Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:41 — 42.1MB)
For regular Gnostics Insights, subscribe here. Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn | Deezer | RSS
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This form of Christianity that I’ve been teaching here at Gnostic Insights is Christian because, as you’ve noticed, we speak often of the saving power of the Christ. But in Gnosticism, the definition of Christ and the Christ is slightly different. It’s broader than it is in conventional Christianity. And so what I’d like to do today is look at this document called the Nicene Creed. It is the document that attempted to formulate what Christianity is, what Christianity means, because in the early days after Jesus walked the Earth there were many forms and many beliefs surrounding the Hebrew God and surrounding this person, Jesus of Nazareth, and what his role was and his relationship to the Hebrew God. There were many different versions of Christianity in those first 300 years. They pretty much varied by geography, by where people lived, and each region had its own particular spin on this new religion which, of course, in the beginning was a variation of Judaism because Jesus was a Jew and he was considered by the people who believe in him to be the coming of the prophesied Messiah of the Jews.
Those folks who remained faithful to the Jewish religion rejected the notion that Jesus was the Messiah. Now I am not a historian, so I don’t want to go deep into the history of these things. I’m more of a Gnostic philosopher where I attempt to share with you the gnosis that I have gained through decades of contemplation upon these things. That is a different sort of Christianity in general than comes down through the conventional church.
So what I want to share with you today is for people who do not necessarily have a church background or a Christian background. Or, if you do, you’ve heard of this thing called the Nicene Creed. And practically every modern denomination believes in this Nicene Creed. Creed is the word credo—meaning a belief or set of beliefs. Here at Gnostic Insights we would call that a meme bundle. The Nicene Creed is a meme bundle of what one must believe in order to call themselves a Christian. And it came to be that anyone who didn’t believe in those edicts of the Nicene Creed was labeled a heretic, and anyone such as myself that may profess other beliefs, other gnostic beliefs, for example, or there were dozens of other types of beliefs, well, those are heretics because they don’t believe in the Nicene Creed. So let’s look at the Nicene Creed today and see what it is that we agree or disagree with, as far as this Gnostic Reformation goes.
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and Earth,
of all that is seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
consubstantial to the father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
— Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer (1979), The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Hymnal Corporation. 1979. pp. 358–359.
First off, let me remind you that it’s not a bad thing to have a meme bundle if you are an organization or an institution, because the memes that the members of that institution share is their common mindset, their common worldview. And it’s important to share the same world view if you’re going to say you’re a member of this place or that. In politics, for example, the shared meme bundle is what is called the platform of that party that you subscribe to, and that is how you know if you vote for this person who is in that party, they ought to align their values with the values that you hold because you share the same meme bundle. So that’s the purpose of memes in an institutional setting.
So let’s look at these memes in particular of the early Christian Church. The Nicene Creed was first developed in 325 AD at the request of the Pope and the Emperor of Rome. That was Emperor Constantine and Pope Clement. It was later amended in AD 381 to clarify certain points and to make it a lot more specific, and that was called the First Council of Constantinople of 381. So we’ll look at both of those creeds now and we’ll compare them to this modern Gnostic Christianity, which is a form of Valentinian Gnosticism.
It begins by saying, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of all things visible and invisible.” And it was amended to say, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things, visible and invisible.”
Well, if you’ve been listening to Gnostic Insights for any amount of time, you know that there’s a distinction between the Father Almighty, whom we refer to as the God Above All Gods, the originating source of consciousness, the ground state of all things. Everything emanates from the Father. So in that sense, it’s all true that the Father is the maker of all things visible and invisible. You know—”the buck stops here” in the ultimate sense with the God Above All Gods.
But he’s not exactly the Creator of Heaven and Earth. That is a separate God, a lower God referred to in the Old Testament as Jehovah, Yahweh, or the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the creator of this world that we live in—this material creation. And that is the #1 heresy, right? Because if you go to most any Christian Church, there’s no distinction between the God Above All Gods, the Father, and the God who created this Heaven and this Earth.
It goes on to say, “And we believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only begotten that is of the essence of the Father, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father. And in the Constantinople revision, it says, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds,” and in parentheses “worlds” is translated as Aeons. So this insertion of the word Aeons is interesting because I would agree with that. Remember, the first fractal of the Father, the emanation of the Father out into some sort of existence, is called the Son, the Son of God. And the Son of God incorporates all of the characteristics of the Father, but in a place, so to speak. It is a monad. It has one universal point of view, whereas the Father has no point of view. The Father is spread out all over the place. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.
