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Since we’ve been talking about reincarnation a bit lately, I’ve had some correspondence from a couple of listeners who have wondered about this idea of karma because, as I say, it’s your karma and your meme bundle that influence your next incarnation, or even your escape from this material plane and back up to the ethereal plane. So I would like to explain today what I mean by both memes and by karma.
Your karma is one of those huge topics that people can write dissertations on. In my Simple Explanation way of looking at things, what I do is I go to the meta level of all of the smaller concepts. Meta means above. So when I simplify I’m not dumbing down, I’m rising above. It’s really the opposite direction. The more profound a concept is, the smaller and simpler it can be stated.
When I was for a time an academic at the university level and I would go to conferences where people are expected to present their papers and, you know, these research papers that are generally presented at conferences, they aren’t really generated by the person in order to advance knowledge in the field. Yeah, that’s the stated purpose, sure. But the real purpose is to get promotions and to get tenure—things like that. And you’re required to produce a certain number of papers and present and publish every year. That’s what’s called publish or perish. So, when I would go to these conferences and listen to people’s papers, it was like, Heavens, it’s just a bunch of big words strung together very tightly, of interest, probably, only to the person that wrote it, and usually meaning nothing. How does that expression by Shakespeare go? It’s a quote from Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”
Well, yeah, that pretty much sounds like it. That’s some wisdom from old Will Shakespeare. So I think it was the last conference I went to and it was my last because it’s like, what’s the point of this? It was extremely disappointing to me. I had a satori of the meaninglessness of this sort of scholastic research. That’s why I don’t try to write in a manner that exemplifies scholasticism and intelligence, and ohh aren’t I smart. That is not my goal whatsoever. I’m actually against that kind of writing and that kind of speaking. I’m trying to simplify all of the gobbledygook, or, as my brother Billy has always called it, argle bargle, down to its core, down to the actual meaning. And especially when we’re talking about gnostic insights. What we have to think of is, if this is a consciousness that comes before even our material cosmos, certainly before humanity, certainly before academia, what is the message from the consciousness that can come to any of the 2nd order powers?
See, you don’t need a college degree in order to understand gnosis. What you need is an ability to reason; to open your eyes and see what is going on. To anticipate consequences. This is what is needed to discern gnosis.
When I started this Gnostic Insights podcast a couple of years ago, I posted a couple of articles about memes, and I’ve noticed by looking at the stats that hardly anybody likes to listen to them. So that is why I’m explaining it to you today and then tying it into karma. A meme, as I use the term, doesn’t refer to those cute posters and those funny saying. A meme is any unit of information. And just as a gene is the smallest expression of an organism, a meme is the smallest possible expression of information. Now, we can put memes together and make meme chords and even big meme bundles because memes often go together. So when you consider something like, well, for example, I often use the expression of a cup. What is a cup?
Right. The notion of cup is a meme. And what do you think of when you think of the meme of cup? You think of a vessel with a handle, and that is usually what we drink our coffee or tea out of. But the particular expression of that cup meme varies in everyone’s mind. My cup meme is expressed by this coffee cup I’m looking at right now and it’s got cute little cartoons and kitty cats on it.
But your meme might be a hammered brass demitasse, right? Or your meme for cup might be a measuring cup if you’re a chef, and it will be one of those clear Pyrex cups with markings on it, but it’s still the same concept of cup—what Plato would have called cupness up in the land of forms. So that’s what a meme is.
Memes can express any kind of concept, so you can take any larger concept, even such as one like justice. And what does justice imply? Google tells me that the definition of justice is the meme that people get what they deserve. OK, that itself is a meme. What does that mean? What constitutes deserving, influenced by a wide range of fields and viewpoints, such as the concepts or memes of ethics, rightness based on morality, rational thinking, law, religion, equity, and fairness. Well, those are big memes, aren’t they? So you could definitely spend a lot of time just trying to define the meme of justice. So anyway, that’s what I mean when I talk about memes MEME meme.
