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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is about our spiritual inheritance. All of us Second Order creatures, not only humans but all living things, are the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, what are the Aeons’ characteristics that then transfer to us because we are fractal emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness of God? Now what does that even mean? Those are funny words. They’re not common in theological discussions, unless you happen to be a Gnostic Christian. So today we’re going to look at these words, beginning with verse 61 out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi.
In verse 61 of the Tripartite Tractate it says of what are called the Totalities, “While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depths knew them but they were unable to know the depth in which they were. Nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father, they did not exist for themselves. Rather they only had existence in the matter of seed. So it has been discovered that they were like a fetus.”
So you see what this is saying that while these entities that come to be known as the Aeons, while they were parts of the Son of God who was their Father, they didn’t know themselves. Because they were in such unity with their creator, the Son of God, they only saw themselves as part of this unity, so they didn’t know themselves at all. The way a fetus inside of a mother doesn’t realize itself yet. They don’t even realize that they comprise the body of the Son.
The Tripartite Tractate says, “For that reason, the Father had also thought in advance that they should exist not only for himself, but should exist for themselves as well. That they should remain in thought as mental substance, but also exist for themselves. He sowed a thought as a seed in order that they might understand what kind of Father they have.”
So the Father didn’t want them to remain simply an unknowing part of his own consciousness. The Father wanted them to have Self realization and be discrete, independent entities with their own thoughts and their own identity. In other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading awakened consciousness throughout the entire body of the Son. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as, “seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth and faultlessness.” In verse 62 it says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them, “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.”
This means that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. This is all they knew, that they had a benefactor, someone cared for them, and wanted only good for them. The Totalities began to awaken to Self realization because they were loved, and this thought of beneficence or love was their first knowledge. That’s very much the way a baby comes into the world. The baby, after it’s born out of the mother, the parents love that baby. It’s love the baby feels from the mother when the baby’s moved up to her breast.
The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that, “The one whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the one from whom they take their name, he is the Son who is full, complete, and faultless. He brought them forth, mingled with what came forth from him” (verse 62, Tripartite Tractate). And this is another way of saying that the Son coexists with the Father and that the Totalities coexist with the Son.
It goes on to say in verse 63, “This is not yet his greatness they have received. Rather he exists only partially in the manner, the form, and the greatness that he is.” That is to say that the Totalities are waking up in stages. First, they know that they are loved, but they don’t know the details of who loves them.
Going on, “As for the parts in which he exists, in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for them to see him and speak about that which they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them because it is possible for them to comprehend him. He is, however, as he is, incomparable.”
I often say that the Son wears the Fullness of the ALL like a garment and the Fullness wears the Son like a garment, which is the way that we wear this material body that we walk around in. The cells of our body clothe our eternal spirit. We go everywhere they go and they go everywhere we go.
Verse 63 continues, “In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself even in his ineffability, hidden, and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest so that he may be hymned <or sung about> because of the abundance of his sweetness.”
This is saying that the Totalities become awakened through the process of praising the Father by singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. They come to Selfhood by giving glory to the Father through song. And you see, this is the pattern of most human church services. It begins with singing hymns, by giving glory to God. And this is how our spirits are awakened, that we are the children of God, and that we are to learn from God. So the first step is singing hymns to the Father. That’s why church services begin with hymns.
Verse 64 says, “Both of them, the admirations of the Father and the dispositions of who they themselves are, since they belong to a word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring” (That is the Totalities, and that is us, because we are also in that lineage of emanations of God.) “and roots, which live forever appearing to be offspring which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring, to the glory of the Father.”
So, remember that the Father’s consciousness and spirit flows out from him in an unending stream. It is His reflected glory, initiating through their singing of the hymns, that disposes the Totalities to grasp their own Selfhood, their own “individuality, seeds, and thoughts,” and that they will “live forever,” along with the Son. We are of that inheritance. We have inherited the dispositions and qualities of the Fullness of the Aeons, the Totalities of the Father. And to awaken to Selfhood, the way to do it isn’t to focus egoistically upon ourselves—it’s actually to focus on the Father, and to give glory to the Father. And it’s in that reflected glory that we can see ourselves.
The Totality is now complete in mind and spirit, and it possesses the aware consciousness of the Son. But the ALL at this point still remains an indivisible unity. So although they have individual Self-awareness, they continue to act as a single being. Being themselves, what is called this entity, the Fullness of God. In the New Testament, it often speaks of the Fullness of God, but it’s considered kind of an adjective, a description of the Father. The Father is Full, He is total, He is the Fullness of God. It goes beyond that in the Gnostic Gospel. The Fullness of God is a place, and in my mind I picture it as this hierarchy.
Well, we haven’t gotten to the hierarchy yet. Let’s go into that. Verse 67 says, “The births of his words, his commands, and his members of the ALL are innumerable and indivisible. He knows them, for they are himself. When they speak, they are all in one single name.” (That’s the Son.) “And if he brings them forth it is in order that they may be found to exist as individual qualities forming a unity.”
