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I’m going to read you some excerpts this morning from one of the listeners. She says a lot of people look at her as if she’s speaking Chinese when she talks about the things she’s learned. She says, “I don’t think the point is who is right versus wrong. But if we can come to a universal understanding that is about love, particularly the Father’s love, the Son’s love, and the Pleroma, the ALL and the Totalities—it’s all love.”
And, indeed, it’s about rising above the memes, the particularities, to find the essence that is being conveyed, no matter what people are talking about. Is it love or is it anger and hate? That is a dichotomy. Is it life or is it ignorance and death? Those are dichotomies that cannot be overcome, because they are either/or. But as far as the particularities, those are not as important as where your heart lies.
She says, “I see so many people who have podcasts, YouTube channels, and two week $300.00 classes that promise spiritual enlightening,” and it causes her to shake her head. “Other people seem to want to focus on things that don’t have much substance and then try to fill in the lines.” She asks me if there are any, “specific prayers that I would suggest to give glory to the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. Are there specific prayers for that?” Well, I don’t have a particular litany of prayers. There are really only two prayers that I repeat pretty much daily. [Those two prayers are “The Lord’s Prayer,” and the 23rd Psalm.]
Usually when I go to bed, or in the middle of the night if I wake up, if I say the 23rd Psalm, I immediately feel peaceful. It causes me to have a deep and relaxing breath when I’m beginning the very first stanza, and then I’m able to relax. I picture all of the events taking place in the 23rd Psalm, and then I often fall asleep before I even reach the end. So let me go ahead and recite the 23rd Psalm for you. And it’s a good one to memorize, because it’s pretty much all there and it’s very comforting. Here’s how it goes:
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
He leadeth me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever.
That’s the 23rd Psalm. And it’s not a ritualistic thing. It’s not a thing like repeat this 20 times in a certain cadence and all will be well with you. It’s more a matter of putting yourself into the place that’s being discussed. Picture yourself. So, when I say the 23rd Psalm to myself, I do think of myself as a sheep because it’s talking about the Good Shepherd. “The Lord is my shepherd.” So I picture Jesus looking like a shepherd and I’m one of the sheep lying down in the pastures. And it’s a beautiful pasture. I picture it in my mind. And I can stay there for a long time if I want to and look around the pasture at how beautiful it is. There’s a park near here that I call up in my mind because there’s a river that runs through it. And so the green pasture is at that park.
And, “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” It’s peaceful water. It’s not a raging storm going on so that river is not flowing fast, but it’s very calm and wonderful. A good, safe place to bathe or to drink. And, symbolically, still waters represent calm. Calm emotions, not being in turmoil, but peaceful and calm.
And it says, “He restoreth my soul.” So, whatever is bothering me or troubling me that happened during the day or that caused me to wake up in the night, there’s no need to lie there and to play it over in my mind. That is never helpful. That’s backward and down. You don’t want to replay bad things in the backward direction, which is history, and down, which is the demiurgic direction that stirs you up and makes you feel bad. So, “He restoreth my soul.”
“He leadeth me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” The paths of righteousness—another black and white choice is virtue or vice. We don’t dwell in the gray areas. Those cause turmoil. Those cause confusion. There isn’t any gray area between evil and righteousness. Evil is evil. Evil is a lack of knowledge, a lack of life and love. Evil is rooting for death and division. That is not a gray area. That is a bad area to wander through, so my Good Shepherd leads me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Now, that sometimes used to throw me. What does this mean? Why am I going down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake and not for my sake? Because when we go down paths of righteousness, of course it’s onward and upward. It’s virtues. It’s dwelling on love, forgiveness, charity—the good side of the Ledger. But we are representatives of the Father. We are representatives of the Fullness of God. We represent here in this fallen plane the glorious Father above, and so it’s for His name’s sake that we reflect that righteousness because, well, first off, it’s for his sake he doesn’t want us to suffer. He doesn’t want us dwelling in the darkness. He wants us to walk with him. So it’s for his sake that we are with him. But it’s for our sake and it’s for the world’s sake because we’re reflecting the glory of God when we dwell in righteousness—when we spread love and not hate. When we’re kind and not angry.
