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By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.
Copyright 2022; all rights reserved
So far in our unfolding of the Gnostic Gospel, we’ve discussed the origin and nature of the Father as the originating consciousness. We’ve discussed the Son, which was the first localization of the Father. We have discussed the Son manifesting his various attributes, known as the ALL. We’ve moved beyond the ALL and discussed how the Totalities of the ALL became the Hierarchy of the Fullness as they became self-aware individuals with their own points of view. Each Aeon of the Fullness was an individual who is also an integral part of the larger whole.
Logos was the final Aeon conceived by the Fullness, and this singular being possessed the blueprint of all of the personalities, proclivities, powers, and positions arrayed in the Fullness. Logos embodied all of these distinctions of the Fullness as smaller fractal iterations within himself.
It came to pass that the Aeon named Logos mistook himself for the original Pleroma of the Son of God, confusing the small, fractal copies within himself for the Totality of the Fullness. Feeling the fullness of glory within himself, Logos decided to give glory to the source of his awakening and launched himself from the Hierarchy in an attempt to reconnect with the Father. Logos believed his personal will was sufficient to reach the Father without adding the will of the united Fullness to his own.
The problem with Logos striking out on his own was that the Fullness always worked as one body, even though it consisted of an infinite number of individuals. Because Logos had been placed at the very tiptop of the hierarchy, he mistook his will for that of the Fullness and imagined he could, all by himself, build the Paradise that was being dreamt by the Fullness. Logos understood all of the plans and he possessed all of the necessary talents because he contained all of the blueprints of every one of the Aeons.
However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father. We have previously discussed that giving glory means focused praise and wondrous adoration of the object of devotion. The Aeons were only supposed to give glory to the Father and not to themselves or each other. But Logos looked down and beheld his own identity and thought he was complete enough to ignore the rules and offer glory on his own.
The Tripartite Tractate says, “The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted.”
As Logos reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits. We refer to this as the original Fall. It’s not Eve handing Adam an apple in the garden of Eden. This is the Fall: Logos reaching for the Father, stumbling, and falling.
“His self-exaltation and his expectation of comprehending the incomprehensible became firm for him and was in him. But the sicknesses followed him when he went beyond himself, having come into being from self-doubt, namely from the fact that he did not <reach the attainment of> the glories of the Father, the one whose exalted status is among things unlimited. This one did not attain him, for he did not receive him.”
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. Prior to this time, every Aeon’s core Self was in perfect harmony with its Ego, and their Ego’s function was to put into practice the will of the Self, the Fullness, and the Father. Now self-doubt replaced the ineffable joy of the Fullness.
The division of the deeply troubled Logos was the first manifestation of Ego acting outside of the will of the One Self and the Fullness. The Fall was caused by an act of Ego falling away from the Self. The Tripartite Tractate calls the Ego “presumptuous thought.” And isn’t that what egoic thought is? It’s presumptuous, meaning going beyond what is right and proper. Egoic thought places the focus of thought on one’s own desires without regard to others. What am I going to do? Presumptuous thought is all about me, me, me. The Aeons of the Fullness are not me types of creatures. The Aeons all live for one another: “All for one, and one for all.”
The presumptuous thought of the Ego of Logos arrogantly presumed that he was going to build the Paradise the Aeons dreamt of and populate it with his own emanations. But Logos was inadequate to the task and he produced instead “shadows, copies, and likenesses” of the Fullness.
Verse 78 says: “Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything.”
Here the Ego of Logos is characterized as “vain thought,” and the copies produced by the Fall are nothing but likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms. The Tripartite Tractate says these likenesses are not “products of anything,” indicating that, unlike all of the other entities that came before, these imitations are not true emanations proceeding from the Father through the Son and on through the Fullnesses. These shadows were made up out of nothing and do not contain the essence of the Father’s consciousness. They are flat, without depth, like a mirror image is to the object it reflects.
