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Welcome to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. In 2019, I posted an article to my new Gnostic Gospel blog called If All Are Redeemed, Why Not Be Sinful?, and I’d like to share that with you today. Much of this episode was broadcasted in May of 2021; this content has been updated as my gnosis has deepened.
One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ and all will someday return to the paradise of the Fullness. Yes. Yay! Everyone’s going to heaven! No one is going to hell, not even the fallen angels. What joy! This seems to fly in the face of Christian Orthodoxy that promotes the idea that only those humans who confess a belief in Jesus as the Christ will make it into heaven. And those who don’t believe in Jesus will go to an eternal damnation of suffering in hell.
Conventional Christianity states that Jesus came to save humanity, but only those who acknowledge Jesus as the only son of God and invite him into their hearts will be saved. This is the basis for all evangelism and all churches that follow the Nicene Creed, which is to say all Christian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. This is why Christians are so keen on saving souls. They don’t want you to suffer for eternity in hell.
The Gnostic church begs to differ with that common interpretation of Christ’s mission. According to the books of the Nag Hammadi Library, all of Creation will be redeemed and returned to the Fullness and the Father’s home in heaven. All of creation, everyone and everything, will be made clean and pure and holy by the end. As they say, it will all be good in the end, and if it’s not good yet, then it’s not yet the end.
Gnosis refers to the ability to use reason and logic to arrive at spiritual truth. So let’s think together about this idea of Christ and redemption, and who does or does not go to heaven.
First, if Christ’s redemption were a matter of your belief, then Christ’s mission of salvation would be limited to what you believe. In other words, you would be the one holding the power of salvation, not Christ. Does that make any sense to you? Are you the one who redeems, or is Christ? Can you see how making your belief central to redemption actually limits the power of Christ? Can you see how that makes sinful humans more powerful than the mission of Christ’s redemption? Limiting Christ to your belief, it seems to me, is the greater heresy than simply trusting Christ to accomplish the mission. It is Christ’s job to redeem humanity, not yours.
Second, according to Gnostic texts, all creatures great and small will be redeemed. This means that all creatures are going to heaven. My dog has never professed a belief in Jesus as the Christ. Yet my dog is going to heaven. The fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the insects, the forest animals—all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ. It is the job of the Christ to redeem creation, irrespective of creation’s ability to confess that fact. Do you think that only good dogs go to heaven or nice fishes? Maybe only herbivores. Perhaps only parrots who can say Jesus saves.
Once we concede that it is only the Christ that can redeem, then what is the point of leading a virtuous life? Why not sin up until the end, have all kinds of fun and then waltz into heaven without repentance? Repentance, by the way, means to feel sorrow and regret. Are we allowed to sin willy nilly with no negative consequences? An even more profound question is why were we created in the first place?
According to the Tripartite Tractate, the 2nd Order Powers were created in order to rescue the fallen Aeon known as Logos. The most perfect and complete of the individual Aeons, Logos crowned the top of the aeonic hierarchy. This single Aeon consisted of all the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled up into one individual. And as you know by now, from listening to the first eight episodes of Gnostic Insights, Logos had fallen from the Fullness and smashed to smithereens in a lower dimension. The broken bits of Logos scattered into space, forming our material universe, along with a host of powers and personalities, including demons, evil jinn, and Archons.
Logos imagined he could build the paradise dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and possessed all of the necessary talents. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father. As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits. Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness, now there was a division and a turning. The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos “could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths and he faltered.” That’s verse 77 of the Tripartite Tractate.
Going on to verse 78: “What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance,” by the way, that’s another word for Ego, “What issued from this Ego had existed from something that was itself deficient, and because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to its own in the Fullness, leaving the sicknesses behind in the darkness.”
The material space of our universe is known as the deficiency and the imitation in Gnosticism, and it was initially populated by nothing but the fallen Ego of Logos, and we call that Ego the Demiurge. The loss, the separation, of the Ego of Logos from his Self and from the Fullness was mourned by Logos and the Fullness. And so initially, before any 2nd Order Powers were sent into this material world, the Fullness and Logos were already mourning the loss and the separation, the splitting in two, of Logos into Self and Ego. And so those fallen bits of Logos that remained behind needed to be redeemed.
