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Earlier this week I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio and was interviewed by Miguel Conner about my new book—A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. The interview was about an hour and a half—very extensive. So, I hope that you will catch it. It’s on YouTube, but he’s also posted it to audio-only podcast platforms. The name of the episode on Aeon Byte was The Gnostic Myth Simplified. So that’s what you would look for.
This week we’re going to look at the three-part nature of humankind, as presented by the Tripartite Tractate.
We humans and all other creatures are called the second order of powers. The first order of powers are the Aeons of the Fullness, and we are their fruit. We have a three-part nature. This is why it’s called the Tripartite Tractate: tripartite, meaning three parts, tractate, book. It’s not just because this book is divided into three sections, which it happens to be, but it is because it describes the three-part nature of God, the three-in-one, and we humans are fractals of that tripartite system. And, by the way, I talk a lot about fractals in that Aeon Byte interview.
The first part of our nature is our version of the monad of the Father, the Son, what is called our Self, with the big S. Self is what we call it here at Gnostic Insights; other people often refer to that as your spiritual aspect. The second part of the 3-part structure is called the psychical, our association with the Aeons of the Fullness, because we are representations of the Aeons of the Fullness; we are fractals of them. The psychical part is our psychological nature. It’s the part of us that thinks. Our third part is associated with the ego of Logos after the Fall. And our third part is the material level—the hylic.
So, reading from the Tripartite Tractate, “To those who belong to the remembrance…” and those are the second order powers, because we are of the good thought, the remembrance, whereas the material world is of the presumptuous thought—the Fall. The material world is based upon egoic strivings of Logos in particular, and we all carry that ego forward through our material aspect, and so that’s why it’s called “those of the presumptuous thought,” because it was presumptuous of Logos to think that he could reach the Father and reunite without the Fullness. So, the presumptuous thought is the material level, whereas “those of the remembrance” is the psychical, or psychological level—our thinking, our thoughts and the fact that we can remember that there is a Father above. We remember we were pre-existent consciousness because we are all of the remembrance. But, of course, we forget it. We get all tangled up with the material and we forget our higher nature.
Again, “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.”
So let’s think about that sentence. We second order powers, we humans in particular, we belong to the remembrance, and all of the second order powers belong to the remembrance. The flowers remember the Father, the dogs and cats remember the Father. All the creatures on Earth, even the cells of your body, remember that we come from the Fullness and from the Father, because we all have to remember in order to instantiate the Golden Rule of cooperation, and it is cooperation that builds our bodies up from single celled, fertilized eggs, all the way up to whatever creatures we become. That’s the remembrance of the Father. So, we second order powers belong to the Father, but we also belong to Logos because we’re fractals of Logos himself. And, remember, Logos himself was a fractal of the Fullness of God, so he was already one iteration down from the entire Fullness. And we are a second iteration down because we’re fractals of Logos and the Fullness down here below.
“He revealed the thought of that which he had stripped from himself…” And what is that thought that he had stripped from himself? It’s his ego, it’s his presumptuous thought. Logos, after the Fall, finds himself down here below in another dimension and he goes, what the heck did I do? He then stripped himself of the imitations of the likenesses. And the imitations of the likeness are imitations of the Fullness; imitations of the broken open fractals that Logos carried within him when he Fell into this dimension. That’s why they’re called imitations; they’re not true fractals. They’re the shadows, the imitations, the phantoms of those fractals that Logos carried along with him. He stripped himself of the presumptuous thought. That presumptuous thought was his over-reaching ego. He left that behind and Logos, “the best part of him,” that would be his noble thought, that would be his representations of all the images of the Fullness of God—his true Self—he fled back up to the Fullness. He deserted the material plane and retreated back to the ethereal plane to go back home to his brethren in the Fullness of God.
