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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Don’t you think it’s interesting that God is so often in the news? If this were a purely secular life that we’re living, if life really had no meaning and there was no God, then why are people always talking about God? Even the people that say they don’t believe in God at all talk about God.
For example, the big atheist of our generation is Richard Dawkins, and I’ve referred to Richard Dawkins many times in my writing, although I usually take his name out so as not to be impolite and call him out. But Richard Dawkins has been an extreme proponent of meaninglessness in our modern age. He tries to narrow all things down to material science. He’s a materialist. Lately, as it turns out, here in the springtime of 2024, Richard Dawkins has come to profess what he is calling cultural Christianity. Richard Dawkins now believes that, well, it may be all hooey that there’s such thing as a God or such thing as a Christ or that there was such a person as Jesus, but he now recognizes in his older age that if we throw all that away, there’s nothing to hang morality on. There’s nothing to hang hope or belief upon.
You see, if you reduce our consciousness to a purely mechanical or mathematical or computer-like process, there’s no such thing then as morality or ethics because it’s a mechanical process. So, where would ethics come from? There’s no right or wrong process.And we know that isn’t true. We know deep in our souls, deep in our hearts, that there is such a thing as right or wrong.
Now, the people that don’t believe in right or wrong, we call those people sociopaths or psychopaths. And indeed, there’s a lot of psychopaths running around who will kill you just as easy as look at you. All these random attacks, random stabbings, random shootings, mass murders, pushing people onto the subway tracks—these are the acts of sociopaths who are acting as if there were no such thing as righteousness or morality or goodness. But yet, if you yourself are a modern person, though not a sociopath, but you’re a good moral humanist, you do believe in right and wrong. You do believe in morality. You think it is better to be kind than to be cruel. You think it is better to love than to hate, although a lot of people who do not profess belief in God run around hating and they think that that’s love.
Good things never come from hate. So people that are running around protesting in a hateful manner, burning things down, pulling things down, striking their opponents—they’re not going to bring about good change. Bad comes from bad. So if you want to make a better change for this world, if you want to make this world a better place, it has to come out of love. It has to come out of morality and righteousness.
And you see, at long last, even Richard Dawkins, Mr. Big Material Scientist, has come to believe that there should be such a thing as cultural Christianity. Dawkins says now that Christianity seems to be the only religion that offers an uplifting, righteous type of way to be. And it’s true. Of all the religions in the world, or belief systems in the world, only Christianity offers a sacrificial savior. offers a human with the attributes of the Christ. And the Christ is the perfection of man. The Christ is perfection itself on both a physical level, emotional, and spiritual level—all things good, all things bright and beautiful, all love, no punishment, no vindictiveness, no revenge, no hatred—pure love.
So, in our Gnostic Christianity, we acknowledge the Father and the Son and the Christ. We acknowledge the variables of the Son as being the fullness of God, and those are known as the Aeons of God that live in the Fullness. And it’s all on the good side. It’s not a yin-yang, darkness versus white kind of balance. It’s not a continuum between darkness and light, between love, and hate. It is not a dialectic. The Fullness of God, the Son of God, the Father, the Christ—they are entirely on the side of good.
The darkness, the ignorance, the separation, the hatred exists outside of that ethereal plane, it exists down here in this material world. Indeed, as a Gnostic, we would say that materiality itself is a form of evil, and this is what drives people crazy against Gnostics. This is one of the big heresies. “Oh, you can’t call creation evil. It’s the creation of God! It’s all good and wonderful and beautiful!” But it’s not, is it? It’s full of death and pain and suffering and betrayal and hatred. Creation is the realm that expresses the fall away from ethereal purity.
And here we are. Here we humans are. We are stuck in the middle between the material cosmos and the ethereal creatures of the Fullness, the Aeons, because we come from the Aeons. We are their fruit. We are children of the Fullness of God. We are literally the fruit of the Aeons of God. And we have been seeded down here on this now material plane to remind this plane of the ethereal plane. This material existence that we dwell in, the reason it has death and delusion and ignorance and hatred, disappointment, sadness, betrayal, failure—these are all expressions of the separation from God. These are expressions of the ignorance of who we are and where we came from.
