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Gnostic Psychology: Human Nature, part 1
Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.
Copyright 2022; all rights reserved
Today’s episode of Gnostic Insights begins a chapter about the nature of humans. What is our psychology? Am I defined by my Ego? Or am I a spiritual Self independent of Ego? Am I a God? Am I an animal? Am I really conscious or am I random electrical fluctuations? Who am I? Do I have a soul and how is that different than a spirit? Is there a mind involved? What exactly is the Ego and how does it relate to my body and my spirit? This is material is complicated, as we humans are complicated creatures. Therefore, I will be spreading this topic of human nature out over the next couple of weeks. If there were a university course called “Gnostic Psychology,” this would it.
By now in this series that we are calling A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, we have encountered a number of terms from my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. In this episode, we will again be discussing memes, fractals, units of consciousness, the Simple Golden Rule, and the shape of the torus. I will explain these concepts as we go along but, if this is your first time listening to the Gnostic Insights podcast, it would be helpful for you to back up and listen to the current series from the beginning. You can find it at gnostic insights dot com under the tab labelled “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.” This episode is the 14th in the current series of talks that are forming the chapters of my next book.
For most people, the answer to “who am I?” is that I am awareness of myself encased in this body of mine. Yes, we are that. But we are also the things we love and the things we hate along with the ideas and memories we cling to, which I call our meme bundle. Plus, we are the record of our actions in this world, which is called our karma, and that karma is wrapped around our unit of consciousness along with our meme bundle. And finally, our personalities also reflect the original personalities and talents of the Aeons that make up the Fullness of God. Even our use of the simple pronoun “I” requires examination.
Freud identified the human as having three distinct realms of thought. He called these the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The id controls our base instincts. The ego is our presenting personality and self-identity. The super-ego is our higher aspirations and noble thoughts. Not a bad start, but we are much more than those three simple concepts. My reading of the Gnostic Gospels has led to a further refinement of human personalities and psychology that I would like to share with you today. First, let me identify the id, ego, and super-ego in Gnostic terms. I will then go on to explain and expand upon their functions.
The Simple Explanation would liken the id to the thoughts and actions of the units of consciousness that make up our bodies. Each of the body’s units of consciousness are fractals of the Fullness, just as we are fractals of the Fullness at a higher level. The body’s units of consciousness each lead their own lives at their own level, position, and rank. Their duties are particular to their level and position.
For example, the life of a cell is about as complex as any of our lives. The machinery within a cell is extremely complicated and interactive, and it operates according to the Simple Golden Rule of sharing information, assistance, and love for the betterment of all—in this case, our bodies. There is a marvelous animation on YouTube called “The Inner Life of a Cell.” If you go to the Gnostic Insights dot com website to view the transcript of this episode, you will find the link to the video. (8) Inner Life Of A Cell – Full Version.mkv – YouTube The “Inner Life of a Cell” video illustrates the incredible complexity and apparent awareness of cells. You just gotta love those motor proteins! Watch the video and you will see what I mean.
Our bodies are an entire galaxy of units of consciousness at smaller fractal scales. Their activities and their karma aggregate upward in the higher the fewer manner, as they level up to eventually form my body’s karmic record of health and disease. They operate in a parallel world of smaller lives, inside of our bodies. As their messages aggregate upwards to the organ level, we begin to notice their communication and demands for food, sex, and other macro-scale activities. Again, this constellation of smaller fractals make up the portion of our personalities that Freud identified as the id. The id is the body’s talk and demands.
Going on to Freud’s idea of the super-ego, we Gnostics would identify that with our big S Self. The Self is the fractal representation of the One Self we all share at the transpersonal level. The Self is a fractal representation of the image of the Son. We have spoken about the Self in previous episodes, particularly the episode called “Neverending War,” posted on September 3rd, 2022. We’ll tease apart the Self from the Ego as we move through this episode.
My Ego is not the totality of me, even though that’s who I usually think I am. We usually mistake our Egos for ourselves, but this is the delusion. We are much more than that. Other people refer to this Ego as one’s soul or mind. Yes, the Ego reflects our personalities, but I am much more than my personality. Nor am I my mind. My mind is like a tuning device that scans for information and locks onto data that fits into my meme bundle. The Ego feeds on the memes tuned in by my mind. My mind is drawn toward its preferred memes by my karmic record. Ego is not a conscious entity; Ego is a location within my personality that identifies with my memes bundle and interacts with others. Again, we spoke about Ego in the previous episode, “Embrace Virtue.”
Ego is like a garment that we wear. Ego is a garment that is cast over our Selves. Ego is like a vessel that contains a shadow outlining my Self’s unit of consciousness. Underneath this garment of “me” resides a perfect fractal of the originating units of consciousness, and that is known as my Self–Self with a capital S. Other people often call this Self the Spirit.
I am a unit of consciousness that is identical to the universal unit of consciousness, which in Gnosticism we would call the Son and the Pleroma of the Son. These are the archetypal patterns held by the mind of God, so to speak, and I hold one of these fractals of that perfect originating consciousness within myself.
In terms of the model that I’ve constructed based upon the Tripartite Tractate, the Pleroma of the Son, usually referred to as the Fullness of God, appears in my illustrations like a pyramid of stacked golden cannon balls. It looks that way because it’s a hierarchy, and a hierarchy means “the higher the fewer.” A hierarchy looks like a pyramid. There are more objects at the bottom and there are fewer and fewer as you climb up toward the top. At the very tip top, just above this hierarchy of the Fullness, is the Son of God, or the Son of the Father, and the Son is a perfect fractal of the Father. If I think of my own Self, I have one of these pyramidal structures within my mental construct. That pyramid is my Self, and it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. Within my Self I have access to the entire Fullness of God. You could say I have access to all of the Aeons of the Hierarchy at both the mental and the physical level, as the body’s aggregated units of consciousness also reflect the Hierarchy of the Fullness.
