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Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share Gnostic Insights with you. I’ve written a couple of books based upon one of the tractates of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the Great Purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that repackaging of Christianity, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books which were buried in the desert of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, to keep them from the purge. This big jug of scrolls was rediscovered and dug up in 1945, which means they were kept away from almost 2000 years of formal academic study and formal religious theology. So what you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is relatively fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts.
I’ve studied one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote on the subject, called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. That little book is a non-academic approach to the mythology of what can be called early Gnostic Christianity. The Gnosticism presented in the Tripartite Tractate and my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated is a very early version of Christianity.
The reason I say it’s Christian is that there is a figure called the Christ that runs throughout the Tripartite Tractate. There are also many other overlapping ideas that you can still find in the New Testament and traditional Christianity—the Father, the Son, the Fullness of God, the Fall, explanations of virtues and vices and their effects upon our lives, a need for relationship with our ethereal origins and assistance from the Christ. But the meanings of those words have changed so much during these past two thousand years of formal institutional religion that they hardly resemble their original meanings. The Gnostic Gospels use many of the same terms as the Bible, but their interpretation and application is not what they originally were. When Jesus of Nazareth spoke of his Father, for example, who was he talking about? When we read of the Fullness of God in the scriptures approved by the church, what does that mean? When the Bible says that Christ will return with armies of angels to battle for our souls, what exactly is that about?
My goal here at Gnostic Insights is to reacquaint modern believers and nonbelievers with what I take to be the original intent of the religion that has come to be known as Christianity, in order to return it to the teachings that Jesus shared before the Nicene Council of the Pope and the Emperor of Rome changed everything to suit their own institutional agendas. To church folks this will initially sound like heresy, while to non-believers it will sound too churchy. To those folks who have fallen away from the church because they can’t reconcile inconsistencies between the Old and the New Testament, it will come as a welcome relief. And to those people who have never believed in God, this version of Christianity may be exactly what they haven’t been expecting and didn’t realize they were hoping for.
As I explain these Gnostic Insights to you, I will often use quotes out of the Old and New Testament as well as quotes from the Tripartite Tractate, in order to demonstrate their compatibility.
I like to begin talking about gnosis with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out in the beginning. The word for that, by the way, is cosmogeny—the study of origins of the cosmos. This makes the most sense to me—to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are in this great drama of which we are a part. We will look at the nature of consciousness and how and when it arises. After that we can discuss what happens in our lives and why we are here. We will look at the troubles we are burdened by in our lives and what we can do about them. And after all of that, we can look at the final roll-up at the very end of time as predicted by the scriptures.
So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. The story begins before the beginning of time because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. And so you can think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time. No history. It is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists called the Buddha mind, which is something people try to achieve during meditation where you can be aware that you are conscious but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the base state consciousness of the Father.
Obviously the Father is not an old man with a white beard in long robes. Obviously there’s no gender. The Father is a singular consciousness without form or face. So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am interpreting for you, it is referred to as the Father. And this Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts but rather love—the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet. Utterly still. Utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom will, but to what end? There’s nothing else there.
Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to an emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog and book, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son–SON. So now we have the Father and a Son. In the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of itself. The Son is the Father having a thought. The Son is the Father knowing itself. The Son is the Father having a sensation of its own eternal Self. This Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son.
And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL arose at once. This figure of the ALL does not appear in orthodox Christianity, so here our Gnostic Gospel begins to diverge from the familiar.
The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father, because it is a reflection of the Father’s traits. And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son. And the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In conventional religious talk, the ALL is known as the Pre-existent Church. This is not your church down on the street corner with the people in it hearing sermons and singing hymns on Sunday. This is the true, pre-existent church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the church exists from the beginning.”
The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say, “Before the ALL arose from the Father’s thought, he knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else, for they were within the Father as an embryo or an unsprouted seed.” (I’m not going to cite verses here for purposes of flow, but you can find all of these references in my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.)
So, the ALL can be characterized as potential. They were there living in the Father, living in the Son, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know themselves. They’re not Self aware. The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, it says, “Because they were newly formed, the Father concealed the ALL’s perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge. This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so that the ALL would be able to relate to the Son and see the Father’s glory according to the ability of each one to receive him.”
So, nobody sees the Father. The Father is unknowable. The Father is too immense. When people say, Oh, you can’t possibly conceive of God—God is too big and unknowable—that’s true. But God made itself into a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. In philosophy and early theology another word for this singularity of consciousness, by the way, is monad and the One.
One of the reasons the Son is there is because we can know the Son. We can’t know the Father, but we can know the Son. The Tripartite Tractate describes it this way: The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL. “And they understood who he is and he is covered by the ALL, and with the birth of the ALL the Son also became a Father.”
This can be a little confusing because you have the originating consciousness, the God Above All Gods, which is the originating consciousness or the Father. The Father had a sense of itself. This was called the Son. The Son immediately reproduced itself, and this is called the ALL. With the birth of the ALL the Son also became a Father. The originating Father, that consciousness so lonely and still for eternity, now had a child who had also borne fruit from his glory. And in this way, the One begat the ALL. And the Father loved them all, as he loved his Son.