And the purpose of the Christ is to bring the redemption, is to bring all of this materiality back into awareness of who we are and where we come from. The material itself—the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals, the aggregation of minerals like rocks and stones, the planets—that is the domain of what we call the Demiurge.
The Demiurge is part, only half of, an ethereal being who came from Above. That refers to the Fall, the fall of the Aeon known as Logos. He fell out of the Fullness. He broke apart into another realm. And he was horrified at what happened. He was horrified at what he had created. He thought he was going to make Paradise, the Paradise the Aeons dream of in the Fullness. He thought he could do it all on his own when he struck out. He didn’t realize that only the Fullness of God can contain the beauty of Paradise. And so he struck out on his own to bring it about, and instead, he brought about this material deficiency, this imitation of Paradise.
And when Logos looked around and saw what he had brought about, he was, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, horrified. Because, imagine thinking you’re going to create Paradise and instead you create this unruly, dead, lifeless place—this quantum chaos. There’s no chaos in the ethereal realm. So, the Tripartite Tractate describes that Logos fled back to the Fullness—that the Aeons helped pull him up out of the deficiency and brought him home.
But part of him remained behind. All that part that splattered below that has become our material existence. And that we call the Demiurge, because the Demiurge has the patterns of Logos. He’s got the blueprints, but he doesn’t have the life. He doesn’t have the love. He doesn’t have the Fullness of God. He only has the blueprints, so he doesn’t realize that he is the partial shadow of the glory of God. He thinks he is the glory of God. He calls himself God.
We Christian Gnostics believe that this Demiurge that calls himself God is the God of the Old Testament, is Yahweh. “There is no God before me. Thou shalt not worship other gods.” These are the statements of this fallen aspect of Logos, who thinks he is God, but he’s mistaken.
And we Gnostics believe that there is a God Above All Gods. That’s what we call the ultimate consciousness. The God Above All Gods is consciousness itself. It is the ultimate consciousness. It’s not only consciousness, but the God Above All Gods is the fountainhead of love. So all consciousness flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods. All love flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods.
I used to live down in the Mount Shasta area, and my dogs and I would hike up Mt. Shasta. There’s a place on the mountain, on Mount Shasta, a beautiful meadow, and there’s a spring in that meadow that turns out to be the fountainhead, the spring out of which the entire river that becomes the Sacramento River originates. The great delta that flows into the Pacific Ocean begins bubbling out of the rocks on Mount Shasta. And the water is really cold. Boy, you can barely stick your hand into the spring on Mount Shasta, it’s so cold. It’s so pure—the water is absolutely pure. And then it picks up size. It never diminishes. It just keeps flowing, and it’s a gigantic river by the time it’s this huge river delta that reaches the Pacific Ocean down there in the middle of California.
God’s love and consciousness is like that. It’s pure and it’s unceasing. It is not lessened by the amount that flows out of it. And there’s enough consciousness and enough love and enough knowledge that flows out of this spring of the God Above All Gods, through the Son of God, through the Fullness and all of the Aeons of God, even surviving down into this diminished cosmos that we now live in.
The first order of powers are those Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. We are their fruit. We are the second order of powers. And it’s not just the humans; it’s every living creature. Because when Logos fled back to the Fullness, only ignorance and death was left behind with a set of blueprints in its hands. So the Demiurge is able to construct a facsimile, an imitation, a deficient imitation of Paradise down here on Earth. That’s why even the religious people of the earth or the people who love Mother Earth, the people who love the cosmos, well, they are loving the pattern. They’re loving the blueprint of Paradise, but they’re mistaking this fallen cosmos for Paradise. They are worshiping the imitation. This isn’t Paradise down here. And I really shouldn’t have to tell you that. You know that. Paradise is up in the Fullness of God.
We second-order powers were sent down here, and with us, we bring life. The creation of the cosmos is otherwise dead. It only extends to the material level. But all of the living things, even the bacteria, the plants, the insects, the critters, the animals, and then the humans—we are second-order powers. And the difference between true life down here and the inert material is that spark of the God Above All Gods that flows down into us.