Quoting the sentence again, “To those who belong to the remembrance.” That’s us. “He,” that’s Logos, “revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself.” So he gave us the egos. When we second order powers came down, we came not only with the good thoughts of the Fullness of God, but we came down with the presumptuous thought that Logos had peeled off of himself, that being his over-reaching ego. And that is why we have both the higher Self and we have an egoic structure, the ego. Our ego is a reflection of the Fall. All of the Aeons, the first order of powers, also have egos. But their egos are simply their position, place, name, rank, and duties. It’s the thing that defines them as individuals, and their relationship with neighbors. Down here below, our egos also reflect the over-reaching, presumptuous thought, and that’s how we second order power egos differ from the first order power egos. It’s not just who we are—our sense of identity—it’s also a drive for power, a striving to be on top.
“He revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention…” So why did he do that? Why did Logo saddle us with that ego? “… with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.”
If we didn’t have the ego making us want to cling to these material bodies, to this material instantiation, we wouldn’t have been able to meld ourselves to the material world. Our bodies are made up of the mud from the bottom up. Our bodies, the hard parts of our bodies, the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms and the molecules, that is the material part of the Demiurge. That is demiurgic. It’s not evil, it’s just material, whereas up above it’s ethereal. And it was given to in order for us to be able to stick the landing when we are born here into the world when we exit the ethereal plane and are literally born into this material world.
You know, we begin at the cellular level. Life comes in at the cellular level. The Demiurge has the power from the mud up through the molecules. But the creatures, living creatures, all living creatures, from the bacteria on up—all the soft, squishy parts that coat the hard, rocky parts—that is the second order of powers. That is “those of the remembrance” at conception, coming in to that molecular level, coming on top of it and then through the pattern of the Fullness above, as directed by Logos, because we are the actual fractals of Logos, not the fallen fractals of the Demiurge.
The Fallen fractals of the ego of Logos is the material level only, but we of the remembrance, the psychical, that is the psychological, the thought-filled part—we come from the top down. So material is from the bottom up and it is demiurgic, but life and consciousness and love is from the top down. And that is aeonic—in particular, coming through the fractal of Logos.
So, all of the variabilities of life, even our very structure, when the material to which my psychical part is melded begins to develop from that original zygote and then becomes a creature, it is the Hierarchy of the Fullness, it’s the patterns of the Hierarchy. It’s the consciousness of the Fullness of God coming along through, right down through our cellular level, and that’s what builds us up. It is indeed a form of intelligent design, and the intelligence is in Fullness, and we are brought up above the molecular level, at the cellular level on up, forming ourselves, forming our organ systems, forming our organisms, even then forming our communities outside of our bodies, our larger communities. It’s all according to the Simple Golden Rule, which is how the Aeons work. And this also reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenic fields. And the morphogenetic field that forms us comes in with that first spark of life from the Fullness, and then we grow into what we already were designed to be. It’s there from the beginning; we grow up into it. Kind of like the air filling a balloon and pushing it out into its full balloon shape.
We reach out to others at the living level to hold hands through free will and we cooperate with each other to build something bigger and better than ourselves. We come in as that single-cell and we have to build ourselves up into these organisms, and we do that by holding hands with others like ourselves and sharing information, sharing physical assistance, and sharing love and coherence, because love only comes from the top down. From the bottom up it’s the strong material control: it’s the bonds of the Demiurge; that stops at the molecular level. And then we are wedded to that material level through the love of the Fullness of God, and that continues our leveling up. But now it’s voluntary and now it’s through the Simple Golden Rule.
The Demiurge doesn’t know love. The Demiurge doesn’t remember the Father, it doesn’t remember the Fullness. It doesn’t know what love is—it is purely ego, it’s all about me. Of course, the Demiurge is also built upon the pattern of the Fullness of God, but he doesn’t remember that. So his version of “me” is to replicate the Fullness of God as best he can, but it’s only at the material level. It takes the love and consciousness coming from the Father to grow us on up beyond that. The Demiurge thinks it all began with him—that he is the one and only god. But he is mistaken in that.