And it says that this begotten Son of God was begotten before the Aeons. If you take that literal translation I would agree, because the Aeons are emanations of the Son of God. The Aeons are entities. It’s not a unit of time, it’s a unit of consciousness. So all of the Aeons all together make up the Son of God. He wears them like a garment, and they wear him like a garment, which is what consubstantial is translated as. Here it says, “very God of very God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.” So they’re one and the same thing, but kinda different. The Son is consubstantial with the Father because he is a complete and perfect fractal of the Father. So in that sense he’s the perfect reflection of the Father. But he’s a monad and the Father is not. And then the Son will break up into all of his parts and he is consubstantial with all of his parts. It’s like our cells of our body are consubstantial with us. You have the sense that you are this being walking around in this body. This body goes everywhere you go. That is the relationship of the Aeons to the Son.
Back to the Nicene Creed now. “By whom all things were made both in Heaven and on Earth,” and the revision says, “By whom all things were made.” So this is interesting that the revision was actually less specific in this case than the original 325 version, because you could say that all things were made by the Father or by the Son of God, because it’s all then coming down from them. We’re all downhill from them. We’re downstream from the Father, the Son, and the Aeons. But in particular, the God Above All Gods is not down here making things. He’s not down in the garden chatting with Adam and Eve. He is this underlying reality of everything. The God down here is a different guy—that is Jehovah. He is the creator of this Heaven and this Earth down here. The material plane is the realm of the Demiurge or Jehovah. And it’s his job to create it, to set it all up and to make the rules that everything runs by.
Back to the creed. “Who for us men and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made man.” So, we’re still talking about the one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Now there’s separate steps in this Gnostic Christianity. The Son of God is the first fractal of the Father. The Son of God is all the way up there, back upstream, nestling into the Father. And it is the Son of God who breaks into all of the Aeons. Then it was one of the Aeons themselves that fell out of harmony with that Son of God package, also known as the Fullness of God. And it was one of those Aeons, Logos, or Sophia if you believe in a different line of Gnosticism. But I called this fallen Aeon Logos; that’s what it’s called in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. And it is Logos who fell out of the Fullness of God, broke apart, and created this material world. And when the best part of Logos fled back up into the Fullness because he was horrified at what had happened, he left behind part of himself, that being the ego.
And it’s that egoic portion of Logos that runs this realm. It’s that egoic portion of Logos that is the Demiurge Jehovah. The Son of God never fell. The Son of God stays up there, plugged into the Father and holding the Fullness of God. It’s just a portion of the Fullness of God that fell and created this Earth and that portion that stays down below. The Son of God came before the fall, came before the creation of Heaven and Earth, and stays perfect and unsullied up above. And Jesus came way later because Jesus is part human and part God. But we can say that one Lord Jesus Christ did come for our salvation, came down and was Incarnate, and was made man. We would agree with that. The Christ was formed for our salvation, to take us back up.
In the 381 edition, it says that “the one Lord Jesus Christ, who for us, men” (and women, we presume), “and for our salvation, came down from Heaven, was Incarnate,” (which means made into flesh,) “by the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” And we Gnostic Christians would tend to agree with that. The Christ is the Third Order of powers. We are Second Order powers ,we creatures that populate this Earth and this universe. But the Christ was made to give us salvation and take us back up. So the Christ is called the 3rd order of powers. It is a superior power to the 2nd order of powers. We 2nd order powers are glommed onto this fallen material world, which is a thicker, slower, energetic type of space than is the realm of the Father or the realm of God or the realm of the Fullness. The 3rd order of Powers was created by the Aeons and the Son and the will of the Father, all together praying for our salvation. You might have heard other people say yes, the Gnostics believe that we creatures on this Earth are angels that have become stuck in a material realm. That’s one way of putting it. We are the Fullness of God. We all carry the Fullness—the Aeons of the Son of God—but we are welded onto this material when we are conceived. The Aeonic inheritance, the love and life of the Father, come from above and impregnate a material molecule. And that grows into this creature—into the zygote or the egg that begins to develop.
