Tag: ego
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Reforming Gnosticism
When people say, “My goodness, your Gnosticism is so different than what I have come to understand Gnosticism to be,” that’s because I didn’t take it from secondary sources. I took it from the original sources. Then of course, Valentinian Gnosticism is an early form of what has come to be called Christianity. Christianity diverged immensely from the original message around the 300’s and on up, when the gnostic books were taken out of Orthodoxy. Those folks that are called heresiologists are the people that went around slapping heresy labels on the early Christianity—the early Valentinian Gnosticism. They weeded it out of the official sacred texts that made their way into the New Testament.
The main book of the Nag Hammadi that I relate to is called the Tripartite Tractate. I believe it to be the purest form of gnosis. It has very little in the way of mythologies, of extraneous characters, of the names of things and the numbers of things and the astrology of it all.
Valentinian Gnosticism from the Tripartite Tractate is unique in that the fallen Aeon is not called Sophia, a female character. The Aeon who fell is called Logos, not to be confused with the Son of God, Christ, or Jesus.
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This Gnostic Reformation
How is it that we come from above? How is it that we return to above? And how do we interact with the above space, that is the pleroma of the Fullness of God, when we’re down here trapped in this material world?
That was the query that actually kicked off most of my own personal gnosis, even before I read any of the Gnostic books. I used to wonder, as I played with my dogs down by the river and I stood barefoot in the mud of the river, how does the consciousness of God flow through me and the mud surrounding the river make up my body and how do they connect? That’s the beginning of the Simple Explanation. -
Three Glories
“For no one can conceive of him or think of him or draw near to that place toward the exalted, toward the truly preexistent. [That would be the original Father they’re talking about.] But every name that is thought or spoken about him is brought forth in glorification as a trace of him, according to the capacity of each one of those who give him glory.”
So this is saying that the full glory of the Father cannot be known. The Son can be known because he is coexistent with the Totalities of the ALL. So they are him and he is them. But the Father can be perceived as this trace. And in other places, it says like a sweet odor wafting to your nose.
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The Illusion of Form: A Gnostic Inquiry into Gender and Selfhood
The Aeons are not male and female. They are fully integrated units of consciousness. What we call male identity and female identity reflect our lack of integration of our complete identity, or what Jung referred to as the lack of self-actualization of our animus and anima. In other words, our essential identities are neither male nor female but both. So identifying with either is actually a deficiency that represents incomplete individuation hampered by overidentification with the physical form.
We do not necessarily reincarnate as the same gender from lifetime to lifetime. Therefore it follows that our ego’s memory houses all of our prior gender identities. What we take for our gender identity is usually associated with the body we are currently inhabiting.
A person may identify with their previous life’s gender and carry those memes strongly forward into this incarnation. It is not an error to notice those gender-identified memes and behave accordingly. The error is thinking this current body needs to conform to that previous meme chord that we call gender. Confusion arises from thinking one is born into the wrong body or telling a child they are born into the wrong body. No. We are born into the most perfect body possible for our current incarnation. We are sent into this fallen world by our aeonic parents with our full cooperation. We forget our mission once we are here. We forget why we are here and who we really are, just as the Demiurge did. The error is thinking we know better than the Fullness from our fallen perspective down here who we are and what body we should be wearing. -
Remembering the Mission
Conventional Christianity states that Jesus came to save humanity, but only those who acknowledge Jesus as the only Son of God and invite Him into their hearts will be saved. This is the basis for all evangelism and all churches that follow the Nicene Creed, which is to say, all Christian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. This is why Christians are so keen on saving souls. They don’t want you to suffer for eternity in hell.
The Gnostic Church begs to differ with that common interpretation of Christ’s mission. According to the books of the Nag Hammadi library, all of creation will be redeemed and returned to the Fullness and the Father’s home in Heaven. All of creation, everyone and everything, will be made clean and pure and holy by the end. As they say, it’ll all be good in the end, and if it’s not good yet, then it’s not yet the end.
Gnosis refers to the ability to use reason and logic to arrive at spiritual truth. So, let’s think together about this idea of Christ and redemption and who does or does not go to Heaven. First, if Christ’s redemption were a matter of your belief, then Christ’s mission of salvation would be limited to what you believe. In other words, you would be the one holding the power of salvation, not Christ.
Does that make any sense to you? Are you the one who redeems or is Christ? Can you see how making your belief central to redemption actually limits the power of Christ? Can you see how that makes sinful humans more powerful than the mission of Christ’s redemption? Limiting Christ to your belief, it seems to me, is the greater heresy than simply trusting Christ to accomplish the mission. It is Christ’s job to redeem humanity, not yours. Once we concede that it is only the Christ that can redeem, then what is the point of leading a virtuous life? Why not sin up until the end, have all kinds of fun, and then waltz into Heaven without repentance? Repentance, by the way, means to feel sorrow and regret. Are we allowed to sin willy-nilly with no negative consequences? An even more profound question is, why were we created in the first place? When you dwell in vice rather than virtue, your life is part of the problem and not part of the solution. The Christ brings redemption and remembrance of the Father and the Fullness, one bit, one piece of the Fall at a time. Every time you resist evil and turn a bad habit into a good habit, you have redeemed a piece of the Fall. When you redeem all of your bits and pieces, you will be fully redeemed and regain your home in the Fullness. When all Second Order Powers have accepted the remembrance and the redemption of Christ, then Logos will be fully redeemed and this material universe can pass away. At that point, Paradise, with all of the love, peace and happiness that is implied, will be fully restored.