In the Simple Explanation model, instead of picturing a golden pyramid, the Self unit of consciousness is described as looking like a donut—a geometric shape called a torus. I have resisted bringing the torus into the gnostic model because it does not appear in the ancient scriptures, unless it is identified as the “wheels within a wheel” we sometimes come across. However, the torus is such a good concept that it’s difficult not to include it. So, we can also think of the Self as an energetic bubble that’s shaped like a donut. This donut shape has a very, very tiny center, smaller than a material particle, and my consciousness is wrapped within it. There is a little donut associated with every particle and unit of consciousness in my body.
My body is a veritable galaxy of units of consciousness working in conjunction with the material particles of my body. The simpler the matter and units of consciousness, the more of them there are. So, while there is only one of me, my body is comprised of 11 organ systems made of 78 organs, which in turn comprise 30 trillion specialized cells made up of such a large number of atoms and molecules that I wouldn’t even know how to read or write the numbers. The more organized and complex the unit of consciousness, the fewer of them there are. This follows the hierarchical precept of the higher the fewer.
The mind, or ordinary consciousness, as well as the subconscious, is filtered as much by my body’s organ systems as it is by my Ego. The mind is an operating system, but the actual drive associated with will power is just that: a force or power that flows through us from above. My will power is my personal expression of the power that originates from the Father and passes through the Son and then through the Aeons and on through us Second Order Powers, along with information and consciousness itself. The “Powers” reference in the titles of First Order of Powers and Second Order of Powers applies to this force of will power. Will power is freely distributed to all of us through the Father’s extension of its will. The Father and the Fullness are not stingy in gifting this will power to us. We have “free will.” The only limits to our free will is the limitations our minds place upon ourselves in the form of limiting memes and prior karma.
The organs and cells that make up my body are involved with my meat’s thought processes, not my Self’s higher consciousness. This is why scientists who study consciousness are mistaken when they identify consciousness as a by-product of the physical brain’s electrical activity. The most you can say is that what they are identifying as consciousness is actually the egoic output of the body’s fractal activities. However, the One Self that we all share is the origin and shared stream of will power and consciousness.
My Self’s unit of consciousness sits atop this hierarchical mountain of countless units of consciousness, all working to instantiate my body. I call that my governing unit of consciousness. While it may feel as though my governing unit of consciousness is the only conscious entity inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, each with their own jobs to perform, each laying down their own karmic record. Lucky for me, their job is to hold me together and facilitate this life of mine, and they generally go along with the program and do a good job.
Another basic trait of my aggregated units of consciousness is this: the more units of consciousness on the same level of complexity that are laterally linked, for example, cells-to-cells, the greater their shared perception of here and now. This means that when you add up all of these units of consciousness together that make up my body, their aggregated consciousness is about as aware as my governing Self’s unit of consciousness. It is no wonder that I can get around so well without my conscious Self paying much attention to my behavior. The units of consciousness governing my legs, for example, take care of getting me where I want to go without needing close supervision. I am able to react quickly to my environment because the units of consciousness involved with sensory input and mechanical reactions to stimuli can do their jobs without needing my governing Self’s involvement.
Just imagine if this weren’t true—if you had to consciously will every action you take. We obviously don’t work that way. Step, reach, blink, duck, are carried out locally without conscious instructions from higher authorities. And, of course, the autonomic nervous system which controls the body’s inner organs, is almost entirely outside of conscious control. It takes a great deal of training and practice to learn autonomic control; this pursuit is usually left to Yogis, monks, and mystics.
The Ego is my subjective sense of who I am, where I am, and what I am doing. This Ego is largely a reflection of my personal choices. The meme bundle of my choices is called my karma and it consists of the memes I cling to, which are my beliefs and narratives, and the record of those thoughts and actions. My Ego also reflects feedback from my body’s aggregate units of consciousness and the choices they make.
I repeat, the Ego is not identical to the Self. The Self’s unit of consciousness is the full and perfect spirit that exists independently from this material instantiation. This spirit is often referred to by others as one’s soul. I have the choice at every moment of time to either identify with my egoic me and my bundle of memes and karma or to identify with the immutable Self and the universal consciousness that transcends personal identity. An Ego is selfish, competitive, single-minded, short-sighted, and meme-bound. Transcending Ego, I reach out to others with love, assistance, and information for the betterment of all—what we call here at Gnostic Insights the Simple Golden Rule.
The egoic, small-s self, is self-centered, or more specifically, “Ego-centered,” and it only takes care of me. The Ego is patterned after the Fall; it is patterned after Logos, having fallen from the perfection of the Fullness of Spirit after breaking with the Fullness and seeking its own reward. The solo endeavor of Logos did not work out well and Logos fell. The result of the Fall is this apparently material world that we live in. And so, when you dwell deeply in the world as it appears, you are living an egoic lifestyle. My true Self, as a fractal of the Fullness, is unified with the Fullness of God—unified with the grand scheme of redemption, abounding joy, and limitless love. I have the choice at any moment of time to either identify with me and my bundle of memes or to identify with the universal unit of consciousness and the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. The more I step away from my selfish Ego and identify with my transcendent Self, the more I can cooperate with other people and with the entire world in order to instantiate the Simple Golden Rule and work with others with information and love to build something that will benefit all.
Next week we will pick this discussion up where we left off.
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