However, as the 2nd Order Powers entered this earthly dimension, they were immediately plunged into a never ending battle with the fallen. Due to the law of mutual combat, we temporarily forgot our Father in heaven and our mission of engagement and rescue. We were all infected with a host of fallen influences and fell into lifetimes of fear, regret, lust, and rage.
As the Tripartite Tractate puts it in verse 84, “The two orders fought against each other, struggling for command with such a result that they were engulfed by forces and material substances in accordance with the law of mutual combat, and they too acquired lust for domination and all the other passions of this sort. And consequently, empty vain glory pulls them all toward the desire of lust for domination, and not one of them remembers what is superior or confesses it.”
We humans are 2nd Order Powers infected with many, many fallen influences that blind us to our true natures and our mission. These negative influences prefer the deficiency to the Fullness. These negative powers of the fall represent the opposite of the ALL and of all that makes us truly happy and fulfilled. The survival reflex of the imitation requires the 2nd Order Powers to be miserable and lost because misery loves company. They influence people to fight against each other rather than fight and resist the evil fallen. Our lives become an endless and fruitless quest to find happiness through selfish pursuits. All you have to do is pop into Facebook or Twitter to find evidence all over the place of these fruitless pursuits that appear to cause happiness, but actually cause misery.
At this point in the Gnostic story, the Father and the Aeons of the Fullness produced a superior new entity, a 3rd Order Power called the Christ. It became the mission of the Christ to help the 2nd Order Powers remember and love the fallen so that the fallen could be redeemed. Love is the only power that can redeem the fallen. Why, then, was a 3rd Order Power needed to accomplish the task that the 2nd Order Powers were sent to accomplish? Why populate creation with well meaning but ignorant and confused 2nd Order Powers? Why not just send in the Christ to accomplish the redemption of fallen Logos in the first place? What is our function and purpose other than bumbling around in never ending war with the fallen?
The answer is because the fallen Logos must be loved and redeemed, one fallen piece at a time. Imagine if the original body of Logos resembled a human form, like we might picture an angel in heaven looking something like us. Now imagine that the heavenly body of Logos and the Fullness comprised the blueprint for every single potential body that would ever come to life in the imitation down here after the Fall. Imagine the body of Logos falling from an immaterial dimension, that being the Fullness or heaven, and crashing and breaking apart into a lower, slower, thicker dimension—our material universe—and spilling out the blueprints for the material universe.
Then each of our material lives and the parts that make us up from the subatomic particles on up through our bodies and our brains and everything, are themselves the parts of the fallen Logos that need redemption.**see post script clarification at the end of this article.** Moreover, our personal stories, the drama that each human life enacts, are also stories of the Fall—stories that need redemption. Every life tells stories of Falls and Redemption, Temptation and Overcoming, Despair and Triumph. And every time an archonic influence is defeated and stripped from your personal life, part of Logos is redeemed.
When we live a virtuous life, we are following the principles of the Father and the Fullness in heaven, and we are participants with Christ in redeeming the Fall of Logos. When we live a sinful life, we are succumbing to the demons of the fall and contributing to the chaos and despair of the deficiency. I made up a chart with the values of the imitation or the deficiency on the left, and they are called on the left, and the values of the Father and of the Fullness on the right. The left is the material downward pull of the deficiency, and the right is the upward psychical and spiritual pull of the values of the Father and the Fullness.
This chart appears in this particular post, and I know I’ve described this chart to you before in prior episodes of the Gnostic Insights. So let me just briefly hit a few of them. If you’re living on the left, if you’re “enjoying a sinful life,” and it’s not actually enjoyment because joy does not come from the left side. Joy only comes from the right. The most that you can hope for if you’re living on the deficiency side is an imitation of joy, which we generally call happiness. But as I believe you know by now, happiness is a never-ending pursuit and we are often reaching for happiness. Oh, let’s go here. Let’s go there. Let’s buy this. Let’s buy that. Let’s eat this. Ooh, let’s have that. Ooh. Hey, let’s do this drug. See, everything promises this joy. Sometimes it brings you temporary happiness, but it never fulfills; it never brings satisfaction.
