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What we call Christianity today, the religion of Christianity, may not be exactly what the Christ had in mind. It may be a human interpretation and institutional package of the religion that Jesus promoted, but there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.
When I was about four years old, I recognized the difference between Baby Jesus in the manger and Santa Claus. There was the religious iconography of baby Jesus in the manger and the Christian Christmas story. And even at a very young age before I started school, I’m like, yeah, Santa Claus is a kid’s story, but this is baby Jesus in a manger being sent down from God to redeem humankind. Well, I could relate to that. That was clearly a difference in kind from Santa Claus. It seems to me that people who don’t recognize Jesus and who don’t accept the whole notion that there is a God above and that there can be a Christ who is a very special etherical character that was sent into this cosmos in order to help us out—that’s a sad thing. I recognized Jesus when I was very, very young.
Anyway, I want you to realize that I have been a follower of Jesus for over 60 years now, and during that time I’ve been a very active student of the Bible and of Jesus in particular. I’ve been taking most of my spiritual notes from the red letter editions of the Bible, listening to Jesus himself. Yes, I’ve been in and out of churches, particularly in my teenage years and early 20s, but after I was married, my husband didn’t enjoy church, and so I stopped going. Nowadays I’m able to devote most of my time to spiritual pursuits (as a widow), but my spiritual pursuits are not what most people’s are who currently follow either Christianity or Gnosticism. And yet I’m calling myself a Gnostic Christian.
So, I’m following the Bible. And I am very happy that this new edition of the Bible came out—The New Testament by David Bentley Hart—which is a fresh interpretation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Most of the editions of the Bible that people read in church or that you have on your bookshelves at home are derivative of an old Latin translation hundreds of years old that has been Anglicized ever since, so the original meaning of the words are often lost or misrepresented. And those are the Bibles that people are following in what is now called the Christian religion.
There are a lot of errors in Christianity, but I find myself in a peculiar situation of being what I would call a true Christian. I know Jesus; I was baptized. In the past couple of years, I’ve been listening more to radio preachers again, like I used to in the old days, and I often find myself agreeing with what they say. I agree with 90% of what is taught in the Christian Church. It’s that 10% that’s the problem.
For example, a very important issue is that all Christian churches believe that you need to right now accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, period, because if you die before accepting Jesus, you aren’t going to heaven. And this causes much anxiety and much angst amongst Christians whose relatives, children, husbands, friends haven’t accepted the Christ—will not pray the sinner’s prayer and ask Jesus into their hearts. Because they’ve been taught, and therefore they believe, that all those people are going to hell, and they are anxious about it.
Yesterday I went to church. I don’t often go, I must say, but it was a Communion day and someone asked me to go. I think it’s a good thing to ask people to go to church and so I honored her by going with her. And I accepted Communion. Now one of the interesting things about Communion is that you are recapitulating the fractal of the Last Supper where Jesus broke bread, blessed it, and said, “This is my body which is broken for you. Eat this in remembrance of me.” And then he takes the cup of wine and he says, “This is my blood that is spilled out for you. Drink this in remembrance of me.” And that is what is called the Sacrament of Communion.
And Christians take that sacrament fairly often to remember Christ. But only Christians are allowed to take Communion. So, before the Communion is served, the minister will say something like, Now we ask that only those people who have accepted Christ come forward for Communion. And if you have not yet accepted Christ, one of the elders would like to meet with you and pray with you to accept Christ. But for now, please don’t come forward to take the Communion because it’s only for Christians. I can kind of see the point in that, but once again, it’s creating a divide between those who have acknowledged the power of the Christ here on Earth and those who have not, and presumably all those people that don’t go back and talk with the elders at the end of the service are going to go to hell if they die that night.
But the Bible doesn’t really say that. In the New Testament, and particularly the New Testament as translated from the original Greek by David Bentley Hart, this newest translation published by Yale University Press, doesn’t say that. Yeah. It says that Christ came for everyone. For everyone. Christ came to redeem everyone. That’s what it says. Now, as we have discussed in previous episodes here at Gnostic Insights, if your physical body dies, (because you never die, we are eternal spirit, so we are not dying). but if your hylic part, (that means your physical body, the demiurgic molecular part of your body), will die and stay behind because there is no material above. It’s all ethereal. It’s all spirit. Down here it is material or apparently material. That part won’t go up with you, so it seems to die. But when I say die, that’s just your material, because your spirit is eternal.
