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Last week we looked at David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, and compared some of the verses to verses out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. And we see that when the ancient Greek, which was the language that the New Testament was written in originally, when it is correctly translated from the original text rather than simply anglicized out of old Latin editions that had been put out by the Catholic Church, we find that the similarities between this Gnostic Christian gospel and the gospel as presented in the New Testament of the Bible are very, very close. There is actually no distinction. Of course it is my opinion that the Tripartite and other Valentinian texts of the Gnostic Gospels were stripped out of the Bible on purpose by the Catholic Church and by the Emperor of Rome. Now, most of us are no longer Catholics and we’re certainly not Roman subjects, so I believe we have no allegiance in particular to the Council of Nicaea, which was set up around 300 AD and that was responsible for taking these books out of the New Testament. The only reason these books were taken out of the New Testament—it’s true they have a slightly different take on the origin story, on the pre-Genesis story, but as far as the New Testament goes, as far as the nature of Heaven, the nature of the Son, the nature of the Father, the nature of the Fullness of God—that all belongs back in the New Testament because it is not at all at odds with what Jesus taught.
So, we’re going to look again this week at one of the books of the New Testament, the 1st letter of John, which is attributed to John the Elder, and we’re going to look at it with a Gnostic mindset and see how it is that it is not conflicting with the New Testament. I want to share with you that it grieves me deeply that Christians would consider this Gnostic Gospel to be heresy because I believe it is the true Christian gospel, and that the reworking of it by the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome is what the heresy was.
So let’s take a look at this first letter of John. And right off the bat, we’re going to see that David Bentley Hart translates the Word “Logos” as Logos, who is a major character in this Gnostic Gospel that we learn about here on Gnostic Insights and at the Gnostic Reformation. This personifies the Logos. It’s not simply the Word of God, as if when God speaks, things happen, and of course they do. But the Logos of God was an actual character, one of the Aeons. And if you’re new to us here, if you go to the gnosticinsights.com website, there on the landing page, the homepage for Gnostic Insights, you’ll find 21 episodes that teach this Gnostic Gospel with great clarity so that you can understand it. I refer to the concepts in those first 21 episodes continually, because that is the basic teaching of the Gnostic Gospel.
So, from 1John 1:1-4: “What was from the origin… concerning the Logos of Life—And the Life was made manifest, and we have seen, and bear witness to, and announce to you the Life of the Aeon which was present with the Father and which was made manifest to us—What we have seen and heard we also announce to you, so that you may also have communion with us. And our communion is indeed with the Father and with his Son Jesus the Anointed…”
And this is why I say it saddens me that conventional Christians think that what we’re teaching here is heresy, designed to lead you astray because it isn’t. And actually, if you are a contented Christian that has a home within the conventional church, you’re not my intended listening audience. The people I think that most resonate to this Gnostic Gospel message are, first of all I’ve noticed, fallen-away Catholics who love Jesus, love the Father, but do not like the Catholic church and all of its extra doctrines that come along with it.
Any fallen-away Christian—if you’ve fallen away because certain things don’t resonate well with you, such as universal salvation, well then, you will find a home here at Gnostic Insights because part of the Gnostic Reformation is that, yes, you have to believe in Jesus to be saved. But guess what? You can do that after death. And that is a big no no in the conventional church because they want to seal the deal. They want to make sure you come forward and confess Christ while you’re here on Earth. And I also agree that’s way better—that’s the best thing. Ask the Christ into your heart today, really, because it will turn around your life. It will put you in touch with your true mission here on Earth. The world—our cultural space that we live in—is really screwed up, and it always has been because it isn’t run by God. It’s run by what the Bible calls the God of this world, and they call that Satan. But we call that the Demiurge.
The Demiurge is the fallen nature of Logos. That was the Fall, and it happened before Adam and Eve. It’s not the fault of human beings that the world fell out of grace. It happened before us. It’s above our pay grade. Our material cosmos is the Fall and we simply came up into it. And the purpose—by the way, I know I’m off track here from 1 John, but in case you’re new here, I want you to hear that the purpose of our life here on Earth is to bring love and knowledge of the Father to all of the 2nd Order Powers, and even to the fallen Demiurge, so that everyone can go home. We were sent here by our parents, the Aeons of the Fullness of God, to spread the knowledge of the Father, to spread the love of God, and, through the demonstration of our love, that people would want to join us. And, having joined us, that they would be able to spread love. True love. Remember, love can’t come from anger. So if you happen to be one of the angry people that is so riled up against everything—that is not coming from the Father. That is from the Demiurge because the Demiurge and the Archons want you to be angry. They want you to be riled up. They want you to cause destruction and to block other people and to slander them in the way of the Slanderer.