In my illustrations, I picture the little pyramid of Logos sitting on top of the big pyramid and then launching itself out into the inky blackness toward the all-encompassing Father above. But, instead of going up, Logos takes a nose dive and goes down. That is why it’s called the Fall. In my mind, I picture Logos smashing into bits. This is metaphorical language because of course there isn’t anything to smash against; there is no material. Like a dry clump of sand, the pleroma of Logos just crumbles apart and dissolves into pieces. Only now, because they are shadows, the bits of Logos are no longer little golden balls. My illustrations depict the shadows of Logos as super-dark-blue balls rolling out and spreading forth in chaos.
The Tripartite Tractate says in verse 77, “Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and <of that> which is.”
The “forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and of that which is” becomes a defining characteristic of the Ego’s relationship to the Self. The Ego of Logos becomes entirely estranged from “his better self.” All that remains of Logos down here below is the shell of his broken Ego and an almost infinite number of Ego-ridden, dark blue balls scattering in all directions. This Ego, divided from its Self, has total amnesia of Logos, the Fullness, and the Father. It recognizes no one but itself.
The act of the beautiful Aeon reaching for the Father out of love, stumbling, falling, and breaking apart into dark, chaotic imitations produces the deficiency of the imitation. This deficiency is our material universe.
Logos was aghast at what had happened and the “best part” of Logos fled the scene and returned to the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says, “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.”
The governing Self of Logos is “the unitary aeon” that abandoned his Ego down below and rushed back up to his brothers in the Fullness. The Self of Logos, stripped of its Ego, reunited with the Pleroma of the Fullness. The Fullness abandoned the imitation and the copies and phantoms that had rolled out below because they had no part in their creation. They were unable to relate to the chaos because they only knew cooperation.
“Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be. It is they, however, by themselves who are greater, more powerful, and more honored than the names which are given to them, which are their shadows. In the manner of a reflection are they beautiful. For the face of the copy normally takes its beauty from that of which it is a copy.”
This passage promises that the imitation’s time is limited. “Its end will be like its beginning,” because it is not an emanation from the Father, therefore its home is not above in the Fullness. At some point, this material cosmos will evaporate.
This passage also describes the shadows as beautiful in the manner of a reflection. The imitations resemble the Aeonic blueprints upon which they are modeled, but it is only a surface resemblance, lacking the depth of the Father’s consciousness. They may possess the names and faces of the original Aeons, but they are not fractals of the originals because they are not emanations from the Fullness. They are merely shadows of the Aeons that were copied within Logos.
We can imagine it this way: when we watch a movie we see actors projected onto a screen yet we realize that the actors are not really there in front of us. We know we are only seeing the flickering phantoms of their projected images. The phantoms of the deficiency are similar. They are projected simulations of the Fullness.
When Logos overreached because of presumptuous thought and fell out of knowledge into the darkness of ignorance, he shattered into a confusing jumble of disconnected parts. These pieces of the shattered Aeon were sicknesses–small, dark, ignorant, divided, and roiling with chaos. They reflected neither the glory of the originals in the Fullness nor the ecology of the Hierarchy. And, because they were no longer arranged in the pattern of the Hierarchy, they were clueless about their functions and their names. All that remained was ignorance and chaos.
Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate describes their condition in verse seven:
“The Logos was a cause of those who came into being and he continued all the more to be at a loss and he was astonished. Instead of perfection, he saw a defect; instead of unification, he saw division; instead of stability, he saw disturbances; instead of rests, tumults. Neither was it possible for him to make them cease from loving disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him.”
In other words, immediately after the Fall, chaos reigned supreme. The bits and pieces and powers could not work together because they came from the isolated will of the fallen Aeon and not from the cooperative structure of the Hierarchy of the Aeons. In mathematical terms we would say that entropy was high in the beginning. Each bit of the fallen Aeon acted out of its isolated, personal Ego and not from any form of relationship.