As I said, the ALL is referred to as the pre-existent church, and it’s also called the Second Glory. The First Glory was the Son; the second Glory is the ALL. The originating Father’s consciousness is incomprehensible. Its scope and greatness is so immense and so unfathomable that the Tripartite Tractate says anyone trying to take hold of it would be annihilated, and so the Father created the Son, thereby giving form to what had been his formless Self, for the Father’s desire was to be known. His desire was to love and to be loved. The Son that arose is perfect, even as his Father is perfect, and he carries within his perfect form every quality of the originating consciousness. Being the perfect image of the Father, the Son’s inherent creativity spread itself out into the ALL like rays shining from a star.
In my books I illustrate these concepts in this way: when I picture the originating consciousness of the original Father, I see just total blackness—an entirety of dark, inscrutable blackness. Then, when I picture the Son emerging and being held by that blackness, I see the Son as kind of a diffuse, foggy light that begins to emerge out of the inky blackness. That is what I see as the Son. Then immediately coming out of that foggy image of the Son like rays of a sun spreading out, I see bright golden light coming from the middle of that fogginess and beaming outward like the sun. These are helpful illustrations for me, so when I picture the ALL I picture it as a bright yellow starburst. The ALL, like the Father and the Son, is infinite and limitless in its scope and capability. In fact, another name for the ALL is the Totality. Each individual ray, each of the Totalities, emerges from the central seed of the Son, SON, and they ALL shine forth as One.
In the same way that a crystal refracts white light into all the colors of the rainbow, so the Son beams forth every one of his countless qualities as the individual and yet unified rays of the ALL. The ALL is a single entity, yet it has differentiations represented by each of its Totalities. You can picture each one as a ray coming out from a central starburst. The Son intimately knows each facet of the ALL, for the ALL are all facets of himself. The ALL is at the same time One and many. One and ALL. The ALL is a selfless diversity giving glory to the Father with a single song of praise. So, you can imagine the ALL as singing in unison when it sings. The Son who became the Father of the ALL shines forth as the emergent rays the ALL.
These are the basic ideas behind the Father of consciousness and the first off-shoot of that consciousness—the Son—and the variables of the Son—the ALL. I want to cover one more thing before we leave this introduction to the origin of consciousness. The Bible and the Tripartite Tractate talk a lot about glory and giving glory to the Father. Glory is one of those religious terms that is used quite a lot. But what is glory? And what does it mean to give glory?
Glory is the recognizable magnificence of someone. Glory is, Oh my gosh, that is so fabulous! So we say that the Father is glorious and the Son is glorious.
1 Chronicles 29:11 ESV
Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.
And what does it mean to give glory? The Bible says that all glory proceeds from the Father, and we are to give glory back to God.
Habakkuk 2:14 ESV
For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
The Tripartite Tractate says that Self-awareness comes through the act of giving glory to God, and we’ll talk about that more in the next episode. Giving glory means that you are focused on the glorious object in adoration and love—that is giving glory. God is glorious, and when I give glory to God, I am loving God by seeing that glory and acknowledging it and reflecting the glory back to God.
So, glory is the wondrousness of the object and giving glory is reflecting that glory back at your object of devotion, and truly glorious things are those that reflect the glory of the Father. When we glorify a person or a thing as if it were glorious all on its own, that’s what I would call vain glory. Vain because no one but the creator of the universe qualifies to generate and to receive glory.
Psalm 115:1 ESV
Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!
And glory is not worship for the sake of worship, as if God needed our adoration. This would imply that the Father of the universe is hungry and insecure and wheedling for our affection, as if we mere mortals could offer up anything of value not already owned by the Lord of Creation. That just doesn’t make any sense. So giving glory is not for God’s benefit, it’s for our benefit.
The reason we give glory to God is because that is the method by which we tune in to God’s frequency. You could say giving glory to God is how we synchronize ourselves with the one consciousness of which we are essentially fractal units. I’ll explain fractals at some other time. Why would we want to synchronize with the Father? The Gnostic Gospel tells us that we were designed with a built in homing device that gives us indescribable pleasure when we are in communion with one another and when we are operating according to plan. The closer we are to dialing in to the Father’s frequency, the happier we feel. It is through this process of giving glory that we realign ourselves with the universal unit of consciousness, or what we are calling the Father or the God Above All Gods. When I am speaking with people I often refer to this as the Glory Road or the Glory Beam.
Ephesians 1:17 ESV
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him,
This is how we align ourselves for instruction and for renewal. When we center ourselves and sit in silence with the Father, we feel peace, happiness, joy, and love. When we acknowledge the Maker and focus in that direction, we give glory and we are united in glory. And when we give glory alongside others who are themselves giving glory, we share with them a worship experience of the One that transcends what any of us can experience alone. So this is not for the benefit of a needy God, but for the edification of the Saints. Edification means strengthening. It is through giving glory that the choir of which we are a part is able to sing along with one perfect voice.
It is very important to choose your objects of glory carefully. In this distracting world in which we find ourselves, we are giving glory away right and left to things that do not deserve glory. We glorify movie stars and television stars and musicians. We glorify sports figures, we glorify models, and products that we love. This is a distraction away from true glory, and it doesn’t make us happy. Only glorifying the Father in love can make us happy. The other objects that we may find ourselves glorifying—these are imitations. These are deficiencies and so they cannot ever fulfill us the way that we hope they will.
John 5:44 ESV
How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?
I think this is a good beginning for our basic concepts. We’ll talk a lot more about all of this in episodes to come, so thank you so much for being with me today and I’ll see you again next time. God bless. Onward and upward.