And when we are conceived, when every living creature is conceived, that’s the spark of life and consciousness and love coming into them. That happens at conception. All the soft and squishy things comes from the God Above All Gods. So if you decide to snuff out a life through abortion, for example, you’re snuffing out consciousness and life. An embryo is not identical to a stone. You can’t snuff the life out of a stone because it’s not alive in the first place, just like, by the way, viruses are not alive. They are molecular machines created by the Demiurge on a nanoparticle scale. But the bacteria are living creatures. They procreate. They eat. They’re soft and squishy. So even the bacteria comes from above, But the viruses don’t. The rocks and stones don’t. They’re facsimiles. They are deficiencies. They are imitations of things that exist above.
We are melded to that material when we are conceived. It’s the life and light of the Fullness coming in, yes, but in order to manifest here on this material plane, we are bonded to the molecules. We are inextricably bonded during this lifetime here on earth to the material because our bodies are made up of the material. We are mud up. Mud is the material. From the ground up, we are molecular, but from the top down, we are spiritual. And we come together in the middle, where our molecules bond with the consciousness and love of the Fullness of God.
Now, I started talking about morality and ethics and Richard Dawkins and atheism, because just as it is true that all life comes from above, that all consciousness comes from above, all of the values and virtues of the Father come from above as well. There is no absolute until you get to the absolute. Yeah, down here it’s very confusing. Down here it’s like yin and yang and life and death and goodness and badness and who’s right? Who’s wrong? Are you a good guy? Are you a bad guy? Or are you simply my brother? It’s relative down here. We call this current postmodern age relativistic morality because everything’s relative. “Oh, yeah, it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as that, so we have to go with this bad instead of that bad.” That’s relativistic. It’s relative to another thing. But we only have the things down here on this material plane to compare them to. And they’re all bad. It’s bad down here. The goodness comes from above.
So if you don’t want to dwell in the shadows of death, you need to acknowledge and accept the goodness of the God Above All Gods. That’s where the goodness comes from. The light is from above. The darkness is from below. Dwelling in darkness is not a good thing. And again, I don’t need to tell you that. When you dwell in darkness, when you dwell in ignorance, confusion, delusion—what we call sin, harmful behaviors to yourself, harmful behaviors to other people, hatred of other people, guilt and hatred of yourself—that’s darkness. That comes from below.
And below isn’t coming up from hell. It’s not coming up from Satan. It’s here. It’s this material world because it’s inherently ignorant. It’s inherently confusing. It’s disappointing. You love someone and they die. You love your cats and your dogs, and they die. You love your children, your spouse. They die. You love yourself. You’re going to die. That’s disappointing.
Except that we have hope from above, you see? So why dwell in darkness, disappointment, and death? The valley of the shadow of death is what we’re walking through every day. When we have redemption, we have life and eternal life coming from above in an unending stream, springing out of the God Above All Gods.
So don’t reject the notion of God. Dawkins is halfway accepting Christ now. He’s halfway accepting God because he says he now recognizes that life without ethics or morality—this relativistic, postmodern philosophy that’s going around—is inherently baseless. There is no standard. How can you say it’s better to love than to hate? Who says? How can you say it’s better to caress than to beat? Who says? That “who says” comes from above, you see? We know that life and light and love and a warm embrace and kisses and babies, happy little babies who have not yet been defiled by this sad life—we can inherently know. You know that’s better than living in darkness and death.
So, don’t reject the God Above All Gods. Don’t reject the notion of God. Don’t reject the idea that there is an ultimate right, that there is a difference between right and wrong. Don’t reject the love of God. Don’t reject the Fullness of God. And certainly, don’t reject the Christ. Because the third order of powers, (we’re the second order, then there was Christ’s third order of powers), and that is the redemption and the embodiment of the Fullness of God onto this material plane in its fullness without any blemish or mark, without any defilement or sin or imitation.
The third order of powers walked among us and displayed through its life and love the qualities of the Father and the qualities of the Fullness. So, it’s extremely wrong-headed to reject the Christ.
Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.