So, if your body dies before you have acknowledged the redemption of the Christ and the actuality and presence of the Father from which we all come, and the Aeons whose children we are, if you do not accept that now while you’re alive, you’re going to have a difficult passage after death. I’ll put the link here into the transcript for the episode called Overcoming Death, and that’s where you get into the various bardos such as are spoken of in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, or the purgatories of hell that the Catholics talk about. Because the ethereal plane is the reality.
This is why I’ve been sharing episodes with you of near death experiences that thousands of people by now have shared on YouTube. Watch some of these near death experiences. Now, if someone has a near death experience and they’re dead—by the way, it’s only near death because they come back. That’s why it’s called near death. But they were dead. They just came back because it wasn’t their time. So, if you have one of these types of afterlife experiences and you survived to come back to talk about, even if you were a staunch atheist before you passed away, you have to come to a reckoning once you become ethereal and it turns out you’re still alive. You go, What? I thought I was gonna be dead! I thought it was all over with! And those people sometimes have very difficult passages. Very difficult.
There’s 14 layers of bardos in the Tibetan tradition, and if you already believe in the Christ or the Buddha, if you already believe in the Father, you recognize it right off the bat, and you are more than willing to bathe in the love and warmth and light of the afterlife. But if you don’t, then each phase—the longer you stay in that post-life place, which I call a bardo—the more difficult it becomes until it becomes absolutely hellacious. And I believe that these are the depictions of hell that are now and then glimpsed throughout the Bible. The people reaching up from hell going, Oh, please, Lazarus, save me! I didn’t believe it, but now I do. Please pull me out. Pull me out! That is an afterlife experience of someone who staunchly refuses to believe in the Father or the spiritual existence after this life.
But please be aware that this misery is not punishment by the Father or the Son. The reckoning is self reflexive—from your ego for the benefit of your Self. It is your own egoic consciousness feeling regret for its past deeds. And the point of the reckoning and repentance isn’t punishment—it’s not a spanking by God. It’s for you to realize the harm you have done to yourself and others during this sojourn in material life, in order to strip off those egoic memes and rejoin the Aeons in the Fullness. Remember, the ethereal plane is separated from the darkness below by a Boundary. We need to leave the darkness behind in order to rise above. We don’t strip off our egos—we retain our identities—but we do strip off the pernicious lies and memes that have kept us bound to the cosmos.
But if you do believe in the Father, and I say the Father because Jesus came to point the way to the Father. He didn’t say, “worship me, worship me, worship me. I’m hanging on the cross forever. Now worship the cross.” And that seems to be the focus of church all the time. When I go to a church, even yesterday when I went to the Communion service, the minister kept pointing to the cross behind him. And they are limiting the power of the Christ to the action and death on the cross, and then the resurrection from the grave.
But the Christ is way more than that. The Christ came to save all 2nd order powers, not just the people who accept the Christ before they pass away from this body. It gives much more power to the Christ to believe that Christ came to save you even if you reject Christ. Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. I came to represent my Father.”
One of the most often quoted Bible verses is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever would believe on him would not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s how it reads in our most common translations. So in that verse, it is conflating the Christ with the Son. And the Son is a different entity. The Son is the first breakout of the Father, who coexists with the Father as a monad and has all of the attributes of the Father. The Christ was formed after we 2nd order powers were formed in order to help us 2nd order powers. The Christ has all of the mojo of the Son and the Fullness and the Father. They’re all packed into this creature called the Christ, and Jesus is the human instantiation of the Christ on the planet who came to Israel two thousand and twenty-some years ago. Now let me read to you from John 3:16. Actually, let’s look at the whole chapter 3 of the book of John in the translation by David Bentley Hart. Quoting now,
“There was a man, one of the Pharisees whose name was Nicodemus, a ruler of the Judeans. This man came to him at night and said to him, (he came to Jesus at night—he sneaked in). He said, ‘Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform, unless God is with him.’ (And this was after Jesus had already been healing people and doing miracles, like multiplying enough food that was in one basket to feed thousands of people at a time). In reply, Jesus said to him, ‘Amen. Amen. I tell you, unless someone is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus says to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old?’ Jesus replied, ‘Amen. Amen. I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh. And that which is born of the spirit is spirit.’”
