Gnostic Memes of Jesus

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I thought it would be fun this week to look at some Christian memes that are posted on the internet, little posters with inspirational sayings. I asked for Bible quotes inspirational from Jesus, and what I’m going to do is read you the quote, and I’ll post the meme itself on the transcript of this episode. And I would like to explain to you the Gnostic meaning of each of these memes. So let’s see how this goes.

The first one I run across here is from Philippians 4:13, and it says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Now Christians generally think of Christ as an exterior force, that Christ is basically the Holy Spirit of the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. And so they picture Jesus being outside them, but very near, someone that you can call to you and pray to, and he knows you, and he will take care of your prayers.

Gnostic Christians, on the other hand, have an understanding, a gnosis, that Christ is within us when we accept Christ, when we invite Christ in, because as the Christians always say, Jesus is a gentleman, and he won’t just come plowing into your soul unless you invite him in. So Christians understand that you are asking Christ in, but they don’t understand that he completely takes up residence inside of you.

We know that we humans are made up of a spiritual Self, that one Self that is the reflection of the Fullness of God. We all share that in common. It is identical to all of us. Then we share a psychical level, our emotional level, generally what we would call our ego, and that’s our Second Order nature that comes into us and melds to the third part of us, which is our physical body. And our physical body is built from the molecules on up.

The physical body is of a demiurgic origin. This is why it has always so many cravings that go against our better judgment, let’s say. We eat too much, we take drugs we shouldn’t, we drink too much, we have sex with strangers or sex outside of marriage. These are physical urges that arise from the demiurgic level because they are embodying and carrying forward the commands of the Demiurge. And that’s the way the Demiurge likes to do things—keep us under control, keep us alienated from our higher Self.

So when we invite Christ in—let’s say you’re at a revival or you listen to an old Billy Graham sermon on the radio or you’re reading the book of John in the Bible and you have the urge to invite Christ to take over your life, and that is what it means to invite Christ into your soul—Christ is a different order of powers than we are. We are what’s called Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons; we’re the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ. And there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. That’s how it is that Jesus or Christ comes with your face and knows everything about you because Christ is an image of the perfection that you can be. Jesus was the first human that fully embodied the Third Order of Powers. And now it’s your turn…

When we invite Christ in, we invite the Christ to take residence in our souls and in our bodies. We invite the Christ’s Third Order Powers to replace our own Second Order Powers because we’re leveling up. We’re leveling up to a more powerful and loving Godly existence when we invite Christ in.

You can’t put down various mistakes and cravings and sins in your life just out of striving within your own little Second Order ego because it’s the one that got you in trouble in the first place. You need the higher power of the Third Order to embody you. That is the real meaning of Philippians 4.13. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me because I’m no longer just me and my Second Order body. I have the Third Order within me that has more power than the Second Order and demiurgic body that we are given.

The next meme I run across is from 2 Corinthians 12:9 and it says,  “Every weakness you have is an opportunity for God to show his strength in your life. My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

The conventional Christian church and especially the hellfire and damnation churches talk about your weakness as depravity and as inherent sinfulness and shame on you. Shame. “Have guilt. Turn to God for that’s your only salvation.” Well yeah that’s kind of correct except for the hell and damnation part and it’s got the whole wrong emotional spin on it.

When the egg of my mother was fertilized by the sperm of my father, my earthly parents, I was a pure Second Order Power coming in with all sorts of hope and knowledge—gnosis. It’s inherent in us because we are the children of the Aeons. We are the incarnation here on earth in the material realm of that First Order of Powers, the Aeons, who live in the pure bliss of the ethereal space. But when we come down into this body that starts with that fertilized egg we are bound to the material of the Demiurge and that’s where the weakness leaks into us. It’s from the bottom up. From the top down it’s all God. It’s the Father. It’s the God Above All Gods and it’s our aeonic inheritance.

We don’t get our weakness inherently from our fertilized egg and then our embryo grows up and then we’re little babies. We’re not sinful from the get-go. We are purely God-created from the get-go. But we are born into a fallen world run by the god of this world who’s the Demiurge and it has all sorts of traps and snares and temptations designed to pull us down to separate us from the God Above All Gods and the Fullness of God. So I would say, in regards to this meme that I just read, “Every weakness you have is an opportunity for God to show us strength in your life,” I would say it probably reads more like every weakness we gain or every weakness that is thrown into our path, every snare, is an opportunity to show God’s strength because the Father above is infinitely more powerful than the fallen god of this world. Infinitely so. And when we take on the Christ, we invite that power into our fleshly being.

