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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Tag: hell

  • Thumbnail for The True Nature of the God Above All Gods

    Gnostic Insights Podcasts, New Gnostic Gospel Simply Explained & Illustrated

    The True Nature of the God Above All Gods

    Perhaps you were raised in an extremely cruel household with extremely vindictive parents, or schoolteachers, or somebody got to you and, in the name of God, inflicted cruelty upon you. Then you have come to accidentally transpose their human cruelty onto God, because they told you to. But that’s not God, by definition, you see? And when I say, by definition, that means, like, cold is not hot, by definition. Cold is cold. And if you’re going to start arguing, oh no, cold is hot, well, then you’re not talking about cold, you’re talking about hot. Do you see what I mean? And if you have been rejecting God, the God Above All Gods, because you have this view of God as merciless and vindictive, cruel, illogical, unfair, unjust, take comfort, because that’s not God you’re talking about.

    Now, it may be the small g god of this world. It could be the guy whose best friend is Satan, because remember, that is a small g god of confusion. And its main job is to cause you to forget that you come from transcendent goodness, that you come from above, from the God Above All Gods, and that you do have freedom. You do have free will. You are meant to inherit joy. You are to do good works, and to be happy, and to be in love, and to love everybody else.

    Don’t let some evil archon, or evil Demiurge, or evil human, redefine God in such a way that you reject God, because that’s the mistake. That’s a categorical error. And that’s why I say, take comfort, have joy, receive the love that was meant for you.

  • Thumbnail for Are You Going to Hell

    Gnostic Insights Podcasts, New Gnostic Gospel Simply Explained & Illustrated

    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.

  • Thumbnail for We are all in ALL

    Gnostic Insights Podcasts, New Gnostic Gospel Simply Explained & Illustrated

    We are all in ALL

    I’m wrapping up this review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It’s not to tear down Christianity. It’s to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity.

  • Thumbnail for Our Awesome Origin

    Gnostic Insights Podcasts, New Gnostic Gospel Simply Explained & Illustrated

    Our Awesome Origin

    Something I heard this week on the radio and something you hear all the time is someone exclaiming, I can’t believe God loves me! I can’t believe that this great and powerful God even knows who I am, even cares about me. Even says that he knows me and loves me and wants to save me! People continually exclaim that and it’s part of so many songs in hymns and popular Christian music. Of course God loves us! We are of God. We’re on loan down here in the material world. We’re temporarily bonded to this dead material. But that is a temporary condition. And when we loose this mortal coil upon the death of that body, we go up. We go straight up. We don’t go to Hell. We go straight up because they love us. The Fullnesses love us—we are their children. Christ loves us. He came and died and suffered for us. It’s his job to remind us of God.

    We were in the mind of the Son and the Father since the beginning. So of course he knows us. And not only that, but he’s inside of every part of our living body. We are imminent with the presence of God—every cell, every organ, every person, every bee and flower and squirrel and cat and dog, every living thing on the planet or even beyond this planet in the cosmos is a manifestation of the Fullness of God, so of course they know us. That shouldn’t even be the major focus of salvation. Oh, God loves me and knows me. Of course they do. And that’s why we’re going up.

  • Thumbnail for Aeons, Not Ages

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    Aeons, Not Ages

    In this ground-breaking episode, we take a close look at David Bentley Hart’s recent translation of the New Testament, and how his more accurate rendering of the original Greek brings the New Testament fully in line with the concepts of Gnosticism.