So, this Fullness of God and the progression of consciousness through the Son is found in the New Testament, although the meaning has been lost. Speaking of the Son in Colossians, Paul writes, “Who is the image of the Invisible God, firstborn of all creation, because in him were created all things in the heavens and on Earth, the visible as well as the invisible, Whether Thrones or lordships or Archons or power. All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things and all things hold together within him, for in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him. Making peace by the blood of his cross through him. Whether the things on Earth or the things in Heaven (Colossians 1:15 through 20). So, you can see this comports very well with what I’ve been saying out of the Tripartite Tractate.
And like the Son before them, the ALL began to generate offspring. “But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they have come,” (that being the Father and the Son), “according to their mutual assistance, since they assist one another like the unbegotten ones.”
And again, the unbegotten ones are the Father and the Son. So it’s this mutual assistance of the Totalities of the ALL that carries forward throughout creation. As soon as the Totalities of the ALL came to know themselves—and how was that again? By giving glory to the Father, that is how they came to Self-awareness and to recognize their own individual identities.
Each one of them birthed a singularity that reflected both the Totality of the ALL and their own individuality. Verse 67 puts it this way, “Now all those who had gone forth from him, that is, the Aeons of the Aeons, being emissions born of a procreative nature, also procreate through their own procreative nature to the glory of the Father, just as he has been the cause of their existence. For that which they glorified, they bore.”
So, we have just heard that all possible expressions of consciousness, the illimitable, the ineffable nature of the Father, all possible expressions of consciousness can be found within the Fullness of God. These newly formed Aeons of the Fullness of God, it says, sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy. Now a hierarchy is a pyramidal shaped stack of objects, like a stack of cannonballs or like a pyramid. So when I picture the hierarchy of the Fullness of God, I’m not in any way at all emulating the pyramids of Egypt, although I do believe that the pyramids of Egypt, their architectural design, did emulate the Fullness of the Father—that’s why they’re pyramids.
A hierarchy is a group of related objects that are interrelated and work together, and the principle that a hierarchy reflects—now picture a pyramid—is The higher, the fewer. So, the bottom level of the pyramid has the most blocks in it, and then the next level up has fewer blocks, and then the next level up fewer blocks, and it goes up and up and up until it culminates in the capstone at the top of the hierarchy. That is what is called the King or the Lord of that hierarchy—it is the top position of authority.
I think that perhaps people who think of themselves as anarchists do not like hierarchies. They do not like authorities, but we are made to be under authority. We are made on the pattern of the Fullness of God, which is a hierarchy of the higher, the fewer, and it culminates in the Father, with the Son right up there at the top. If you are an anarchist, you’re down there at that quantum foam level. You’re there before the formation of order and hierarchy. Hierarchy is the way that the universe builds up into what we see around us. To be a true anarchist would mean that you want to stay at the quantum foam level, and the quantum foam level is anarchic. It does not come together. It pops in and out of existence. It boils down there on the bottom like a boiling pot of water. It can’t build up because as soon as it boils up, it disappears and falls back down.
So that’s why in my illustrations I picture the hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannonballs, with each orb representing a particular Aeon. And there are an infinite number of those Aeons because the Fullness of God is infinite and illimitable. That is “having no limits.” So using that principle of hierarchical design, the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God “sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names,” This indicates that they each had their own individual point of view. They each had their own location and place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven. When the ALL became Self aware, it recognized itself in all of its parts and its potential, and these parts and these potentials are the blueprint that comes to form our universe, because it is, after all, the mind of God.
So when the ALL procreated, each one of their aeonic offsprings emerged as a fractal of the Son itself, with each of them replicating on a smaller scale in each of their own golden cannonball orbs the original Son who is itself a fractal iteration of the consciousness of the Father. The Father is illimitable, diffuse consciousness; the Son is a sampling of the Father that entirely replicates the consciousness of the Father but with a border—a discrete parameter that gives the Son its own huge point of view. And then, within the Son, the differentiations of the Son became Self aware by giving glory to the Father.
And they procreated and they became each one a reflection of the Son as well as an identity of their own. I call that identity an ego because it reflects their own name. It reflects their own position, place, power, and duty. So, not only do they reflect the entire Self of the Fullness of the Son within themselves, they reflect a location, a point of view that allows them to recognize where they fit into this pyramidal stack of cannonballs. A point of view is where you are, right? It’s what you see from where you are. If they all sorted themselves into positions, places, ranks, duties and names, they’ve all got their own unique spot in this hierarchical place, and I simply call that the ego. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just your address and your name.
Verse 68 of the Tripartite Tractate says, “If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each Aeon, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who himself is the ALL. From their assembled Fullness they offered a glorification worthy of the Father. An image that was one and at the same time many because it was brought forth for the glory of the one, and because they had come forward toward him, who himself is the entirety of the ALL.