So while I may not be able to quit smoking or to stop drinking too much or put down the pornography, whatever the weakness is that has taken hold of you, whether it’s a great weakness, something you feel very ashamed about, or whether it’s a small weakness like gossiping about our neighbors or being short-tempered with our spouse or our children, once we ask the Third Order of Powers to help us, then we have more strength than that weakness brings to us. It’s a mathematical thing. It’s not then a struggle to put those things down. You need to be mindful of the Third Order Powers of the Christ giving you the strength to overcome.

All right, what’s the next meme I run across here? Ah, this one is from John 14:6, and it says, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

Now, this is generally taken to mean, in the conventional Christian way of thinking about it, that you need to come forward in some sort of revival situation. Revival has to do with repentance. Revival means you’re reviving your soul; you’re coming back to life. You have been dead in sin, and now you are being revived into life, into the life that comes from the God Above All Gods and the Fullness of God, the Aeons. And Jesus said, I’m showing you the way. I am the way.

He said, I am the truth. So we can trust what Jesus says. That’s the red letter editions of the classical Bibles. Everything Jesus said was in red. So you can find the way. You can come to the truth by reading the words of Jesus without confusion.

And he says, I am the life, and this means the eternal life. Because down here, this material world, as we know, is transitory. This is not our permanent home. So when Jesus speaks of the life, he’s talking about your ethereal, eternal life.

And he says, no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. So this generally means, as I started to say, that you have a revival situation where you come to Christ and you pray the sinner’s prayer, where you say, I’m a sinner. I’m nothing. I need you, Christ, save me. Okay, that’s basically the sinner’s prayer. And the Christians take this to mean that you have to do it in just that way, that you have to say Jesus was the Christ and Jesus is the way to God. And here’s the thing—if you don’t do that in your revival situation and pray the sinner’s prayer, then you will be eternally damned and you will go to hell and be tortured forever by a supposedly all-loving and all-forgiving God. For some reason, they can’t see the contradiction in that.

Here in Gnostic Christianity, we agree that Jesus was the first embodiment of the Third Order Powers and that Jesus shows us the way and that Jesus shows us through his words and the example of his life the power that we can all have by asking the Third Order Powers, by opening up our souls and inviting the Third Order Powers, as exemplified by Jesus, into our souls. You don’t have to say “the Christ.” You can say “Jesus,” because Jesus told us this will do. This is what you need to do. This is why I came. He shows us the way. He tells us the truth. He demonstrates the life through his resurrection after the crucifixion.

Now, if you don’t gain that gnosis before you “die,” then you’re going to have a very bumpy ride after you die. You are going to have to account for all of your errors, all of your weakness, all of your mistakes, all of your sins, great and small, and give amends and apologize to everyone whom you injured when you were alive. And there will be no hiding from it. There will be no denying it. You won’t be able to say, oh, I never did that, it wasn’t that way, because here you are face to face now in the ethereal plane, in the in-between place. It’s not all the way up to heaven, because only goodness reaches the Father. Only goodness can regain the ethereal plane, because it’s all good. There is no sin. There’s no death, no destruction, no despair, no sadness on the ethereal plane where the hierarchy of the Fullness of God lives. The Aeons are protected from all of that, and we can’t bring our dirty laundry up there. We can’t bring our bags full of weakness up there. It’s oil and water. They don’t mix.

So there is an in-between place that accounts for all of this, where you are face-to-face. And it’s not God punishing you. It’s not the Aeons punishing you. Nobody’s punishing you. It’s you having remorse for what you’ve done and wishing that you had not done these things. It’s a lot better to repent and invite the Christ in before you die, because then, when your body stops functioning and your spirit is released from this bondage of flesh, you won’t have to go through that really horrible experience. You will have been already redeemed through the power of the Christ, because no man cometh unto the Father but by the Christ. The Christ is our correcting algorithm for our second-order Powers.

Here’s a meme from Philippians 1:6, and it says, “I’m sure about this, the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus.”

So, as I was just saying on the previous meme, when you invite the Christ into your soul, you’re trading the third-order Powers for all the baggage and all the remorse and regret and things that you’ve done. You can pray a blanket prayer to the Christ. You don’t have to be able to remember and enumerate every single bad thing you’ve ever done.