If that is happening with you and you’re doing it in the name of righteous indignation put there by the Demiurge to keep us angry, to put things between us, to break us apart—it’s not true. The only force from above is love. And you know you have love if you not only love your brethren and you love all of the 2nd Order Powers, which are all of the living things on the planet, but that you are helpful and kind and have empathy; that you are virtuous and righteous. And, if those types of words really disturb you and you think it’s all a bunch of BS, then guess what? You’re on the wrong side of the Ledger there, and you know it.
So, carrying on with First John: “And this is the message that we heard from him” (and the him is unspecified in the translation, so it could be the message from the Father, it could be the message from the Son, or it could be the message from Logos. The translation is unclear.) “And this is the message that we heard from him and announce to you: that God is light and in him is no darkness whatsoever. If we say we have communion with him, yet walk in darkness, we are lying and not practicing the truth; If we walk in the light, as he himself is in the light, we have communion with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son purges us of all sins.”
In last week’s episode, In the Origin there was Logos, we discussed that the blood of Jesus that purges us of all sins is the correcting algorithm, you could say, the correcting algorithm for our messed up code. Jesus represents the Aeon of Man, and his perfection is complete. He walks fully in the light of God without error, without any shadow or darkness. And what we do when we ask for the Christ to help us, when we say, OK, I guess I believe in Jesus. Please help me. I want to be righteous. I want to know the truth. Just tell me the truth—when you do that, the correcting algorithm is allowed to rewrite your code. It can’t happen if you are resistant. If you’re living within a hardened shell of ego, the Christ cannot enter you. That’s your barrier. But if you let down your barrier earnestly and ask for help, ask for correction, then you will be helped lovingly, kindly, and gently. And then you will be able to be a conduit for the love of the Father and the knowledge of the Father.
So, returning back to the text of First John again: “If we say we have no sin, we lead ourselves astray and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, so that he may forgive us our sins and purge us of all iniquity. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his Logos is not in us.
“My little children, I write these things so that you do not sin. And if anyone sins we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus the Anointed, the righteous one; And he is an atonement for our sins, and not only for ours, but for those of the whole cosmos. And, by this, we know that we have known him: if we keep his commandments… But whosoever should keep his word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in him: Whoever says that he abides in him ought himself to walk just as he walked.” (1John 2:1-6)
Now, none of us walk in perfection at all times. There was only one perfect human being, and that is Jesus. Jesus never sinned from birth onward because he was fully instantiated as the Christ from the get-go and his perfection was melded on to this material body that we all occupy. Yet, that didn’t ever bring him down the way it brings us down. Our physical bodies are made of demiurgic material, and the Demiurge controls material through strings of power—through bonds, chemical bonds, the bonds of physics, and through emotional bonds and the Demiurge’s willpower. The Demiurge wants to control his creation. The cosmos is the creation of the Demiurge. Demiurge wants to control his creation to the Nth degree. He does not want anybody to have free will. And that’s why the Demiurge is so much at odds with us 2nd Order Powers that come from above, because we aren’t powered by the Demiurge, we are mainly powered by our parents—the Aeons of the Fullness; by Logos who is directing us down here below; and by the Father who gave birth to the Aeons and Logos. We have free will because the Father gave us free will, because everything that proceeds from the Father, everything, all of God’s nature, comes down to us in an unending stream. That’s that fountain of life. We are born from above. We are emissaries of the Fullness of God and Logos and the Father, sent to bring love and knowledge here to this otherwise completely dead material cosmos that is ruled by the strong bonds of the Demiurge. See? Are you getting this?
So, every living thing that is born from half material—that’s the molecules that make up our bodies—and half Fullness of God, half life force, free will, love, empathy, compassion, righteousness. What comes from the molecular side is the bonds of the Demiurge—the addictions, the being down on yourself, the hatred of yourself, the hatred of other people. Hatred comes from the Demiurge. And you know who the Demiurge hates the most? Us. You. That’s why you’re always in these tangled-up messes. We don’t walk in righteousness all the time because we are being continually bombarded by the Demiurge and his Archonic forces that mean to bring us down, to break our remembrance of the Father above.
