Tag: The Fall
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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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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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Demiurgic Justice
A podcast listener recently asked me to amend my categorization of the Demiurge as a malevolent force. He asked me to read the “Epistle to Flora” from The Gnostic Scriptures to see that the Demiurge is a force for good on the right hand side of the ledger. In other words, is the Demiurge evil or good? Turns out it’s a controversial subject in the Gnostic community. That is what we consider on today’s podcast.
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Birth of the Demiurge
What is the Demiurge and how did it come about? What was the presumptuous thought that led the youngest Aeon to overreach and fall and how does that relate to Self and Ego? Why would the Father set things up so that this Aeon could make a unilateral decision that resulted in the Fall? Was it a mistake? Did God cause this Aeon to create evil? How is such a thing even possible? Was it God’s will that it should fall?
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Not By Works
If you reject the Christ because you believe in the strength of your Ego more than the Christ’s, then you’re not on the glory beam. We need the pattern of Christ’s human inheritance plus the Father’s perfection and love to overlay upon our souls. This lends us the perfection of Christ that redeems us from the karma and memes we have generated. That is the only surefire way to achieve full enlightenment.
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Communion with the Demiurge
This episode offers an explanation of the philosophical and spiritual pitfalls of transhumanism. Can our units of consciousness be downloaded into a computer matrix? If it could, what would that metaverse look like, and would you want to live there?
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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…”
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The New Economy Arises–the Boundary and the Demiurge
As Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness, the Father placed a Boundary around the area containing that which had been produced as a consequence of the Fall. The purpose of this Boundary was to separate finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness.
Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The Demiurge strictly controls everything in our material portion of the universe using strong strings of power, like a puppet master. -
Ego Falls and Forgets
The Fall was caused by an act of Ego falling away from the One Self. The Tripartite Tractate calls the Ego “presumptuous thought.” And isn’t that what egoic thought is? Egoic thought places the focus of thought on one’s own desires without regard to others.
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Logos–Ego Led Him Astray
It is a unique feature of the Tripartite Tractate that the book does not describe the Fall in terms of sin and blame, but rather as an event that was destined to come about in order to usher in a “new economy” that differed from the ethereal Pleroma where the Aeons dwell. This is our archetypal story, our pre-history as fruit of the Aeons.
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Our Hylic Third
We are eternal life and consciousness. We do not die; we return home to the ethereal realm. Our bodies do not die either, for they were never alive to begin with. We need not mourn the passing of the hylic particles, for we are returning to eternal consciousness and they were merely shadows of the Fall.
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The Tripartite Nature of Humanity
“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.”
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Second Order Powers–The New Pleroma of Logos
When Logos turned away from the presumptuous thought and began to remember the Fullness and the Father, he generated a new fractal Pleroma within himself that contained all of the images of the beings of thought. Only this time, since Logos was within the Boundary when he remembered the Fullness and the Father, his new Pleroma was fitted into the Boundary. This differed from the original Pleroma of Logos that Fell and deserted him because this Pleroma was able to work within the Boundary with reason and purpose, unlike the imitations of the deficiency who lacked the Father’s consciousness and the ability to pull themselves out of chaos.
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The Demiurge and the Boundary
Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The book of Genesis attributes these actions of the Demiurge to Jehovah when it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down. -
The Fall and the Deficiency
Logos had not realized the impossibility of approaching the illimitable consciousness of the Father. Logos could “not attain him,” because the Father “did not receive him.” Because of his self-exaltation, another good synonym for ego, Logos fully expected to reach the Father and to reproduce his own glorious reflection that would populate a new Paradise of emanations based upon himself. In other words, Ego’s opinion was not based on reality or truth, only his high opinion of his own capabilities. Abandoning the Aeonic rules and his brothers in the Fullness, Logos “went beyond himself” and this overreach brought the sickness of self-doubt onto his soul.