Then, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” See a lot of the people who explain the Bible to us like to look backward at history. I’m not that much into history. I know a lot of you folks are, but there’s really no point in it for my life. I dwell in the here and now. The here and now is all that we have. The history, particularly the history of 500 years, 1000 years, 2000 years, 3000 years ago, that is not going to lift you. That doesn’t help you, does it? So when people talk about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, yes, there was this place that the Hebrews referred to near Jerusalem as the valley of the shadow of death, or whatever. That’s a fractal of the story. It’s not the story. It’s an archetypal vision of the shadow of death, but the actual valley of the shadow of death is the fallen world—is material existence. We live in the shadow of death. It overhangs us at all times. At any minute you can lose this material existence. And the great fear of death that people have is not knowing that we go on after this material existence passes away. That’s the fear of death. People are paranoid and neurotic about death, about fearing death. Particularly in the middle of the night.
So, even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, which is this material body that we are yoked to, we need not fear it. We will “fear no evil” because, and now we switch from talking about ourselves walking through the valley or through the pastures and near the still waters, now we start talking to the Good Shepherd himself. “I will fear no evil for thou art with me.” And now we switch from whatever dark vision we had of the fear, get off of it, and turn around. That’s what repentance means. It means to turn around, turn around and face the Lord, turn around and face the Good Shepherd who’s taking care of the flock. Who’s taking care of us, me, the little sheep? The Good Shepherd is with us. He’s with us at all times, so I need not fear death. I need not fear passing away or the terrible things that happen to me in this valley of the shadow of death where we now dwell.
Because “Thou art with me,” and now you’re establishing a relationship with the Christ, with the Good Shepherd. So we’re taking our eyes off of the valley and we’re looking at the shepherd. And he loves us. And it’s his job—it’s the shepherd’s job to care for the sheep and to lead us to safe places, and to protect us from the wolves that come to try to nab us. “For thou art with me,” and I’m looking right on the face of the Christ—right on the face of Jesus. Now, it says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father has no countenance. Countenance is another word for face. The Father has no face. We cannot look directly upon the Father. He’s too large and inscrutable, and invisible, as a matter of fact. We can’t look upon the Father. But what can we look at? We can look upon the Son. We can look upon the Christ. We can look upon Jesus. He has a face. He’s a person. So it says, “For thou art with me,” and, looking upon the face of the Christ, now I’m talking to him. And now I’m feeling reassured, because I’m beholding the Christ; I’m beholding the glory.
And then it says, “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” So then I had to think about, well, what does this mean? Thy rod and thy staff? Well, it turns out that shepherds carry two instruments with them. They carry a rod and a staff. OK, I think we’re more familiar with the Shepherd’s staff, right? That’s that long tall stick with a crook on the end of it.
And the shepherd can use that staff for rescuing sheep that have fallen in a hole, for rescuing lambs, pulling them out of places he puts the crook around them and pulls them out. He can use that long staff to corral the herd, to keep them from falling over a cliff or keep them from going into a dangerous place or into a ditch. So he uses the staff to help guide us and protect us and rescue us.
So what’s the rod? Well, the rod is a weapon. The rod is a heavy stick. It’s like a billy club that he wears, and he pulls it out when he needs to beat off some predator, or he can use it as a hammer when he needs to hammer something anytime he needs a good, heavy object that he can control. That is the rod. He never uses the rod to hit the sheep. He does not beat the sheep with the rod or the staff. That is a misconception that many legalistic people have about God and about the Christ—punishment. God doesn’t punish. Yes, God loves us. He takes care of us. He’s the Good Shepherd. The Lord is the Good Shepherd that protects us and takes care of us and threatens away the predators and keeps the flocks safe and together and close to him. So you picture all of these things as you’re reciting the 23rd Psalm. I recommend that you memorize this. It’s not long. It’s only 6 stanzas. So, “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
And then the next verse jumps to me now as a human. Now suddenly I’m no longer a sheep. Because it says, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Well, I don’t know that the shepherd prepares a table for sheep, so I’m thinking it’s a banquet table and that he’s laying out all these wonderful things for me. That he “prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” So now it’s comparing me and the favor and grace and care that the Christ is taking of me as one of his sheep with my enemies, and the enemies are whoever you think are your enemies. We tend to think of other people that we don’t get along with as our enemies. That isn’t exactly correct, because we’re all brothers and sisters from the Fullness of God, we are all second order powers. And it’s part of the sadness and part of the Fall that there is a schism amongst us second order powers—that there are people who think of themselves as on that political party and they are the enemies of the people of the other political party or people who think of themselves as part of that religion and they are enemies of people of the other religion. Or maybe I have a neighbor that’s really nasty and mean and says awful things to me when I walk by with my dog. Maybe I think of that person as my enemy, but these are not really our enemies.