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Gnostic Psychology Slide Show, Pt. 2
There’s only peace and joy and happiness on the side of virtue when you’re sincere. We’re not talking about hypocrisy. We’re not talking about forcing the issue. We’re not talking about whipping yourself with a flagellant whip to make yourself holy. That is not God’s will. God is entirely love, entirely acceptance, entirely forgiving, entirely compassionate, entirely charitable.
And if you think you’re living a righteous life, yet you’re feeling anger, hatred, division, well then you’re not living a righteous life. Those are clues that you’re in the wrong set of memes, you see? So you want to get rid of those and turn your eyes upward. And you can either turn your eyes directly to Jesus as Christian true believers do, and I mean true believers, not hypocrites or pew warmers, or you can go this Gnostic route and turn your mind up to the Fullness of God, the Son, the Father, and the disincarnate Christ who pre-existed Jesus. You can take your choice, but it all is going to level you up to the Father. If you’re on the path, the glory beam, then you wind up with the Father.
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Gnostic Psychology Slide Show pt. 1
In the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, and within the pleroma of our bodies, we have every single type of unit of consciousness derived from the Hierarchy of the Son, from the cells on up through our governing unit of consciousness. Our governing unit of consciousness sits on top of our personal hierarchical pleroma. We are all fractals.
Within my body, there are countless fractals of the Fullness of God, and each of them is doing its job to keep me alive and walking around.
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Second Order Powers Slideshow
This is the lecture I delivered to my adult education class this week. It caused quite a stir. One dedicated atheist dropped the class at this point in a huff. It seems that the class is quite alright discussing gnostic concepts in the abstract, but when it comes down to Earth, then it gets real. Suddenly it’s a war between science and religion. The part that ticked off some of the students was demonstrating conscious life within the cells. In other words, consciousness comes down to the cellular level and then levels up through intelligent design to become us through cell division and differentiation.
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Synchronicities
And the only way to bring it back up, the only way to right the course of this fallen world, is to demonstrate the love, life, and consciousness of the ethereal plane to all of us down here, to remind us that we don’t really belong down here. We are sojourners passing through. We come from the Father and we will return to the Father. And all of us bringing love, consciousness, and life, whenever we accept that and remember that and begin to manifest that love, that higher consciousness, that’s when the synchronicities begin to occur. That’s when the love pours out of us instead of the hatred. That’s when desire to make things right and heavenly replaces the desire for power and hate and control. That is how the Demiurge is brought to remembrance.
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When Truth Falls, Ego Rises
All of our egos have a choice to cooperate with the Self or to deny the Self and stake a narcissistic claim to consciousness. Since this ego of Logos was unaware of its origin as the Logos of the Fullness and the Father, it believed it was its own originating consciousness. Hence, everything that it produced was similarly ignorant and disobedient to the Father and the Fullness. In this manner, the deficiency took on an imitation of life on its own, becoming the cause of the things that do not exist on their own account.
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What Are Archons
“Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.”
“Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be. In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows, made beautiful by way of imitations. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.”“They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. For this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence. For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.” “Being imitations, then, of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows. Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring. Because of this, it came to pass that many issued from them as offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.”
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Authoritative Discourse of the Nag Hammadi
Death and life are placed before everyone, and people choose for themselves which of these two they want. The soul forgets her siblings and her father, and sensual pleasures and sweet things deceive her. She has abandoned knowledge and has fallen into the life of an animal. A person devoid of sense lives like a beast, not knowing what one should say or should not say.
We are to be triumphant over the ignorance of those who contend with us, the adversaries who contend against us, through our gnosis, for we already have known the inscrutable One from whom we have come. We are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face.
The soul who has tasted these things has come to realize that sweet passions are fleeting. She has learned about evil, has forsaken these passions, and has adopted a new lifestyle. After her experiences, the soul disdains this life because it lasts for only a time. She seeks the kinds of food that will bring her life, and she leaves behind the food of falsehood. She learns about the light, and she goes about and strips off this world. Her true garment clothes her within, and her bridal gown reveals beauty of mind rather than pride of flesh. She learns about the depth of her being. She runs into her sheepfold as her shepherd stands at the door. In return for all the shame and scorn she experienced in this world, she receives 10,000 times as much grace and glory. -
All Is One–A Conversation with my Brother
The reason there is quantum entanglement is because there is no space and time. All potentialities exist within the mind of the Father and our consciousness notices one after another, giving the illusion of time and space. The Demiurge organizes the confusion of the Fall and that is the imitation. At the end of time, illusion drops away and all are redeemed into the ethereal awareness of pure consciousness.
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First Emanations of Consciousness
When their generations had been established, the one who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was not yet manifest, and he brought forth those within him.
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. -
Gnostic Memes of Jesus
When we invite Christ in—let’s say you’re at a revival or you listen to an old Billy Graham sermon on the radio or you’re reading the book of John in the Bible and you have the urge to invite Christ to take over your life, that is what it means to invite Christ into your soul—and Christ is a different order of powers than we are. We are what’s called Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons; we’re the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ. And there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. That’s how it is that Jesus or Christ comes with your face and knows everything about you because Christ is an image of the perfection that you can be. Jesus was the first human that fully embodied the Third Order of Powers. Now it’s your turn…
When we invite Christ in, we invite the Christ to take residence in our souls and in our bodies. We invite the Christ’s Third Order Powers to replace our own Second Order Powers because we’re leveling up. We’re leveling up to a more powerful and loving Godly existence when we invite Christ in.