Understanding Pleromas: The Gnostic Journey of Consciousness

Let’s talk about pleromas. Pleroma is a common word in gnostic scriptures, and it has a particular meaning that only relates to Gnosticism. Today, I’d like to take another look at pleromas because they describe the flow of consciousness from the origin and tell us where we all came from, where we are, and where we will wind up at the end of days.

I know that when I run through these various pleromas, people can get confused because it all sounds so complicated. But believe me, it isn’t complicated. All you really need to know is that we come from the Father and will return to the Father. That is the essential message of gnosis. What do we mean by the Father? The Father is the originating consciousness we all share. You could go with that and spend the rest of your life contemplating nothing more than its meaning and consequences. All of this detail I’m about to share with you is only an explanation meant to help you to understand the nature of the Father and then how that fundamental consciousness is packaged and distributed to the point that we can be sitting here today thinking about it.

You see, the originating Father of us all is not simply empty awareness. The Father is not the null void. The Father consists of recognizable characteristics, with love being the foremost character of the Father. This love implies belonging. This love implies virtues like kindness and caring, truthfulness and fidelity, and a host of other virtues. These characteristics flow in an unending stream from the originating consciousness into every living receptacle of life, from the aeons and the angels down to the creatures that populate the cosmos. And each one of us who receives this gift of life, love, and consciousness also receives the gnosis of the One Who Gives and our relationship and responsibilities here within the structure of creation.

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Tag: Cyd Ropp

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    Lost in the Hallways

    Here’s the peculiar thing about this VA facility that I’ve been going to—I seem to be the only patient. It’s like I’m in one of those Reddit spaces called Mall World or Liminal Spaces, if any of you have ever been into any of those types of Reddit discussion groups, because there’s hardly any patients. Then the only people I see as I’m walking, and it takes, honestly, it takes about 20 minutes or a half hour to get from where I walk in to get back there to the chiropractor’s office. Maybe I saw three patients in all of that time.

    Corridor after corridor after corridor with empty waiting rooms, and the only people you see is glancing into office rooms, on the right and left, where people are working at their computers on whatever the heck they’re working on, because I never see patients there. It’s very strange. So, that in itself is very much like this place called Liminal Space or Mall World on Reddit.

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    Are You Going to Hell

    My major reason why everyone and everything that’s living now will return to heaven is that everything comes from heaven. So if everything doesn’t return to heaven in the end, if most of it, as a matter of fact, was thrown into eternal fires of torment, well, God itself would be lessened. The Father would be less than he was at the beginning, and that’s an impossibility, because the Father was, is, and ever shall be the same. He is not diminished by the love and consciousness and life that flows out of him. But if that life, love, and consciousness winds up in a black hole at the bottom of an eternal pit of torment, well, there’s so many things wrong with that statement, just absolutely wrong.
    The reason I say it can’t be so is that all consciousness, life, and love come from the Father. So in the big roll-up, if we accept the proposition that there will be an end to this material existence, which is what all Christians and Jews profess, and if everything that emanated from the Father in the beginning, beginning with the Son, which is the first and only direct emanation, and then everything else emanates through the Son, well, if it doesn’t return at the end of material time, then the Father and the ethereal plane would be diminished, because it poured out all of this love and consciousness into this material realm, and it all has to return.

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    New Gnostic Gospel Simply Explained & Illustrated

    Aeon Byte Appearance “What Is the Gnostic Pleroma”?

    I believe that I have written the first ever Gnostic kiddie book. And it’s ironic because people have this idea–and of course the way a lot of gnosticism is presented, it is very labyrinthian– but they have this idea that gnosis is impossible to achieve or it’s so difficult how can we grasp it? And I have actually simplified it down to uh well the book is  34 pages long but it’s double page spreads like kiddie books are. It’s a big size book and so it’s actually simplified down to only 17 story boards that aged 2 to eight can understand. And really, their parents. I’m thinking they’re the ones that are going to be sapping it up the most—the people that are reading this book to the kids. So, it’s very exciting to be able to produce a book in a cartoon type of way for little ones that’s true.

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    Aeon Byte Interview

    I was a guest this week on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, hosted by Miguel Conner. Miguel also narrated the audio book of A Simple Explanation…

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    A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel Is Here

    The Tripartite Tractate says there’s a reason that the Father set it up so that we are drawn into the material world, and yet we are disappointed and never satisfied by the material world. And that disappointment and lack of satisfaction is so that the material will have a weak hold on us, so that when we pass out of this mortal existence, we can immediately return back into the Fullness of God.

    So, God isn’t going to throw you away, even if you are a sinful person, although it breaks everyone’s heart if you are living a sinful life. It’s a very, very sad thing for your Aeonic parents. They’re not ashamed of you—they are so sad on your behalf. So throw off those coils. Back off the demiurge. Come to the truth. Come to the light.

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    Interview: Scott S. Smith, part 2

    Part Two of my interview with fellow Gnostic, Scott S. Smith. He attends the Ecclesia Gnostica Church in Los Angeles and regularly appears on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio and a slew of other Gnostic podcasts. In this episode, we discuss reincarnation and Scott’s pragmatic approach to Gnosticism.

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    So What?

    A fascinating thing about ideologies is that most people are not even aware that there is such a thing as competing ideologies. Their own ideology is what is called “naturalized,” which means that they hold it so deeply that they do not recognize it as an ideology and that there may be other valid points of view. They don’t realize that their own worldview shapes and filters what they see and the options open for their behavior. They think that those who disagree with them are wrong, crazy, or evil.

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    Introduction to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel

    And then around 2016, I read a copy of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. At first I found the ideas shocking. These were the very heresies my conservative Christianity had warned me away from. According to Christians, these beliefs were excluded from our modern versions of the Bible to protect the church from theological misinformation. I discovered that radical repackaging had removed from the New Testament a type of spiritual belief that was well- known to Jesus and his followers. This belief system, commonly called Gnosticism, describes Christianity differently than does our modern Church. Gnosticism makes sense of most of the more mysterious aspects of Christianity, including humanity’s role in the great scheme of things, and common questions such as “why is there evil in the world?”

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    Cyd and Friend Talk Gnostic Gospel, Pt.2

    Cyd sits down with a new friend who has just read The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated for the first time. She is obviously far along in her gnostic journey and her questions and observations are right on point. We sat at the kitchen table and shared gnosis for a couple of hours. Here is the second half hour of our conversation. This is a wide-ranging conversation that touches on an amazing array of gnosis.