Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:28 — 29.5MB)
For regular Gnostics Insights, subscribe here. Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. We’re proceeding through a study of the Tao Te Ching and how it relates to our Gnostic beliefs. Today we’re going to have a look at verse six of the Tao Te Ching.
First, I’ll read the version translated by David Bentley Hart in his Tao Te Ching, A New Translation. It goes like this.
The goddess of the valley is deathless;
She is called the mysterious Mother,
deep and subtle, the Mother’s dark womb.
The gateway to the mysterious Mother’s abode
is the foundation of Heaven and Earth.The one origin lasts forever and ever,
like an endless strand of gossamer,
ceaselessly drawn out, yet never depleted.
So it’s a fairly short verse. In comparison, Jonathan Star’s translation draws it out quite a bit. He uses more words in his translation of the Tao Te Ching, from The Definitive Edition.
He says,
Endlessly creating
Endlessly pulsating
The Spirit of the Valley never dies.
She is called the Hidden Creator.Although She becomes the whole universe
Her immaculate purity is never lost
Although She assumes countless forms
her true identity remains intact
Whatever we see or don’t see
Whatever exists or doesn’t exist
Is nothing but the creation of this Supreme PowerTao is limitless, unborn, eternal—
It can only be reached through the Hidden Creator
She is the very face of the Absolute
The gate to the source of all things eternalListen to her voice
Hear it echo through creation
Without fail, She reveals her presenceWithout fail, She brings us to our own perfection
That’s how Jonathan Star puts it. We can see we’re talking about what Gnostics call the Divine Feminine.
I don’t talk much about the Divine Feminine. Actually, I don’t know that I talk at all about the Divine Feminine, because it’s not brought up in the Tripartite Tractate. But as we discovered by studying the Tao Te Ching in our previous several episodes, the Divine Feminine in the Tao Te Ching is translated as a yin force. And yin is receptive. Yin draws in.
Yang is active. Yang puts out. In Gnosticism, the Father is a yang force. He is the Origin. And the Origin has to be, by definition, emitting, emanating, putting forth. This is why it’s called the Father. Do you understand?
This is not a slight against women. This is not like saying, Oh, patriarchy wants God to be male. It’s not that at all. It’s that yang force is outward pushing. Yin force is inward pulling. Women receive. Men penetrate.
So the Divine Feminine force is that womb of creation that receives the emanations of the Father.
It says in verse 78 that after the Fall, when those parts of Logos that were left behind that formed our material cosmos, Logos rushed back up to the Pleroma to be with the other Aeons. It says in verse 78 of the Tripartite Tractate,
When He who produced Himself as perfect actually did bring Himself forth,
[and we’re talking about Logos—He produced Himself as perfect. He was a perfect fractal iteration of the entirety of the Fullness]. So it says,
When He who produced Himself as perfect actually did bring Himself forth,
[and that bringing Himself forth, that becomes our material cosmos. That is the womb of creation.] Because, listen, it says,
He became weak like a female nature, which has abandoned its virile counterpart.
[So the female nature is yin, receptive, bringing in what comes from the yang force. The virile counterpart is the yang force. The female nature is the yin force]. So once again, it says,
When He who produced Himself as perfect actually did bring Himself forth,
[that is when Logos, who was perfect, fell, He brought Himself forth, fell],
He became weak like a female nature,
[that is, He became yin, receptive],
which has abandoned its virile counterpart,
[that is, the yang force]. It goes on to say,
From that which was deficient in itself, there came those things which came into being from His thought and His arrogance, but from that which is perfect in Him, He left it and raised Himself up to those who are His. He was in the Pleroma as a remembrance for Him so that He would be saved from His arrogance. The one who ran on high, [that is Logos], and the one who drew Him to Himself, [that is the Father or the Son who was sometimes called the Father], were not barren, but in bringing forth a fruit in the Pleroma, they upset those who were in the defect.
So this is saying that the yin space that was left behind after the Fall, when Logos retreated, when His yang force retreated, He left behind the yin vacuum and that it was not barren. It brought forth fruit in the Pleroma, that is, creation.
So this is finally here in the Tripartite Tractate where we’re talking about the yin and the yang. The female nature being that which has lost its “virility,” that is, its outward force, and has become yin, is what was left behind here. And that vacuum was filled with creative power from the Pleroma, that is, the Fullness of God—the Holy Spirit of creation, the Great Mother that was the womb of creation.