OK, now let me pop in here. I think soon I’ll go over another episode concerning the three-part nature of humankind, or of all creatures, really. We have a spiritual portion that comes directly from above and still dwells above. That is the One, capital One or the S, capital Self that is coexistent with the Fullness of God, and also is reproduced in every one of our cells and in our entire body as a fractal of the Fullness of God. That’s the spiritual part, and it lives above, and it lives in us.
We have the psychical part which is our psychological aspect, which is all that thinking and talking that people like to do. It’s this reasoning part. Animals and plants have it too.
And then there’s the physical part. And, the physical is our molecular material structure that only came into existence as a result of the Fall, the original Fall that created the cosmos, not the Fall of Adam and Eve. That’s a whole different error that we’ll get into again at some other point.
So, Jesus is saying you have to be born of both water and spirit. You know, when a woman goes into labor, her water breaks and a baby is born in a gush of water. That’s the amniotic fluid. But we are also born of the spirit, the One true Self that we embody, and people need to realize that and recognize that. Materialists don’t recognize the spiritual aspect of humankind. They only recognize the material and possibly psychological; not even necessarily the psychological. They only recognize the material. The material is demiurgic. It is the creation and the domain of the Demiurge and the Archons. The psychological is your egoic self. And the spiritual is your One that is bringing the love and the life of God. So, back to this Bible here:
“That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed because I have told you it is necessary for you to be born from above.” And, when we’re talking about above, we’re talking about up there with the Fullness and the Son, the Aeons, the Totalities, the Father. We call that above. It’s a different plane of existence, a different dimension, if you will.
“The spirit respires where it will” (or the spirit breathes, the wind blows. It’s a Greek word.) “’The spirit respires where it will and you hear its sound. But you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; such is everyone born of the spirit.’ Nicodemus answered and said to him, ‘How can this happen?’ Jesus replied and said to him, ‘You are a teacher of Israel and you do not know these things? Amen. Amen. I tell you that we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen. And you people do not accept our witness. If you do not believe what I have told you of things upon the earth, how will you believe if I tell you of things of heaven? And no one has gone up into heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.’”
And by the way, I think maybe a lot of these people with near death experiences, well, they haven’t gone up into the highest heaven, they haven’t rejoined the Fullness, but they’ve gone to that in-between place, which is a dimension right between heaven and earth.
“’And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, (that’s an Old Testament reference) so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up.’” And Jesus is called the Son of Man. It’s an aeonic designation. There are also Sons of Dogs, Sons of Cats, Sons of Birds, etc. But we are humans, and that’s who we’re talking about. So Jesus was the Son of Man, embodying the Christ. It’s a designation of the Aeons.
Quoting again, “’that everyone having faith in him, might have the life of the Age.’” Hart translates the word Aeon as Age, as if it were a period of time. I believe that’s an error. It can just as easily be translated as an ethereal being that is eternal. You know it works to say the Age, because that’s going to be the Age of Heaven, and here we are in the Age of Earth. But there’s no need to say that. We could just as easily say, “everyone having faith in the Son of Man might have the life of the Aeons.” Because we’re from the Aeons and we’re going to return to the Aeons. OK, now here comes John 3:16:
“For God so loved the cosmos as to give the Son, the only one, so that every one having faith in him might not perish but have the life of the Age.” (or the life of the Aeons.) “For God sent the Son into the cosmos not that he might pass judgment on the cosmos, but that the cosmos might be saved through him. Whoever has faith in him is not judged. Whoever has not had faith has already been judged because he has not had faith in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: that the light has come into the cosmos and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their deeds were wicked. For everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light for fear his deeds will be exposed. But whoever acts in truth approaches the light, so that his deeds might be made manifest—that that they have been worked in God.”
It doesn’t say whoever professes faith in Jesus the Christ will be saved. It says, “whoever acts in truth approaches the light so that his deeds might be made manifest.” Either you want to live on the side of virtue and the Aeons, or you want to live on the side of vice and sin and the Demiurge and darkness. The light, the truth, the life, comes from above and sits at the top of our Self and everyone is born with it. We are all called those of the remembrance. And what is it we are remembering? We remember the Father above and the fact that we are 2nd order powers that are sent down into this fallen place in order to bring life and remembrance to the fallen material of this world. That’s all.