The verse also says that the Ego of Logos was “completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him.” That is to say, the totality and exaltation of the Self of Logos abandoned his Ego to the Fall. Totality is another word for a Fullness or Pleroma as a unified entity, and the entity that was Logos abandoned the Ego in the Fall. Exaltation means high praise, and there was no praise for the shadows of the Imitation.
“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.”
So, in addition to being unable to relate to others, these small imitations of the Fallen Ego of Logos did not even recognize the Ego out of which they arose, much less any inkling of the Self that had abandoned Ego and escaped the Fall.
The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say, “The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not themselves exist from the first.”
Again the products of the fallen Aeon’s Ego are contrasted with the original models in the Hierarchy. They were nothing like the emanations that came forth from the Aeons. Because the Ego of Logos was itself extremely unstable—chaotic, entropic, and ignorant of what came before—the bits that fell out during the Fall were also chaotic, entropic, and ignorant of all that came before. They did not know their programming instructions and they did not know their origins.
The Aeons of the Fullness are facets of the Son of God, and the Son, being an emanation of the Father, exists from the beginning. So the originating consciousness is that which exists from the beginning and its offspring is the Son, and the Son’s offspring is the ALL and the Hierarchy of the Fullness. These things that came out of Logos did not exist from the beginning because they are a product of the Fall, and once the Fall occurred, there is line in history where the things that exist from the beginning are before the Fall and the simulations that came into existence as a result are after the Fall. These would be the deficiencies of the imitation, the small and feeble knock-offs of the originals in the Fullness.
The passage says that although the little weaklings had the likeness of the disposition that was a unity, they did not exist before the Fall. Which is to say that the imitations of the deficiency were unable to fake the unity of the Fullness. Because Logos had been reaching for the heights when he fell, the imitation born of the Fall continued to be motivated by a desire to reach the unreachable. But now that upward drive was divorced from the goal of reaching for the glory of reunification with the Father. With no recall of who or what came before, this upward drive was entirely self-interested, for those of the imitation had no cooperative arrangement amongst themselves. What had been an upward pull to reunite the Fullnesses with the Father became an upward push arising out of each singleton, not for the glory of the Father, but for the vain glory of the individual. Vain glory means false glory.
Verse six of the Tripartite Tractate says, “They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be. They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.”
So, while deficiencies lacked the Aeonic attributes of the Fullness, they did display an imitation of those attributes: true cooperation replaced by egoic striving; glory to the Father replaced by vain glory. They did not know their place, station, or duty and so they each believed themselves to be Numero Uno. They were all characterized by a lust for power worthy of the greatness of their namesake–as if a sports fan were to mistake their own abilities for those of the athlete they most admire.
In this manner, Egoic striving for vain glory replaced glorious longing for the Father. Ambition replaced God’s will. The likenesses of the presumptuous thought, as they came to be known, recognized neither Logos nor the Father as their progenitor.
“They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being.”
All of our Egos have a choice to cooperate with the Self or to deny the Self and stake a narcissistic claim to consciousness. Since this Ego of Logos was unaware of its origin as the Logos of the Fullness and the Father, it believed it was its own originating consciousness. Hence, everything that it produced was similarly ignorant of and disobedient to the Father and the Fullness. In this manner, the deficiency took on an imitation of life on its own, becoming the cause of the things that do not exist on their own account.
These descriptions of the shadows and imitations of the deficiency relate to our cosmos on many levels. The imitations arising from the fallen Ego of Logos consist of everything in this universe we have come to know, from the particles that make up the material of the physical cosmos, to the imitations of truth that pass for knowledge and atheistic explanations of life and consciousness.
Thank you for contributing to this effort. I hope that Gnostic Insights is helpful for you. Remember, all you really need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. So relax into that thought and take comfort. You do not need to do anything else; you do not need to know anything else. You only need to believe that you are loved by the Father.