And I’m only just now learning this, because I shared with you a couple of years ago that I have been known to have a quick temper myself. And when people are nasty to me, it’s my natural reaction to whip around and be nasty back. Now and finally, finally, after let’s say two and a half years of this podcast and 10 years of the Gnostic gospel and 20 years of the Simple Explanation, I am finally working it into my heart, after all of this time. Because it has to dwell in your heart in order to come out authentically. We want to be authentic through and through.
We want to feel the love for these people. And so the thing to feel for these nasty people is not anger and vitriol and payback. It’s compassion, it’s charity, it’s forgiveness, it’s love. And I’m starting to understand that. I’ve known intellectually, but it’s starting to work its way into my heart that the way this world is redeemed—the way the world as a whole is going to be redeemed and be able to be freed from the bonds of this material existence and to return to the Fullness above and to the immortal realm of glory and love, which is where we all want to go—is to show that glory and love here on the material realm. So I don’t show anger, I don’t show hatred, I don’t scream at people. What I show them is true love—is true forgiveness. The Demiurge wants us to hate each other. The Demiurge sows division and hatred amongst people, and if you’re feeling angry and divisive, that’s demiurgic—that’s not righteous. That isn’t coming from God. It doesn’t make the world a better place. We think it does. We think that righteous indignation—I used to be full of righteous indignation—no, that’s actually demiurgic. It’s not righteous. There’s no such thing as righteous indignation. There’s only love. There’s only care, forgiveness, concern, charity. And so we need to be on that side of the Ledger in order for them to see that there’s no need to be mean and nasty and angry. Love is the way out.
I used to hear people say that, you know, talk about love, love, love and it’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, love, love, love. Love is an actual force. Love is the most powerful energy force down here in this universe. And guess what? It rides along with us. It comes along with the life from above. If there were no second order powers here on Earth—and everything that’s alive, every creature, every soft piece of flesh, every cell, everything that’s soft and squishy—carries life, carries love, carries the Fullness of God, the entire Fullness of God. We have fractal replications of the Fullness of God, billions of them throughout our body, and those are called cells. All creatures do. That’s where the love comes from. It has to emanate out of us.
There’s no more beautiful emanation and expression of love than parents loving their newborn child—than a mother giving birth to a new emanation of the Fullness of God, and the way she looks on that baby and the way she holds that baby and kisses that baby and says beautiful, loving things to that baby—that is love. That’s a demonstration of love. I was never blessed with children. I don’t have that particular demonstration of love, but I tell you what, my cats and my dogs are well loved, and love is love. So love comes in the form of care and loving and concern; just adoration. And we are first to love God the way that the Son and the Father, before there was anything else, loved each other. That’s all they did. That’s all there was. There was the Father and then his monad emanation, which is called the Son. And they loved each other, it says. They gave glory to one another because the Father is glorious.
And then the Son immediately gave birth to the Fullness, to all of the Totalities, which are his variables. It’s ALL the components of the Son. The Father doesn’t have components. The only component out of this Father is the Son, but once the Son emerged from the Father, he realized himself by giving glory back to the Father in a kind of reflective, glorious way. And then, having all the attributes of the Father, he also gave birth to emanations of himself, just as the Father had given birth to his emanation, which is called the Son. And his emanations are called the Totalities of the ALL. And then they give glory and they birth what is called the Fullness of God [these are the Aeons]. And those are all the steps of the ethereal creatures. Those few steps take care of all of the emanations of God.