And if you don’t remember that now, you remember it as soon as you die. And the people who’ve had near death experiences, even if they’re not Christians, even if they never accepted Jesus, even if they thought they were an agnostic but were trying to do good in the world—were do-gooders. I know quite a few do-gooders—agnostics or people who call themselves atheists, who are do-gooders. That means they love virtue. They don’t remember God; they’re rejecting God. They’re rejecting Jesus. They’re rejecting the Christ. They’re rejecting the Christian religion. They’re rejecting the church. That’s all mistakes. That’s ignorance; that’s not evil. But they do good. They love virtue. They tell the truth. They help others. That’s the side of virtue. And so when they pass away, they will immediately recognize the love and life that envelops them there in the in-between place. And they’ll go, Oh, wow! I was wrong about that, wasn’t I? But ohh man, I’m so glad it’s true. Take me away. Here we go!
That is quite a different thing than people who embrace the darkness—who love evil, who love vice. Being a victim of vice; being a victim of archons—that’s not the same thing as embracing it. The evil-doers are the people that tell us lies, knowing they’re telling lies. I don’t care if they’re politicians or religious leaders or your spouse. If they’re telling lies and they know they’re telling lies, that’s evil-doing. If they kill people, murderers, rapists. These are things that never make it onto the side of virtue. There’s no excuse for rape. There’s no excuse for murder. Period.
But even those people are going to heaven. They’re going to have a reckoning when they get to the other side. Remember, we’re going to have that 360 degree life review where everyone you have harmed, you’ll feel their pain. You’ll re-experience the harm that you did through their eyes and their hearts and their suffering. And that’s a hard thing to experience. But we will all experience that and you come out the other side cleansed because of the Christ. Because the Christ came and took all that pain upon itself on our behalf. Now, if you pass away and you already love Christ, or you already love the Father—let’s say you’re not a Christian, but you’re of some other religion and you worship the true God or a vision of the Father. There’s only one God Above All Gods. So if you’re worshipping the God Above All Gods in your heart, you have been redeemed already, and your bardo experience will be glorious, and you will be taken in. But everyone’s going to be redeemed because that’s the Christ’s job. The Christ came to redeem us all.
I’ll leave you with one final quote. This is from the book of Romans—the letter to the Romans in the New Testament, chapter 3, verse 19. “And we know that the Law, whatsoever it says, speaks to those within the Law so that every mouth may be stopped up and all the cosmos might become accountable to God.” (and that’s the Old Testament Law, all the thou Shalts) “For all flesh will be vindicated before him, not by observances. For through law—full knowledge of sin. But now God’s justice has been manifested apart from the Law. Being attested by the Law and the prophets, And by the faithfulness of [Jesus], the Anointed, God’s justice is for everyone [as well as upon everyone] keeping faith; for there is no distinction: For all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, Being made upright as a gift by his grace through the manumission fee paid in the Anointed One, Jesus: Whom God sent forth as a place of atonement through faith in his blood, as a demonstration of his justice through the dismissal of past sins. In God’s clemency—for the demonstration of his justice in the present season—that he might be just and show him who is of Jesus’s faith to be upright. Where, therefore, the boasting? It has been excluded. By what law? That of observances? No, rather by faith’s law. For we reckon a man is vindicated by faithfulness, apart from observances of Law. The God of Judeans only, and not also of Gentiles? Yes, of Gentiles also, Since the God who both vindicates ‘Circumcision’ from faith and ‘Foreskin’ by faith is one. Do we then abolish Law through faith? Let it not be so! Rather, we establish it.”
By the way, this talk of circumcision and foreskins is odd to our modern ears. But it was a source of contention in the early church because the Jews were required to be circumcised as a display of faith in God and a metaphor of cutting worldly memes away from the soul. When Gentiles joined the Jews as followers of Jesus, some elders felt they also needed to be circumcised according to Old Testament Law, but other elders argued that Christians are freed from the Law since the Christ had paid the price for their shortcomings.
And that’s religious talk, isn’t it? But it means we are not vindicated, i.e. we are not reconciled to the purity of God—(for you know, only the pure to go to heaven)—it is not through our doing, but Christ’s alone, that we are purified. That’s all that means. We are not vindicated through the Law, which means through observances, through rituals; we are pardoned through faith. And either you have that faith now or you’ll discover the faith one way or another—the easy way or the hard way—after you pass away. I actually invite you to join me, now, in faith.
Well, that’s all for today. God bless us all. God blesses us all. Onward and upward.
We’re nearing completion of the publication process for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it. The color edition will be available very soon.