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: The Son

  • Thumbnail for Reforming Gnosticism

    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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    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.

  • Thumbnail for First Emanations of Consciousness

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding

    Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding

    The Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there.
    Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a Son.

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    Awakening Consciousness

    The Father is consciousness itself, and off of that initial consciousness come fractals that are each a unit of the Father’s consciousness. The Universal Unit of Consciousness holds all of the blueprints and all of the potentialities for our entire universe, as thought arising out of the originating Father’s consciousness. And each one of the fractal iterations that come off of that Universal Unit of Consciousness also holds the potentiality of the Father as expressed by the Son. These fractal potentialities are first expressed as the combination of traits called the Pleroma of God, also known as the Fullness of God. When the Fullness sits in its unified perfection, ALL of the traits of the Son are on full display.

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    The Son of the God Above All Gods

    How is it that we can claim to know these characteristics of the Father—his sweetness, his greatness, and so forth? Well, that is because the Father reveals his own characteristics through what is called the Son, and the Son is actually the God that we are able to relate to. The Son is the relatable father to us and to the Aeons, whereas the Son is the only Son of that Father who is otherwise inexpressible. The Son does reflect and incorporate the characteristics of the Father, so it seems to me that we can infer the characteristics of the Father from the Son, and that’s what I think the author of the Tripartite Tractate did—inferred what the characteristics of the Father must be by examining the characteristics of the Son.

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    Gnostic Easter—He and We Are Risen!

    The Christ is not exactly the same as the Son of God. Conventional Christianity has conflated the Son of God with the Christ and then with Jesus. They’ve put all three of these separate individuals into one unit. But we would say that the Son is the original monad out of the Father, from whence all consciousness emanates. But the Christ—he’s something else.

    We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons. We are representations of the living images above. We’ve not been abandoned down here below, for, a new agreement among the Son, the Fullness, and Logos gave rise to a Third Order of Powers. 

    The First Order of Powers were the Aeons of the Fullness. We’re the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ.

    Each Third Order Power has the face of the Aeons as well as the face of the Son—the Father to whom they gave praise. “They came in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help.”

  • Thumbnail for Is the Gnostic Son of God the same as the Biblical Son of God

    Is the Gnostic Son of God the same as the Biblical Son of God

    “Who is the image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation, because in him were created all things in the heavens and on Earth, the visible as well as the invisible (whether Thrones or Lordships or Archons or Powers); All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things and all things hold together in him, And he is the head of the body of the assembly—who is the origin, firstborn from the dead, so that he might himself hold first place in all things—For in him all of the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling, And through him to reconcile all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross through him, whether the things on Earth or the things in the heavens.” Colossians 1:15-20

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    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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    Gnostic Cosmos Origin Story

    To church folks this will initially sound like heresy, while to non-believers it will sound too churchy. To those folks who have fallen away from the church because they can’t reconcile inconsistencies between the Old and the New Testament, it will come as a welcome relief. And to those people who have never believed in God, this version of Christianity may be exactly what they haven’t been expecting and didn’t realize they were hoping for.

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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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    The Totalities of Consciousness

    The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And yet although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, or the Totalities, arose at once.  The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father. Because the Son is an emanation of the Father, it mirrors the Father’s creativity. And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself and creates the ALL…

  • Thumbnail for Christ and the Third Order Powers

    Christ and the Third Order Powers

    “Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.” The Gnostic Gospel calls this new fruit the Christ.

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    The Son, Part 2: The Generation of the Aeons

    Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we’ve hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself. This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through the Aeons, which is to say, through the fractals that come out of the Son. As we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son.

  • Thumbnail for The Emanation of the Son and the ALL

    The Emanation of the Son and the ALL

    The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son.

    And yet although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, or the Totalities, arose at once.  The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father.