And the gnostic gospel that we talk about here at Gnostic Insights, that’s a bundle of memes relating to this Christian gnosis. So there’s a meme bundle for the Father, a meme bundle for the Son, a meme bundle for the ALL and the Fullness. There’s a meme bundle for the demiurge. A meme bundle for the fall, a meme bundle for Christ. A meme bundle for virtue and a different meme bundle for vices. Et cetera, et cetera.
People don’t generally recognize that they’re holding on to these various meme bundles. One way you could talk about a big overarching meme bundle is a worldview. And what we’re talking about here at Gnostic Insights is a gnostic Christian meme. And that is an ideology because it’s so huge. Different religions have their own meme bundles, and generally the follower of those religions hold on to the memes that are promoted by that religion. And it’s their differences between their meme bundles that define the boundaries of that religion. Same thing with political parties. Same thing with cultural subgroups and cultures as a whole. We share memes in common with certain people and by the way, the more memes you share in common with someone, generally you like that person all the more. We like people we share memes with. We distrust or don’t understand people that hold different memes than we do.
So what I’ve been teaching here at Gnostic Insights is that the meme bundle or the ideology that we hold determines our thoughts, our moods, our emotions, our actions. And when we pass away out of this material plane and into that in between space, the meme s that we hold at the time that we pass away determine our experience in the in between place and our experience of coming back to this Earth or going on to the ethereal plane. Evangelical Christians, of course, hold the meme bundle that only people who have accepted Christ, and in particular Jesus Christ, before they die, are going to go straight up to the ethereal plane. But where the gnostic Christianity differs from that of the evangelical Christianity is that it must logically be the case that if a person passes away from this material plane, i.e., dies without knowing Christ, without having accepted redemption, the Evangelical Christian would say that person’s never going to heaven because they died without salvation.
But the gnostic Christian says no. Everybody is eventually going to the ethereal plane because we all come from the ethereal plane. We are sparks off of the originating consciousness. We embody the Father, the Son, and the Fullness within these material bodies that we are walking around in, and when our material body stops functioning, our soul, our spirit, our Self and our Ego, are popped loose from being tied to the material plane, and we rise up to this other dimension or realm. And it is at that place where the memes of the world fall away. They lose their attraction to you temporarily, at least. In the in between space you can see clearly. I can see clearly now the rain has gone. OK. Where you can see clearly and then you have the opportunity to repent, to say, well, that didn’t work out very well. I didn’t really have that much fun. Yeah, eh. You repent, and once you repent, you are able to see the truth of the Father and see the Christ. And the Christ will be standing there saying, OK, awesome. Come with me. And the Christ, even at that point, will take you straight up.
If you don’t repent, then you’re going to be reincarnated. You’re going to come back down. Because the lack of repentance, even though you see clearly you go, but you know, I really like the world. I really love being down there on that material plane. I really like sex. I don’t think we’re gonna have sex in heaven. So I’m coming back to Earth. I’m gonna have all the sex I want. Or I really like to eat. I love, love, love to eat. We’re probably not going to be cooking and eating up above, not in the way we do down here because there’s no death and destruction up above, so we aren’t going to be killing animals and eating them, and we’re not going to be pulling carrots out of the ground and eating them either because the carrots are also second order powers. So whatever facsimile of eating that we are going to have up above, if that is the case, it’s not going to be this down here, below. And so a lot of people who reincarnate just for the food, just for the sex. Maybe you’re going to reincarnate because you love your family so much you can’t bear to see them go their own way, and you abandon them and go to heaven. So that’s another reason a person would want to reincarnate to come back to their cohort.
So we lay down our meme bundle temporarily while we’re in the in between space. We still have our Ego. We still have our personal identity and of course we are completely immersed in the big S Self in the in between place because we’re in One space that we can all share.
If you’re a new listener to Gnostic Insights, I recommend that you go back to the episode called Overcoming Death for more details on what I’ve been talking about–about the in between space and how it is that people would lay down their memes after death and still be able to go up above.
