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For those of you who are new to Gnostic Insights and The Gnostic Reformation on Substack, this reformation lays out a clear cosmology of Gnosticism according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices. This gnosis is unique. If you have not listened to the series yet, you should begin with Episode 1 and proceed in order through Episode 21. Those episodes form the basis for my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. Really, that is all you need to know. You can listen and read the transcripts of this Master Class in Valentinian Gnosticism for free at gnostic insights dot com under the tab labeled “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.”
Gnosis means knowing, and to be a Gnostic means that you are one who knows. It may appear as though I am making all of this up. I am not. I’m taking it out of an ancient scripture—The Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. I’m also deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God. This is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with our aeonic parents in the Fullness above.
As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament of the Holy Bible, because much of this information was stripped out of the Bible by the Nicene Councils around 350 AD under the direction of the Pope and the Emperor of Rome. I am questioning the right of the Emperor and the Pope and the heresiologists of the Catholic Church to edit truth out of the Bible, and that’s what we’re putting back in. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope, and none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. So it seems to me that we should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves what scriptures are truly holy, and these you must arrive at through discernment. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray.
Since 2009, I’ve written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything that is a secular explanation of how the universe goes together. The Simple Explanation presents concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I often bring up here because they help to illuminate the Gnostic Gospel. Today I will be sharing the concept of fractal consciousness with you. This approach to gnosticism helps illuminate the meaning of that expression: as above, so below. As a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called roots. As above, so below.
The same is true with us humans. The nature of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God, also called the pleroma of God, is the same as our human nature, because we are their fruit. We, along with all living creatures, are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness flowing down from the Father and Son through the Fullness, all working together to instantiate my body and sustain life.
While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform. Countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together in complex systems to keep my body alive and fully functional. The simplest and most numerous level of this fractal consciousness is expressed through the cells of my body. Whereas the concerns of the world often confuse my governing Self’s unit of consciousness, the consciousness of a cell is the least distracted by ego and the most attuned with its duty of sustaining life; if it weren’t, our body would cease to function.
Before we go any further, let’s answer the question of what a fractal is. A fractal is a geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced size copy of the whole. That’s a property called self-similarity. Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex because the fractal may be reproduced larger or smaller without ceasing. We are surrounded by fractal patterns produced in nature. The branching structures of trees are a good example.
Why trees look like rivers and also blood vessels and also lightning…
I usually demonstrate fractals by looking at broccoli. And if you go to my Simple Explanation blog, December 11, 2018, there is an article called A Simple Explanation of Fractals, The Broccoli Fractal Video Demonstration. In that video demonstration, which is posted on my blog and YouTube channel, I demonstrate how an ordinary head of broccoli can be peeled apart to at least seven fractal iterations. At the end you have an extremely tiny little broccoli flowerette, but you can see it still has more little broccoli flowers even within it. They just become too small to pull apart. Purely mathematical examples of fractals have no limit to the number of their fractal iterations.
Fractal Zoom, Visualizing The Infinite, Mandelbrot Fractal, Day 100 – #shorts
So that’s what a fractal is. It’s a larger thing that can be reduced, reduced, reduced, and each of those reductions looks just like the mother piece, only it is smaller, and you can just keep splitting it off smaller and smaller and smaller. So that’s why it’s called infinitely self-similar.
I am suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal, and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought, and it became the Son, and that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness.
The Son had a thought, and it became the Totalities of the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And the ALL became Self-aware and turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God who sorted themselves into a pyramidal-looking hierarchy.
The Aeons gave themselves names, positions, places, and duties. The Aeons are recognizable by their names and duties, and I refer to these designations as the egos of the Aeons—the ego of an Aeon being nothing more than the name and address that distinguishes one Aeon from another.
The Aeons represent thoughts and patterns within the Son of God, and the Son is a singular fractal expression of the Father. So while the Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness without form, the Son as a monad is knowable. The Father and Son desire to be known. They are not hiding from us. They are revealing themselves to us through the consciousness we share. Our consciousness is a fractal of the Fullness of God—we are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness. Gnosis means recognizing that Source of consciousness, life, and power.
All living creatures are fractal emanations patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Fullness. Because we are fractals of the Aeons, the rules and the descriptions of the Aeons apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of as above, so below. So, when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons, such as the Fall of Logos and the Aeons working together to redeem the Fall—this happens to each and every one of us as well.
Logos fell because he allowed his ego to make a free will decision to leave his place and proper function in the Fullness. The ego of Logos overreached. He thought he was going to plug directly into the Father, but he wasn’t able to do that, and he fell. Logos fell out of perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. It was the free will of his ego that caused the Fall. It is this overreaching ego that has come to be known as the Demiurge. When Logos fell out of resonance with the Fullness, the imitation came into being here below as a deficient version of the Fullness. And since the ego of Logos was motivated by a presumptuous thought, the imitation and the Demiurge that rules it is characterized by presumptuous thought and overreaching.
Because we each embody the fractal of the Son’s consciousness within our Selves, we second order powers bear the likeness of the first order of powers—the Aeons of the Fullness. In fact, the Tripartite Tractate calls us “those of the remembrance” because our fractal consciousness reminds us of the Father and the Son and gives us a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the hierarchy and their dream of paradise. The Demiurge, abandoned here below by Logos, does not remember. The Demiurge thinks it is all there is. It believes it is God. And, indeed, it is the god-like architect of this material cosmos, patterned after the dreams of the forgotten Fullness.
We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the pleroma, whereas the phantoms of the deficiency are shadows of the broken fractal body of Logos. The shadows and archons are not true powers but only extensions of the Fallen egoic consciousness of the Demiurge. The shadows and archons are not fractals of the Aeons; they are imitations of the fractals of the pleroma of Logos.
At this point in the story we can begin to see human nature emerging because while this has been told as a creation story, it is also the story of every human being. 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 egoic shadows of our own nature and with other people who stand in our way.
People who embrace the values of the Demiurge promote the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. Religious folks call this higher consciousness God and the memory of the Fullness Heaven. At some point during everyone’s life, each person decides for themselves whether to continue trusting their own presumptuous ego or whether to heed the call from above.
A huge part of our personality is shaped by the beliefs we collect and hold on to. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the values we hold dear as well as values we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of and we are repelled by memes we disapprove of. The Sanskrit word for these provocative memes is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the ego that interfere with soul consciousness.
The memes each of us cling to, both those that we like and those that we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now. When we unthinkingly lock onto a meme or set of memes, it is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular meme bundle. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters. We are usually unaware of the filtering mechanism that shapes our opinions and this further limits our ability to think and arrive at gnosis.
What does that mean to you? By embracing the values of the Fullness rather than those of the Demiurge as represented by popular culture, we open our gnosis and our connection to the root of consciousness. We cannot arrive at a true connection with the Father and the Fullness through adherence to shoulds, because shoulds are not authentic expressions of your reality. Adhering to shoulds builds rigid legalism but it doesn’t build a relationship with our originating Source. Your behavior may look like righteousness, but unless it arises from your heart it is only an appearance of righteousness.
And that’s why repentance is necessary. We need to repent from embracing the Demiurge’s values in order to embrace the values and the meme bundle that flows out of the Fullness of God. Embracing the meme bundle of popular culture brings nothing but disappointment and heartache. When we embrace the meme bundle and virtues of the Fullness, we feel peace.
This is the never-ending war between the virtuous memes of the Fullness and the egoic memes of the Demiurge. Repentance involves pushing away the memes of popular culture—self-indulgence at the expense of others and getting away with whatever you can get away with. That is not the meme bundle of the Fullness of God. In order to be truly joyful, we repent, we are redeemed, and we embrace the values of the Fullness.
The Gnostic call for redemption goes like this: Because the second order of powers has gotten all gummed up chasing after each other in endless war, another fruit was required to bring peace. The Aeons of the Fullness prayed to the Father individually and collectively for a champion to end the war. This champion is called the Christ.
The Tripartite Tractate tells us that the Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of the Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms so that the one whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help as well as the one who brought it to him.
The Christ is the correcting algorithm for second-order fractals that have been overcome by the imitation’s deficiency. The Christ replicates all of the qualities of the ALL, that is, the full attributes of the originating consciousness in their pure form that existed prior to the Fall, with all of the confounding memes stripped away.
When one accepts the gift of the Christ, one invites a correction to ego’s worldly meme bundle so that the best functioning of the universal unit of consciousness may be re-established within your Self. The Christ also provides a homing beacon to the Son via a direct connection. Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from above and that our Father is in heaven and to heaven we shall return.
Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of ego and this meme shroud of the imitation that we are wrapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines forth from within. That’s all! You cannot be taught gnosis—you must discover it inside of your Self.
So here at Gnostic Insights, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis, I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within myself. You have this gnosis within yourself, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already within you and a remembrance of who you are and where you come from.
Repent and turn from worldly values so you can connect with the Source from above. The Demiurge rules this world. The Demiurge does not have your best interests in mind. The Father, on the other hand, is the Source of all love, life, and consciousness. We are fractals of the originating Source we call the Father, through the Son, through the Aeons of the Fullness, on to us. Redemption requires trust in the truth from above.
So, onward and upward! I’ll see you next time. God bless us all.