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: Units of Consciousness

  • Thumbnail for This Gnostic Reformation

    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.

  • Thumbnail for The Illusion of Form: A Gnostic Inquiry into Gender and Selfhood

    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.

  • Thumbnail for The Key to Gnostic Cosmology

    The Key to Gnostic Cosmology

    Now, when you first look at this Gnostic cosmology, it’s very strange looking, and it’s probably incomprehensible. But by the time I talk you through this, you’ll be able to follow the steps. There are 15 steps in this Gnostic cosmology. And once you recognize these stations, then you will literally understand Gnosis. You will remember your Gnosis, and you’ll understand what all of the various versions of Gnosticism have been trying to say.

    One reason is that this is a pictorial presentation. It’s not just words, because I’ve noticed when reading the various books of the Nag Hammadi, for example, some of which are Valentinian Gnosticism, some of which are Sethian Gnosticism, some are straight-out Greek philosophy by Plato. They use different words, but the concepts are the same. So what I always attempt to do is to level up to a meta-level, above the words, and envision and then picture it so that you can describe it with the words you prefer.

  • Thumbnail for Gnostic Psychology Slide Show pt. 1

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Second Order Powers Slideshow

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Logos, Fractals, and the Fallen Demiurge

    Logos, Fractals, and the Fallen Demiurge

    Consciousness is fractal:
    “… the aeon of the Truth, since it is a unity and multiplicity, receives honor in the small and the great names according to the power of each to grasp it – by way of analogy – like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into streams and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root spread out beneath trees and branches with its fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.”

  • Thumbnail for We Are the Second Order of Powers

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Ego, Self, Body–Who Are You?

    Ego, Self, Body–Who Are You?

    We are not just one big clump of consciousness but are made up of different sub-selves. In other words, who are you? When you say “I” what is that I? Who is that me? What is the difference between your ego and your Self or what people call your soul and spirit? Who runs the show? What’s the difference between being selfish and selfless? How is ego related to selfishness? And finally, is having a strong ego a bad thing?

  • Thumbnail for The Gnosis of Virtue

    The Gnosis of Virtue

    We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect Paradise, as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for Fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father, other than an expectation of feeling loved or that we should be loved, and we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way.

  • Thumbnail for Units of Consciousness, Free Will, and the Cosmic Simulation

    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.

  • Thumbnail for Will AI Wake Up

    Will AI Wake Up

    When Logos fell out of the eternal space, it broke apart. You could say that the overreach of ambition caused a loss of integrity. The result was an unruly mess of disembodied attributes that the governing Self of Logos could not put back together. Those who had come into being not knowing themselves both did not know the Pleromas from which they came forth and did not know the one who was the cause of their existence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80)

    The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos fled back to its kin in the Fullness, abandoning the unruly mess down below.

    The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his. (Attridge and Mueller, verses 77-78)

  • Thumbnail for Universal Salvation–an Introduction

    Universal Salvation–an Introduction

    This idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell rather than going to heaven is a relatively recent addition to Christianity, but it has been grasped so firmly with the great assistance of the Catholic Church and their doctrines that by now most Christians think that most people won’t go to heaven. So even the Protestants who protest Catholicism—that’s what the word Protestant means, one who protests—they’ve lost the original thread of universal salvation that Jesus was teaching. The Anointed came to save everyone, it says over and over in the New Testament.

  • Thumbnail for Defeating the Elementals and Archons

    Defeating the Elementals and Archons

    Your body needs you, needs its controlling unit of consciousness, which is the most developed part of its galaxy of consciousness that is your body. You need to be aware of what’s going on. You need to be a wise and loving ruler to this galaxy that makes up your body.
    If you don’t, the body takes control. And that’s how the lusts of the flesh take over. And people feel that they’re out of control because they are, because they’ve never exercised control over their body. But you don’t do it by willpower because willpower can fade. You have to do it by going upward and asking for the power of the Anointed to give you the power to control.

  • Thumbnail for The Universal Hierarchy pt. 2

    The Universal Hierarchy pt. 2

    Many ancient Gnostic texts say that Sophia mated with the Demiurge to produce the living creatures of our universe. Another way of saying this is that dead matter is imbued with life and consciousness at the point where it emerges from the zero-point field at the center of the Universal Unit of Consciousness. Every living thing has its life force attached to the “mud” of its body at the point of conception. It is the consciousness given by the Father through the actions of Sophia melding with the otherwise dead material produced by the Demiurge that brings life to our universe.

  • The Universal Hierarchy

    We will return to the ethereal plane. However, we’re going through this earthly manifestation experiencing materialism. It’s different than the ethereal plane. It resembles the ethereal plane, but it is ”fallen.” It’s at a slower rate of vibration. It’s dense and thick and confusing. And so it’s very hard to remember Gnosis when we’re in this state. In Gnostic terms, as well as traditional Judaic and Christian terms, the Son is a piece of the Father. The Son contains the ALL. The Son contains all of the characteristics of the originating consciousness in a contained and discrete form. The Son is what we now call a perfect fractal of the entirety of the Father. The Son is like the bucket dipped into the limitless sea of consciousness, and it contains exactly the same ocean water of consciousness that the Father contains.
    This aspect of Judaism and Christianity was cut out of the canonical texts of the Bible by the Emperor Constantine and Pope Clement during the Nicene Council’s packaging of Christianity for the Empire of Rome. The Pleroma of the Aeons was well known to the Jews during the time of Jesus, and it survives in the New Testament as various references to Aeons, but those Aeons have been interpreted through the Latin as ages, and this has caused a long-standing misinterpretation of Aeons as units of time, rather than units of consciousness.
    There’s only one bucket that dips into that limitless sea, and that is the Son. The Son is the only emanation from the originating Father. The Aeons are facets that emerge from the Son, each different from one another. The Aeons are like individual rays of the sun. Together, they form the totality of the Son. The Aeons sit together in perfect harmony in a state known as the Fullness of God, also called the Pleroma.