So, let me read that sentence again: “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place.”
Our psychical and spiritual levels are welded onto this material level to give us “a structure and a dwelling place,” but also in order that by being “drawn toward evil,” it says, but I think the materiality of the Fall is more like it; we don’t have to say it’s “evil” just yet. But anyway, “but in order that by being drawn toward evil, they should acquire a weak basis for their existence.”
This life we live is in the material world is tenuous. It is a weak existence. That is why things physically die. If it had been a strong existence, we wouldn’t die; we would be immortal. But by requesting immortality at the material level, you would be holding yourself forever away from the eternal level. If you allow yourself to be wedded, let’s say in the manner of transhumanism, if you allow your consciousness or your psychical level, which is Aeonic, if you allow it to be materially welded forever to this material plane, then you are being held by the Demiurge very strongly in a strong grip, and you will never be able to exit: “death”. You will never be able to exit and go back home. Because we’re from above. Going back home for us means returning to the pleroma of Logos, means returning to the Fullness of God. And if you want to be a transhumanist and have your consciousness downloaded into a computer, you’re never going to make it back up there. See, it’s not a good idea.
By the way, I know that it’s a popular motif in science fiction, beginning back with Max Headroom, that you can download your consciousness into a computer matrix and survive in that manner. That is the hope and dream of the transhumanists—to achieve immortality through technological advancement. But, I think in terms of these gnostic gospels, that’s not really possible because our Self is a top-down phenomenon. Our Self is a reflection of the One. And our Self quickly flees back to the Fullness when given the chance, as Logos did after the Fall when Logos returned back to the Fullness. We are fractals of Logos and so we follow that pattern. Logos did not allow his Self to be captured down here by the material. Logos returned to the Fullness. So, I think that our Self will not be captured, willingly or unwillingly, into a computer matrix or metaverse.
Max Headroom was a popular science fiction television show in the 1980s that featured a character who was a downloaded personality.
What would be the thing that would be moved into the metaversal matrix? It’s not our second order nature. It really isn’t our psychical level, because that is associated with the Aeons of the Fullness. We are those of the remembrance; we are not those of the material. Those of the material are the hylics.
Again, what would be captured, then, in that metaversal matrix? Wouldn’t it be our meme shroud? See, the material types, the technicians, equate our meme shroud—our collection of experiences, our collections of beliefs, even our personalities—to learned behaviors after birth. They don’t think we come in with any programming. They don’t believe in intelligent design or a pre, eternal, consciousness. They think we begin with birth. They are not of the remembrance—they don’t remember where we come from because they are aligned with the Demiurge, and the Demiurge doesn’t remember where it comes from. But we aren’t created at birth, and we aren’t created at conception. We are created previous to that. We are created in the eternal, non-material realm. We are the fruit of the Aeons through Logos.
So, all that could be downloaded into the meta network will be our meme shroud—the things that attach to us on this material plane, the things that belong to the material—the things that did not exist from the beginning. And, is that your personality? Does that constitute your consciousness and your Self? Does it even constitute your thoughts and your psychical level? At best, it constitutes the fallen ego and everything it has acquired through karma—through the meme shroud attaching to any particular ego. But your psychical self and your big S Self, those are eternal and they do not belong to the material realm, therefore I truly doubt they can be captured by the matrix of the technological metaverse.
And then, just think about this: what kind of matrix would that be to have only pure ego and pure meme shrouds surrounding you? You would literally be living in a land filled with narcissism, which is almost what we have now, but we don’t quite. Because we have, still, that little niggling remembrance, and the remembrance of the Father and remembrance of the Fullness and the virtues… that’s our conscience. Imagine living in a metaverse where there is no remembrance at all. That’s kind of like a description of hell. Just think about it.
And so it says right here, “so that we should acquire a weak basis for our existence so that instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from,” that being the material fall, “and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness.”
That’s all the time we have for today. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless.