s collapsed because we made those choices. So the line from one cherry to the next was already drawn. But in front of us, all that infinity of choices is available to us. (In my brother’s past life therapy, the client actually goes backward down the history trail and chooses a different cherry and goes forward from there.)
Of course, where we have found ourselves in the bowl of jello determines what our possible choices are in the next choice. We can’t jump from this cherry all the way across the universe to another cherry. We are pretty well confined to the here and now of our immediate surroundings, which we have come to through our free will. But you always have the choice to repent from that line you’ve been drawing and deviate your course to go upward and onward in the direction of the glory of the God Above All Gods. And that is what we call redemption. Repentance and redemption. It’s the Christ’s job to strew those glorifying cherries all in front of us and make sure we always have a choice to choose a righteous cherry.
Am I killing this metaphor? Is it going too far? Alright. Maybe we better call this an end to this episode. Thank you for spending this time with me. Onward and upward and God bless us all.