So yes, we can ask for the Christ consciousness to come into us. We can profess belief in Jesus; we can profess belief in the Christ, the 3rd Order Powers, and still walk out the door and have some terrible experience and get in a fight with somebody and curse people out in our minds. OK, that is the Demiurge at work on us, but he can’t keep ahold of us once we have given our lives to the Christ. So, if you ask for the 3rd Order of Powers to come in and sit with you, in your Self, they are continually like your shield of armor. They continually protect you from the slings and arrows of the Demiurge, from the lies and guilt trips of the Slanderer. And they graciously return you to the throne of righteousness in the blink of an eye. It still takes you to acknowledge that, ohh, wait a minute. The Demiurge has me again. Oh, wait a minute. The Slanderers got under my skin. As soon as you recognize that that is the case, you see, you don’t want to ride it out. You don’t want to go marching around in righteous indignation. You want to return to grace and righteousness—true righteousness. So the moment you recognize that the Demiurge has gotten you again, that’s called repentance. You say, oh, wait a minute, you back off, back off, get thee behind me, Satan, and you return to righteousness. And every time you allow one of these small corrections to take place, it becomes easier and easier and the longer and longer you can allow the 3rd Order of Powers to sit on the throne of your Self. The first time you repent, the first time you say, OK, maybe this is all true. Maybe there is a God above. Maybe there is a Christ. Maybe there is salvation. Help me. Please fill me with your truth and knowledge. Show me the way I should go—that’s the hardest time. The first time is the hardest time. But the joy of the first time is the greatest because you will feel; you will suddenly be flooded with the love of God, perhaps for the first time in your whole life, ever since you were a baby.
So, we have this two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back, continually through our lives as we attempt to walk in righteousness, and yet, we fall back into the snares of the Demiurge and the Slanderer. But every time that happens, you repent again. You ask the Christ to correct your algorithm, if that’s how you want to put it, or to fill you with love and peace and knowledge and show you the way, and boom, it happens again. See? We cannot earn perfect righteousness. There was only one perfect human, and that is Jesus, who is our exemplar of perfection. So we want to follow in the steps of Jesus, but realizing that we are fallen humans. And it’s not because of Eve handing Adam the apple; it’s because we are bonded to this material that is controlled by the Demiurge, so our bodies often betray us. Lust, gluttony, cruelty, anger, violence—these are body expressions of the Demiurge and of his chief henchman, the Slanderer, whose job it is to run you down and make you feel like crap. But as soon as that happens, repent, which just means turn around. Ask for help. Ask for Christ again, God help me, and boom, he’s gone.
You see, the power that is in us, the power that is in the Christ, is greater than the power that is in the world. The power that is in the Christ and the Father is greater than the power that is in the Demiurge, because the Demiurge is the fallen ego of one Aeon. That’s all. He’s big enough, he’s a small G god—he created the cosmos, the heavens and the Earth—but he can’t give life. He doesn’t know love, he doesn’t remember the Father or where he came from. That’s why we’re sent here to remind the Demiurge that there is an Entity up above that has more power than he does.
That’s why it is and how it is we can repent, no matter how dire the circumstances, no matter how strong the chains of the bonds are that the Demiurge has on you, or how low your opinion is of yourself because the Slanderer’s in your ear telling you so. They are not as strong as the correcting algorithm of the Christ. They are liars out of ignorance. The Demiurge doesn’t remember God, doesn’t remember that he fell from Heaven. We’re supposed to remind him of that, and he hates us because we don’t have to be controlled by him. He wants total control. We’re not controlled by him once you ask for the 3rd Order of Powers, the Christ, to inhabit your Self. Your ego is not strong enough to repel the Demiurge. You already know that, otherwise you wouldn’t be constantly getting into trouble and feeling down on yourself. But the Christ is stronger than the Demiurge, and that’s why the Demiurge hates us and hates God, or what people talk about as God—because he thinks it’s all made-up. He thinks it’s all a fairy tale. He doesn’t believe in God because he doesn’t remember God. He sees all these people talking about God, big talk, but he doesn’t believe any of the God talk. But you have an opportunity here and now to believe the God talk. Try it as an experiment and you’ll see. And if you do, please write to me in the comments and let me know how it went.
OK, we’re almost out of time here. Once again, I’ve only gotten through one page of notes. But here is a little more First John, because it goes well with what we’re saying. “Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no occasion for faltering: But whoever hates his brother is in darkness, and walks in darkness, and does not know where he goes off to, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1John 2:9-11)
We’ll pick up from here next week. Until then, onward and upward and God bless us all.
