Tag: Second Order Powers
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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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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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We Are the Second Order of Powers
These new creatures that were devised are better than the Deficiency because they come from the union of the entire Fullness, whereas the Deficiency came out of a mistaken solo effort by Logos alone. Out of this union of the Fullness and Logos came what are called the Second Order Powers, and these powers are better and greater than those of the imitation because they did not come into being out of ego and out of lack of thought. This new fruit of the Fullness and Logos was fitted purposely into the boundary that surrounded the Fall, and so because they were fitted to live within this boundary, they were able to have a cooperative structure the way the Fullness had a cooperative structure.
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Units of Consciousness, Free Will, and the Cosmic Simulation
Most units of consciousness perform their work as expected. They do their part. They work according to plan, and that’s a really good thing because that’s what holds everything together. The material controlled by the consciousness of the Demiurge is foundational. If the Demiurge did not control the material, the material universe would not hold together and it would completely and very rapidly fall apart. On the other hand, Second Order Powers, who are fractals of the Aeons above, have complete free will to either fulfill or contradict their responsibilities. Most units of consciousness do their job according to the job they were given to do and, overall, things work according to plan. There is enough redundancy in the system so that when the odd unit of consciousness decides to go rogue, things still hold together.
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We Are the Children of the Aeons and other musings
Jesus becomes the first human exemplar of the indwelling of the Christ. But we all have the potential to have the indwelling of the Christ. That’s the ultimate goal, is to allow the Third Order Powers to replace our Second Order Powers. That is the only way to live a truly righteous life that is outside of the Law, but through grace. But this all has nothing to do with salvation, because all will be redeemed because that is the job of the Christ, sooner or later. And it will be later for most people who do not acknowledge the Christ.
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Fractals of the Fullness–Our Ethereal Origin
I’m suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son; that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self aware, and it turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God.
We share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. -
The Gnostic Lord’s Prayer
In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus suggests that we pray for the Father’s will to be done on Earth as it is in heaven. So here we are trying to bring the perfection and the love and all of the virtues and the knowledge, the true knowledge, onto the Earth. That’s the job of the 2nd order powers. We embody the Fullness of God on this fallen plane. That’s what it means: “Your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.” And that will is expressed through us.
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Consciousness–It’s a no-brainer
The neat thing about planaria worms is that if you cut them in half, the head half will grow a new tail and the tail half will grow a new head. Now, the interesting thing is that even though you chop off the head and the tail grows a new head, that new head knows everything that the old head knew. And this is a form of proof that the memories and knowledge that were contained in that planaria worm didn’t live in the head. They were somehow living in the entire worm.
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Ch. 5 from A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate
The division of the deeply troubled Logos was the first manifestation of Ego acting outside of the will of the One Self and the Fullness. The Fall was caused by an act of Ego falling away from the Self. The Tripartite Tractate calls this “presumptuous thought,” meaning going beyond what is right and proper. Egoic thought places the focus on one’s own desires without regard to others. Presumptuous thought is all about me, me, me. The Aeons of the Fullness are not me types of creatures. The Aeons all live for one another in perfect harmony.
“Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself andwhich is” (verse 77). The “forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and of that which is” becomes a defining characteristic of the Ego’s relationship to the Self . This Ego, divided from its Self, has total amnesia of Logos, the Fullness, and the Father. It recognizes nothing but its own presumptuous thought.
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Emissaries of Consciousness
Logos and the Aeons sent down representations of themselves into our universe, each one being a much more fabulous original than these deficient copies of the Imitation. And so these organizational patterns and names and faces of the Aeons came to bring order and stability and solidity. That solidity is the new economy, the new ecology of this universe. “He generated manifest images of the living visages, mingling the Logos with himself entirely. Therefore, those who came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great.” That’s us, folks!
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We are the Second Order of Powers
The 2nd Order Powers come into creation fully loaded with gnosis, but in the course of doing battle in this never ending war with the Deficiency, gnosis is forgotten and needs to be remembered again. And that’s the purpose of our Gnostic Insights podcast—to remember the gnosis from above.
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If everybody is going to heaven anyway, what’s the point of being virtuous?
Welcome to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. In 2019, I posted an article to my new Gnostic Gospel…
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Our Spiritual Inheritance
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.
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The Nicene Creed
The Nicene Creed is a meme bundle of what one must believe in order to call themselves a Christian. And it came to be that anyone who didn’t believe in those edicts of the Nicene Creed was labeled a heretic, and anyone such as myself that may profess other beliefs, other gnostic beliefs, for example, well, those are heretics because they don’t believe in the Nicene Creed. So let’s look at the Nicene Creed today and see what it is that we agree or disagree with, as far as this Gnostic Reformation goes.
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Lust for Domination
No sooner did the Second Order of Powers begin manifesting on the material stage, they found themselves in mortal combat with the shadows of the imitation.
The Second Order Powers “fought against the order of those of the likeness, while the order of those of the likeness wages war against the representations and acts against it alone, because of its wrath. As a result, they were submerged in forces and natures in accord with the condition of mutual assault, having lust for power and all other things of this sort. It is from these that the vain love of glory draws all of them to the desire of the lust for power, while none of them has the exalted thought nor acknowledges it…”