So, back to the 23rd Psalm. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil,” which is a blessing, see? And it’s God—it’s the shepherd anointing us. Caring for us, blessing us. So, we are blessed by the Father, by the Son, by the Good Shepherd.
“My cup runneth over.” So then I picture I’m holding this goblet, this old fashioned goblet of wine that was on the table that the Good Shepherd prepared for me. And it’s overflowing with wine. It’s overflowing with love. “My cup runneth over.” Cups represent love.
And it goes on. “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” OK, so now if I’m spreading love, I’m living close to the shepherd within the reach of his staff and eating from his table of love. My head has been anointed with oil by the Good Shepherd; my cup is running over with love and provisions because that was a table—it was a banquet table—laid out for me. I often picture this huge banquet table.
Then “surely,” it says, surely. So like, believe it. “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.” Well, that’s very reassuring. So the rest of my life here, all the days of my life that I have left in this material world, I’ll be followed by, I’ll be near to, goodness and mercy all along. Something might happen to me. I might stumble, I might stub my toe. I might run into some snafu, which we do pretty much every day. But goodness and mercy follow me there. Right there. I can quickly, the minute I realize what I’ve done, I can repent. I can pull back, turn back to the shepherd, and goodness and mercy are right there because they’re following me. They’re stuck to me like glue all the days of my life. I’ll never be alone. I’ll never be separated from the love of God. “And I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.” So this is your promise of eternal life. We don’t go to blackness, we don’t blink out into nothingness. We dwell in the House of the Lord.
And now, as part of my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I think of these things as nested fractals. We are part of the new Pleroma of Logos after he returned from the Fall. The Demiurge is stuck down below here with us. The Demiurge is the God of this world. He’s a great and powerful God and he made all the dead things on the earth. So, the earth itself, or the planets, the hard and rocky places—the minerals, the elements, the molecules, the hard and rocky places. They are not love. They do not emanate love because they are emanations of the Demiurge, and the Demiurge is separated from the love of God. The Demiurge fell away from the Fullness of God. The Demiurge does not embody life or love. The Demiurge is the egoic broken fractal of Logos and the Fullness of God. So you can say that the House of the Demiurge is our material creation, and we are sent down into the House of the Demiurge to demonstrate love. We are here to demonstrate love so that the Demiurge can wake up and remember. Oh oh, that’s love. Oh, I remember love. And the minute he does, the minute the love outweighs the ignorance, the death and the separation that characterize this material world, that’s the time this material cosmos will pass away, because the Demiurge will return to the Fullness above and reunite with his “better Self,” the Self of Logos. That’s why the hard and rocky places are hard and rocky. It’s why that the stones don’t walk around and talk. They’re dead. They’re of the body of the Demiurge. The life, the knowledge, the love, the glory is on the eternal plane. It’s on the immaterial plane. It’s up there with Logos and the Fullness and the Aeons and the Totalities and the Son and the Father.
“The House of the Lord.” We belong to the House of Logos, and the House of Logos belongs to the House of the Fullness of God, the Pleroma of God, which is all of the Aeons. And the House of the Fullness of God belongs to the Totalities of the ALL, and the Totalities of the ALL belong to the House of the Son. They are coexistent with the Son. See, these are nesting fractals—up, up, up, up, up, and all of us are tucked up under that wing, that dove of peace, known as the Son of God. Ohh, and the very top of the Fullness of God now is no longer Logos, but the Christ. We belong to the Christ. The Christ is our King. So when it says “the Lord,” that’s the Christ. And He is at the top now of the Pleroma of the Fullness of God. It used to be Logos was at the top, but he fell. He wasn’t up to the job. So Christ came and took over that job. So Christ is at the top, and they’re all together. The Son of God. My goodness. Look at the time. And I only just got through the 23rd Psalm. It’s good news. So maybe your homework this week would be to memorize it. If you want to.
God loves us all. Onward and upward.