Now the main thing to realize about what is called universal salvation is that we are the children of God. It says that in the Bible. There’s no misunderstanding that. And it’s not going to be, but sadly, most of us are going to hell to be tormented forever. That isn’t the nature of our loving Father. It says over and over in the Bible that all who come to Christ will be redeemed. And in the Gnostic Gospel, we’re opening the door so that you can still be redeemed after death. But here’s the thing. If you’re listening to me now and you just want to wallow in sin or vice because you love, love, love whatever it is that you’re doing that you know isn’t from above, then you are rejecting the Christ. You are rejecting the Father. You are rejecting the ALL, and that is not a good, loving or helpful place to be. I think you know this in the deepest part of your heart. So don’t wait until you die to hope for this redemption. Assure your redemption now. Don’t push off redemption.
Now, what do I mean by the meme of karma? Forget about what you’ve learned—the details of karma. If you go up to a meta understanding of karma, all that karma is, it’s so simple. Karma is the consequences of your behavior. Karma is the consequences of your mindset. Karma equals consequences. That’s all. And the karma that you generate by your behavior and your thoughts, it deepens and ingrains the meme that causes that behavior or that thought. So if you continue to behave in a way that expresses some particular vice or sin, then you further entrench that vice and sin, because the karma of behaving or thinking of that vice deepens it and makes it stronger. Every time you repent of that vice—every time you repent—the Christ is right there to fill you with the opposing virtue. With the love that you’re otherwise pushing away. With the sense of worth. With the relief of guilt. So, the karma of redemption and salvation is to lessen the hold of the vices upon you—is to lessen the weight of the sin and everything that comes with that. The weakness, the guilt. The oh darn. I did it again. I wish I hadn’t done that. When you have that thought, that’s a form of repentance. Then, what do you do? Turn your eyes upward because this is the direction from which salvation comes. While we are sinners, Christ loves us anyway. While we are sinners, Christ dies for us anyway. And isn’t it awesome that Christ can find us even in the worst place that we might possibly be? Even if a person is in the most terrible situation and the most sinful possible thing, that Christ can be there anyway.
The pleroma of Christ is what is called the 3rd order of powers, and there is one 3rd order power that covers every single 2nd order power. So of course Christ can find you wherever you are. Of course Christ can go into the midst of whatever valley you are in—of depression or depravity—and pull you out because there’s a 3rd order power sitting right there waiting for you, that’s right there at your side. Every second order power has a third order power devoted to it. So, in my body here, my own pleroma has a certain combination of Aeons, a certain combination of the Fullness that’s activated. You know, like let’s say there’s X number of Fullnesses possible. If there’s an infinite number of Aeons, X amount, we’ve all got that full X amount of the Fullness of the Aeons, but they’re not all expressed. We have a certain pattern, like a stencil overlaid upon that. And so the pattern of Aeons that’s activated in my body that makes me the recognizable person that I am with my various talents and proclivities. That’s a particular pattern of the Fullness. Well, the Christ also has that particular pattern of the Fullness that I express, but one order up. The 3rd order up. So there’s a third order expression of the Fullness of the Christ for my second order expression of the Fullness. Do you understand what I mean? So of course the Christ can save anyone. There’s a third order of powers devoted to you, devoted to you. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that Christ comes with everyone’s face, so that when the Christ comes, you can recognize him, and that’s what I’m talking about here, with the pattern of 3rd order.
So anyway, our karma is the karma that we generate that causes the memes that we cling to to hold on to us. We hold those memes and they are bound to us like a covering through our karma, and my karma is different than your karma. Everybody’s karma is unique to the individual. When you pass away, your karma is momentarily laid aside so that you can see the truth in the in between place after you die. Then you can repent and go on upward and your karma will not reattach.
Negativity does not go forward into the ethereal plane, only the good karma goes forward into the material plane. So whatever accomplishments that I have had down here below, it’s my opinion that that karma, the positive karma, the virtuous karma, will go forward. It will stay attached to my particular Ego when I’m up above. But the negative karma that I’ve generated down here, the karma that I have repented of, that’s what’s get pushed away. That’s what gets “burned up in the fire.” It’s the negative karma. It’s the memory and consequences of your negative behavior. Once you are redeemed and go upward, Christ doesn’t take any negative karma up. Christ forgives and forgets.
So that’s my Simple Explanation of memes and karma and how it is that the karma attracts the memes that cling to your Ego, and those negative memes and negative karma are dropped when you repent and you are redeemed.
Onward and upward.
God bless us all.