Pursuit of material gain always brings more and more desire for more and more material gain, so the values on the left that the sinful are pursuing—these are called vices and they are such things as impatience, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, ruthlessness, anger, resentfulness, rude, obstructionist. (And what I mean by obstructionist is this– Have you ever known someone who, no matter what someone else proposes to do, they go Nah, that’ll never work. So an obstructionist, they’re like a naysayer. That’s what that means. They’re wet blankets. They’re always pulling down good suggestions. That’s what obstructionist means.) Despair, depression, sloth or laziness, chaos, disorder, thoughtless action, greed, envy, arrogance, fear, confusion, gluttony. These are values or vices on the material side of the Ledger, and these are the things that generally are promoted in social media, strangely enough.
The values on the right actually are virtues that are part of our Aeonic inheritance from the Fullness of God. Well, you know, they say that God is love, right? So love is the number one virtue; patience, generosity, graciousness, mercy, forgiveness, welcoming, respect, cooperation as opposed to obstructionism, free choice, hopefulness, joyfulness, truthfulness, industriousness, order, prudence. Prudence, by the way, means knowing what to do at the right time. Logic, charity, kindness, empathy, humility, loyalty, justice, courage, remembrance. These are values on the right side.
And you can hear, as I read down these values of the right side, that these are the types of things that lead to true, loving connections between human beings. They are not the kind of thing we generally see on social media, by the way. And we kind of rarely see them in actual walking around life as well. But this is the goal—to live on the right side of the Ledger; to enact those principles rather than to chase after the emptiness of the vices on the left side.
Now back to my article. Because we are, in actuality, children of the Fullness, we can only be truly happy when we act out of love—that is, out of virtue. When we forget our place in the Fullness of God, we operate out of ignorance and are subject to the evil influences of the Fall. The Fall can only produce misery, fear, rage, and lust. Never love, never happiness. No good ever comes from rage. No good ever comes from fear.
Here is the reason we strive to lead a virtuous life: because only virtue can make you happy. All else leads to despair and depression because, as they say, the wages of sin is death. And that’s what that means. The imitation does not bring happiness. Despite a world full of false promises, vice can only bring ignorance and suffering, isolation, and despair. When you dwell in vice rather than virtue, your life is part of the problem and not part of the solution.
The Christ brings redemption and remembrance of the Father and the Fullness, one bit, one piece of the Fall at a time. Every time you resist evil and turn a bad habit into a good habit, you have redeemed a piece of the Fall. When you redeem all of your bits and pieces, you will be fully redeemed and regain your home in the Fullness. When all Second Order Powers have accepted the remembrance and the redemption of the Christ, then Logos will be fully redeemed and this material universe can pass away. At that point, paradise, with all of the love, peace, and happiness that is implied, will be fully restored.
The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode—that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies. That paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In paradise there is nothing but life, so all the grass is green and flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily forever after with their friends and their families.
The Christ will leave no one behind to condemnation and hell. What kind of unholy savior would that be? From a previous article, I wrote: “Thus the Called will condemn evil and will turn away from the rage that has consumed them, and they will be healed as they acknowledge that they have an origin of their existence, and they desire to know what that is that exists before them. The Tripartite Tractate says in verse 132, “and even those who were brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside them the seed that is lust for domination, will receive the recompense of good things if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things and provided they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love, a temporary glory, so as to do the command of the Lord of Glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the Eternal Kingdom.”
So what this is saying is that you have to step away from ego. You have to take your pleasure-seeking, ignorant side off the throne of your personality and allow the indwelling of the Fullness to reside on the throne of your personality. You can turn your vices into virtues whenever you run across them. Awareness is always the first step, and then you put it into action.