I don’t really care for the mythology surrounding the Fall of Sophia. So I do not go out of my way to teach the Fall of Sophia. I don’t like the whole business.
It seems to me that the Divine Feminine, the Holy Spirit, is the entirety of the Hierarchy of the Fullness. I think it is an error to equate a single Aeon—Sophia—with the Divine Feminine property of the cosmos. According to the Tripartite Tractate it is the Fullness as a whole that sends life into the cosmos in order to restore the Fallen Demiurge to Logos, not the single Aeon named Sophia. The worship of Sophia, the Aeon, is misplaced. It is the Fullness, the Holy Spirit of the God Above All Gods, the “cloak worn by the Son,” that is the Divine Feminine expressed within our cosmos.
This is from verse 67 of the Tripartite Tractate. It says,
He knows them which things He Himself is, since they are in the single name and are all speaking in it. And He brings them forth in order that it might be discovered that they exist according to their individual properties in a unified way.
And so the He is the Son, and what He brings forth is the Totalities of the ALL, or the Aeons when they become self-aware. So they are parts of the Son that then become self-aware.
The Holy Spirit, the Divine Feminine, is much more powerful and Full than any single Aeon, because she is the entire Fullness of all Aeons. This is how it is that all creatures can be sent into the cosmos with their predesigned attributes—they are all preexistent in the Fullness, not within the single Aeon of Sophia. Sophia does not contain all of the attributes of the Fullness; Logos does, in fractal form.
The Tripartite Tractate says that the Fall was created by Logos. And Logos contains within itself, remember, fractals of the entirety of the Fullness of God. So we might say that Logos is non-gendered, if we want to get into today’s terminology for things. Because Logos contains all possible personalities, all possible forces, all physics, all chemistry, all bonding, and all energy and power is all represented by Logos. But at that stepped down, fractal iteration. And that’s what we have down here from the Fall.
In my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I did refer to the inception of the universe as the Mother of 10,000 things, as it’s called in China, or the womb of creation. And in my mind, you know, it’s shaped like a big torus, a big donut shape, but we don’t have to get into that here.
Now let me give you my translation of verse six. And I am achieving this translation by looking at Jonathan Star’s Definitive Edition and his chart at the back of the book that gives all possible definitions of each pictogram. So, reading from the all possible definitions side of verse six, here’s how I would put it.
The Holy Spirit that fills the world never ceases.
This mysterious spirit is referred to as the Divine Feminine. This is the gateway, the primal womb that discloses the source and wellspring of Heaven and the creation of Earth.
Ceaseless and enduring without end, it continues on forever.
Her provision never runs dry. Drawing upon it will not exhaust its usefulness.
That’s it. It’s a short verse.
Now, in Star’s footnotes for this verse, the word Shēn—spirit, soul, God, the Spirit that fills this world, the spiritual reality of the void or the Tao—the pictogram is two hands extending a rope plus influx from heaven. So you put those two signs together into one pictogram and it’s the sign by which the will of heaven is known by mankind. And that is known as the Holy Spirit and that’s how I translated it.
The other footnote here looks at the phrase Hsuän pin. Hsuän translates as mysterious, profound, secret, subtle, deep, hidden, dark, abyss, origin, primal principle. That’s the Hsuän part. And the pin part is female, woman, mother, mare, womb, female qualities, creative power, mysterious female, abstruse womb, dark mare. But it also means mystic, mysterious female, mysterious feminine, mysterious feminine element, mysterious femininity, profound female, dark female, subtle female, mysterious mother, mother of the abyss, mother substance of the deep, primal mother, mother of heaven, abstruse womb, mystery of passivity, dark mare, or what we would call in Gnosticism, Sophia, Divine Feminine. So what I take from this verse six is that the Holy Spirit is a female principle— Hsuän pin .
I’ve always felt that; I’ve always thought that the Holy Spirit was feminine. You have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There you have the Father, the Mother, and the Child. So they are all represented in the Trinity of Christianity. However, it’s never so clearly put.