You can pray that Christ will remove all of the impurities from your soul, give you new life, give you new power, give you new strength to battle in the never-ending war. And this never-ending war, it’s not against other people. That’s one of the lies of the Demiurge.

The news, the social media, the mean people—they are not the object of your never-ending battle. The never-ending battle is with the death and destruction that is brought to us by the Demiurge and his archons. We shouldn’t battle against other people. Our battles are with powers and principalities, archons and the Demiurge. And guess what our armament is? It’s not shaking our fists and shooting off guns or lopping off people’s heads because that’s the wrong target. Those don’t do any good against the archons.

Our magic bullet is love. We Second Order Powers were sent into this world to remind the Demiurge of love and the God Above All Gods and the hierarchy and his better Self that is up there. Down here, the Demiurge is the disembodied ego striving for power and control. Up there, it’s love, it’s acceptance, it’s everlasting life and joy. So this is the balance. What would you rather have? Why would you want to be down here in the mud when you can be up there with our Aeonic parents and everybody we’ve ever known and loved with none of the negative baggage, none of the remembrance of slights and harms and insults? They are not our enemy, the other humans or the other Second Order Powers. It’s the principalities and powers of the darkness that are the never-ending war and the only thing that can win is love.

The light outshines the darkness. That’s a common metaphor used in Christian talk. You walk into a room and there’s no windows and it’s completely dark inside. It’s all blackness. That’s the world of the Demiurge. But when the light comes in the form of the Christ, he’s this glory beam from above by the God Above All Gods to shine the ethereal light into the blackness, into the darkness. And light drives away dark, doesn’t it? That’s the metaphor. That light is the light of love and life, purity and goodness. Those are our magic bullets.

Here’s a meme from Mark 1:17. “Jesus said to them, follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.”

So this is near the beginning of the story of Jesus being on earth and beginning his ministry. And he approaches fishermen who are literally trying to catch fish with nets out of their boat. And he tells them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. This is the true call to evangelism. We are to become fishers of men. We are to throw out our nets of the gospel, our nets of gnosis with the power of love and draw them into the boat of salvation, you might say, or draw them into the boat of gnosis.

This is the purpose of Gnostic Insights. I am hopefully one of the fishers on behalf of the Christ to gather people who are out there flopping around in the ocean, wondering which way is up, to remember your gnosis, to change your loyalty from the things of this world that always pass away. All these material possessions that seem so dear to us, they will crumble with time. They will turn into rust and dust and completely disappear, and to trade them in. That’s what repentance is: turning away from the material world. And then the redemption—that means buying us back, when we trade the material world for the ethereal plane.

Here’s a meme from Matthew 5:16 that says, “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

We are to let our light shine forth. Let your love flow, remember that song? like a mountain stream, and let your love shine through all living things. So we’re to let our light shine forth. We’re to walk around like beacons of light and share it with other people. They should be able to see on our faces that we are embodying the Third Order of Powers.

We don’t go around all gloomy and angry. We don’t slump around and complain about everything. We are thankful that we have the Third Order within, that the Christ came to earth in the form of Jesus, and that we have accepted that, and that we now remember the gnosis that we were born with, and we become like the smile on a newborn baby’s face. We return to our innocence.

We don’t do good works in order to be saved. That is an error in many Christian denominations. They have the feeling that if you work on behalf of God, if you set up your booth down in the county park and you hand out your tracts, or you walk around and knock on doors, have you heard the word of God today? and then you hand them a tract. That is not the good works. The good works is when you are full of love, when you are full of the knowledge of God, then you will naturally perform good works.

We’re not being saved from hell and damnation. We’re being saved out of the sadness and despair of this world that we are yoked to. And when we have that gnosis, when we understand that we are part of the ethereal plane, and that we’re just passing through this valley of death, then we can be joyful. We can know the bad doesn’t stick. Yeah, try your best, Demiurge. You’re not getting me today. Then we perform good works because we are driven to do good works, because we want to share the Gnostic gospel with others. And this glorifies the Father in heaven. This glorifies the God Above All Gods when we share because we can’t help but share the light that shines forth from us.

Okay, these are just a few of the memes I ran across this morning. Let me know what you think of all of this. I regularly get comments from two or three subscribers. Oh, come on. Let’s hear from the rest of you. Let’s start a conversation here in the comment section.

God bless us all. Onward and upward.

Let Your Love Flow YouTube video link–Listen Here