OK, I’ll confess something to you. I have a very short temper myself, and I often lose my temper even with strangers on the street. It’s a kind of a bizarre phenomenon. So I’ll be walking along and I’ll see something that makes me angry, like, for example, someone smoking a cigarette and they don’t put it out and they just flick it thoughtlessly out into the bushes. I walk up to that person, and I go Who do you think you are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who’s gonna pick that up? What if you burn down the place? Are we supposed to look at your cigarette butts? Blah blah blah. Blah blah. I get angry at total strangers. OK, this doesn’t do any good. I realize this is not a good thing. This is actually a vice and not a virtue. This righteous indignation is the thing that captures the do-gooders of the 2nd Order Powers into that endless rage and the war that never ends. We can’t win the battle through anger or through blah blah blah blah. It doesn’t work. We have to love these people. I’m trying to figure out how I might approach a person who flings a cigarette butt down in the street with love and kindness and compassion, but I can’t figure out yet how to do that. And so I’m just going to stop getting in fights with strangers on the street. And that’s been my mission for about the last two years is to stop having random encounters of righteous indignation. Step back. Breathe, give praise to God and go on. I think at some point I will have the wisdom to know how to engage people that would otherwise enrage me. But at the moment I don’t quite have that. So that was my confession.
Perhaps you are struggling with some other kind of thing. So remember you have to just drop the thing when you notice it’s bad. Drop it, stop it. These are called vicious cycles in psychology. Just stop doing it. Just stop it. Don’t worry about the consequences. The consequences are worse when you do engage in that vicious thing. So just stop it. Whatever it takes, just don’t do it. And the more you stop yourself from the bad behavior, the easier it is to embrace the other side of the Ledger. You will shift over to the other side once you stop doing that thing on the left side. You cannot grab onto that virtue as long as you embrace the vice.
From verse 133 of the Tripartite Tractate: As for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, well, “even they will obtain direct vision so that they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice that this is how things are. For the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration. Even if some are exalted because of this economy, having been set up as a cause for things that happen, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them, they, angels as well as humans, will obtain the Kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation.”
Verse 136 promises, “These too will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward, on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the Pre-existent Aeon.”
And that is the end of this article that I wrote on November 8th of 2019. If you want to read it for yourself, or if you want to look at that chart of vices and virtues and contemplate it, you can find it at my blog, which is called new gnosticgospel.blogspot.com.
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post script clarification**
When I wrote that article, I was actually maybe a little bit confused about the nature of the material particles in our world. That’s because in my original theory of everything, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I ascribed consciousness and life to the material objects in our universe—to things like protons and atoms and molecules. But, as my own gnosis has progressed, and as I have contemplated these things since becoming more familiar with the Tripartite Tractate and writing The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and whatnot, I’ve come to realize that the thing that separates the soft and squishy parts of our universe—that being the living creatures, the 2nd order powers of which humankind is one—what separates us meat creatures from the particles of the Fall, is that the particles of the Fall, the material portion of our universe is not alive. It is not truly conscious. It does not come from Above.
All of the material pieces of our world—the protons, the atoms, the subatomic particles of all sorts, the molecules, the aggregates of minerals—the dead, hard, rocky places of the universe, those are not from Above. Those are by-products of the Fall. And what causes the material to seem to have consciousness, the thing that caused me when I wrote the Simple Explanation to think they were conscious, is that they are merely vehicles for the Demiurge’s consciousness. The Ego of the Fallen Logos is the Demiurge, and it’s the Demiurge that builds up and sustains the material portion of our universe. And the demiurge is the Fallen part of Logos that will be redeemed. But it is immaterial. It is not composed of the hard and rocky places that it now governs. The Demiurge, the Ego of Logos, will be redeemed by the Christ—will be freed from this material deficiency, from this imitation that it has built up.
So, the hard and rocky places—the molecules and the minerals, the rocks and stones, the sand, the protons, the subatomic particles, everything that moves around yet is not truly alive, does not come from the top down. Only the creatures, only us meat creatures come from Above. And life carries with it the consciousness of the Father. Life is the consciousness of the Father. The material will be left behind; it will evaporate. It is merely the shadows, the illusion of paradise. But it’s not really paradise. It’s dense and thick and slow. It is not going to heaven because it didn’t come from heaven.
OK. I just wanted to clear that up. I’ll probably spend another episode soon talking about that, but I didn’t want any misunderstandings to arise from what I have previously discussed in this episode.
Until next week, God bless us all and onward and upward.