And we also have, from this verse six, that the universe, or the cosmos, as we call it in Gnosticism—cosmos is another word for universe—it’s bigger than a galaxy. It’s bigger than the Earth. So while these things are often translated as Earth in the Tao, we’ve upped the game to cosmos in Gnosticism, meaning every place that is material. That is here, as opposed to the ethereal realm, the divine, which is outside of the cosmos. And in my Simple Explanation way of explaining things, I think of our cosmos as this gigantic, really infinitely large, torus shape. And remember, the torus is like a donut, but this cosmic torus is like a gigantic donut with a zero point at the middle, and that is the here and now.
And the inside of the donut is our cosmos. Outside of the donut is the ethereal space of the Father and the Fullness. So we have this border, and the border is mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate—that after the Fall, the Father put a border around the broken bits and pieces of Logos that formed themselves into the Demiurge and our material cosmos.
So we have our feminine cosmos, the womb that holds creation, just like the womb of any creature holds its creation inside of it. Life is in the womb.
And of course, it’s always been a mystery. It continues to be a mystery to this very day, how it is that a female, and well, we can talk about humans here, although all creatures have their wombs and their babies, is that the female human nourishes and grows and is her human conduit for the Holy Spirit that is infusing and developing the fetus within her womb.
This is a miracle of birth. It’s truly a miracle, because people have always wondered, how is it? Where does this life come from? It comes through the womb. So the human mother is like the Divine Feminine in that she holds the womb of creation within herself and nurtures it until it is born.
It manifests as its own material creature and grows up the way it was designed in the Fullness. Because, you know, we’re not random folks.
It just kills me that people think that the baby that is developing within the woman’s womb is a random happenstance collection of evolved events that burp out a baby at the end, if they’re lucky and they’re not aborted, that is. The action of pregnancy and then the subsequent birth of a live creature out of seemingly nothing is a mystery. So all pregnant women represent the Divine Feminine and the presence of the Holy Spirit at work in the world.
Of course, the Holy Spirit, the Divine Feminine, permeates the cosmos. It’s in the very air we breathe, the flowers, all the critters, everything that is living. Not the rocks and stones, they don’t give birth, but all of the living creatures do. And that is the Divine Feminine that populates the cosmos.
All that the Demiurge could knock together was the material level of the cosmos—the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals. That is the realm of the Demiurge. And then the immaterial archons that are the subselves of the Demiurge, that are the henchmen, the minions of the Demiurge. And they have their power in the belief systems, the meme bundles that the living carry with them.
So I would like to state here and now, it is clear that abortion is a demiurgic, archontic move. Abortion kills the intended child that the Fullness was sending into the world. And we all have our functions to perform. We all have our position, place, and duty. And when a child in the womb is aborted by a human decision, it is a direct contradiction to the will of God. It is a funeral to be mourned. It’s a sad, sad error.
We serve either the forces of good or the forces of evil. And there is no real force of evil—there is only ignorance. The Demiurge is not evil. The Demiurge is forgetful, doesn’t realize what’s going on, doesn’t realize where it’s coming from, doesn’t respect the Divine Feminine. And this is why other schools of Gnostic thought, other books, show Sophia as a tragic character once she has come to Earth, show her as being raped by the Demiurge or the archons. So the question I pose to you is, whose side are you on?
So let me read for you once more my version of verse 6 and see if this makes sense to you.
The Holy Spirit that fills the world never ceases.
This mysterious spirit is referred to as the Divine Feminine. This is the gateway, the primal womb that discloses the source and wellspring of Heaven and the creation of Earth.
Ceaseless and enduring without end, it continues on forever.
Her provision never runs dry. Drawing upon it will not exhaust its usefulness.
And this is another way of talking about the never-ending stream of consciousness, life, and love that flows out from the Father, that flows down through the Aeons, down through the Holy Spirit—the divine presence that is manifested in our cosmos.
Remember, the Christ came for all of us. The Christ redeems us all. If you have made mistakes, if you have done terrible errors in the past, even killing the life within you, you are forgiven. You’ve been taken care of. The Christ will redeem you. You merely need to ask for the redemption. You need to repent and ask for redemption, and you will be washed clean.
So God bless us all, and onward and upward.
If you are a regular reader or listener of Gnostic Insights, please consider donating to this effort with a little monetary support. I can’t grow the channel without your financial support. I am working on a number of videos to be uploaded to YouTube, but everything costs money. If you can afford it, please help.