So now we follow what that says. What we’ve just been discussing is that the Son is a singular monad with a point of view. He’s still a unity though of many Aeons. The Son becomes knowable through the innumerable properties and names, powers and duties of the Aeons. We can’t really know the Son—he’s huge. We can know him to love him because we know that we are loved by the Son and, for those of us who have a relationship with the Son as represented through the Christ that came to Earth, (and if you’re a Christian, through the person of the human known as Jesus of Nazareth being the physical embodiment of the Christ of the Son of God) who loves us.
So we know ourselves in our full aeonic potential only when we realize that we are loved and give love back to the Father and the Son. It’s not a waste of time. It’s not a needless religious exercise to love the Father and the Son and the Christ because it’s through loving them that we receive our love back and our realization of who we actually are. We are not a collection of memes, a collection of worldly information. We are not a reflection of this family that we were born into and our human neighbors. Here we are truly reflections of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. We are their children. We’re living down here for a time. But I think it’s our spiritual journey to realize that we are the children of the Son of God. We are the children of the Father, of consciousness, the God above all gods. And that’s what gives us our fullest sense of who we are. That’s the only way we can recognize our spiritual gifts.
I’m going to end this particular episode by reading to you from the book of First Corinthians. It’s all about spiritual gifts. Perhaps next week we’ll go into the gifts in more detail, but let me read to you now how this, what I’ve been telling you out of the Tripartite Tractate, this Gnostic Christianity, how it does go hand in hand with the New Testament. Listen to this. First Corinthians verse 12 begins this way. It says, “Now I want to give you some further information in some spiritual matters. You have not forgotten that you were Gentiles” (And in this sense, I think we could say Gentiles as a worldly person). “following dumb idols, just as you have been taught.” And again in our modern world, these dumb idols are YouTube and Facebook, television, popular culture, Instagram. OK, these are idols.
“Now I want you to understand as Christians that no one’s speaking by the spirit of God who would ever call Jesus accursed. And no one could say that he is the Lord except by the Holy Spirit.”
So let’s say that you’re a practitioner who channels spiritual gifts, and you are able to heal or to prophecy. But you are not a believer in Jesus of Nazareth. You don’t believe in the salvation of the Christ. Well, this is declaring here, as far as the New Testament goes, that if you put down Jesus then you are not really channeling the spirit of God. You’re channeling some other spirit. And on the other hand, no one could say that Jesus is Lord, or the Christ is Lord except by knowing the Holy Spirit. So firstly that puts first accepting the Holy Spirit, loving the Father, loving the God Above All Gods, recognizing the importance of the Christ as represented by Jesus.
Then it goes, “All men have different gifts, but it is the same spirit who gives them. There are different ways of serving God, but it is the same Lord who is served.” And by the way, Lord, that’s that top of the hierarchical pyramid. It’s not supposed to be your ego on the top of your hierarchical pyramid. It’s supposed to be the Lord, right?
“There are different ways of serving God, but it is the same Lord who is served. God works through different men in different ways. But it is the same God who achieves his purposes through them all. Each man is given his gift by the spirit that he may make the most of it. One man’s gift by the spirit is to speak with wisdom, another’s to speak with knowledge. The same spirit gives to another man faith. To another the ability to heal. To another, the power to do great deeds. The same spirit gives to another man the gift of preaching the word of God. To another, the ability to discriminate in spiritual matters. To another speech in different tongues. Behind all these gifts is the operation of the same spirit who distributes to each individual man as he wills. As the human body which has many parts is a unity, and those parts, despite their multiplicity, constitute one single body, so it is with the body of Christ. For we were all baptized by the Holy Spirit into one body, whether we were Jews, Gentiles, slaves, or free men, and we all had experience of the same spirit.”
So once again, this is saying that if you’re in touch with the Holy Spirit and you’re on that Glory Road, if you’re looking up to the Fullness of God, we all receive the same top down Gnosis. It’s the same Holy Spirit that goes to each person. There are not individual interpretations of the Holy Spirit. It’s a singularity at the top. It’s a top down flowing emanation of gnosis.
I think we’ll pick this up again next time, talking about the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit and where we fit into the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. But for now, realize that when you turn your eyes upward to the Father, you’re looking in the same place I’m looking. You’re looking in the same place that anyone who has accepted the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the 3rd order powers of the Christ to come and take residence within your spiritual material body here. We are the 2nd order of powers, but when we remember that we come from above and to the Father, we shall return, we have invited the 3rd order powers to come in and those third order powers are full reflections of the Fullness of God.
So for today, know that you are loved. Know that when you love the Father and the Son and the Fullness, you are coming into your own true Self. That love flows back down into you and brings you awareness of the eternity and consciousness of the Father.
All of this is explained in my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. It’s still at the official publisher. It’ll be coming out pretty soon, I’m sure. I do have a pre publication version of it in black and white that is available now through my website at gnosticinsights.com. But if you wait a couple more months, you’ll get all of it in full color. Pretty fancy, but it’s going to cost twice as much, too. Have a good week. God bless us all, and onward and upward.