So we all came down from Heaven. We 2nd order powers, all of the creatures of the Earth, we all came down from Heaven and we were all made incarnate by being put down into this realm and married to this physical plane that was created by the God of this world, Jehovah, the Demiurge. So the Christ comes down, was created later to bring us all back home because we got stuck down here. We are caught in an endless war, it’s called, with a dualistic system. It’s material plus spirit. So our spirits are caught in this material. And the Christ, the 3rd order of power, is far more glorious than the 2nd order of power. The Christ has all of the mojo of everybody altogether, and the Christ comes with each of our individual faces so that we recognize the Christ when we meet him. So there is 3rd order power for every 2nd order power. So every place that you find yourself, that Christ is already there waiting for you to recognize him. And once you do, then you are saved out of that situation that you’re in.
Back to the Nicene Creed. “That the one Lord Jesus Christ suffered and the third day he rose again and ascended into Heaven,” and then it goes into much more detail in the 381 version. “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried. And the third day he rose again according to the scriptures. And ascended into Heaven and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.” Well, I don’t have any particular problem with that, but remember that Christ isn’t exactly the same as the Son. He incorporates the Son. You could say that the Christ was the Son made manifest in this physical world, and it’s necessary to believe in that manifest presence when it comes to you. And it comes to every creature, because that’s what takes you out of this place.
And it goes on to say, (from there, from Heaven), “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” And then in the other translation, “from thence he shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead.” So this refers to the second coming of the Christ as an end times event, the second coming it’s known as. And in the 381 version it goes on to say, “whose Kingdom shall have no end.” And so that is the Kingdom of God. Well, the Kingdom of the Father will never end, of course. The Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of the Father is the Fullness of God. It’s all the way back up.
There are many versions of the realms of Heaven, right? There’s many different books, and many different religions really break out a whole lot of realms of Heaven. The Tripartite Tractate doesn’t talk about all those various realms. I can say that the original realm is the Fullness of God, and that we down here in this material realm are far from that place. We here at Gnostic Insights talk about an in between place that people go after they “die” and that is also where all of our shared thoughts and experiences reside. The original, you could call it the universal meme bundle that is attached to this universe, is in this place probably where the realm of judgment occurs. And then you either go up from there or you come back down.
But in this Valentinian Gnosticism you don’t go to hell, you do not go to hell and burn for eternity. You come back down until you repent and are redeemed by the Christ. Everybody in the end will be redeemed. Everybody will repent and be redeemed. And that was also a source of contention in the early church—whether even “the Devil” would be redeemed. Now, in our Gnostic belief, it’s the Demiurge that will be also redeemed along with the 2nd order powers, because the Demiurge needs to be redeemed to reunite with the Aeons above, because it is the egoic, fractured part out of the Aeon known as Logos, and Logos is trying to get his ego back. So the Fullness is trying to make itself full again. The Demiurge has to come back up for the Fullness to be full. We are the fruit of the Fullness, so all of us also need to come back up or the Fullness won’t be full. We are their children.
And then it speaks of believing in the Holy Ghost. We all believe in the Holy Ghost, it says. And in the 381 expansion it says, “We believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together, is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the Prophets.” And that’s what’s known as that Triune God, which of course was also a source of great contention in the early church. The idea the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—they used to use the term Holy Ghost, but we’ve come to associate ghosts with Casper the Ghost and woo woo spirits of the dead, so it’s been changed in recent years to the Holy Spirit. Well, the Holy Spirit is the life and love of the Father coming down through the Son, coming down through the Fullness and then coming down into this world through the life of the creatures below. So we incorporate the Holy Spirit just like Jesus did. Jesus was a man. Jesus was fully man and fully God. Well, we are fully man, and we are also fully God, but we don’t realize it.
Our Fullness of God is in every cell of our bodies. All things that are alive have the Fullness of God within them, and that is the Holy Spirit and the life and love that pour out into this realm that we live in. But we only have parts of our Fullness activated. It’s like a need to know basis. If the Fullness of God is 100%, I’m here walking around with maybe 4% of it activated. But the Christ, Jesus, when he came down, he had 100% of it activated. So that’s what it means to be fully God. He had the Fullness of God, the Son of God, and the Fullness of the Aeons of God, completely aware and active. And it is because of that that there is 3rd order power for everyone of us 2nd order powers because, if the Christ is 100%, then my 4% is covered within that 100%. It’s like a stencil overlay—parts of it are activated and parts of it are still hidden. So yes we believe in that Holy Spirit as well.
It goes on to say, “But those who say there was a time when he was not, and he was not before he was made, and he was made out of nothing, or he is of another substance or essence, or the Son of God is created or changeable or alterable, they are condemned by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” Period. Boom. That’s what it says.
And this is true. The Son, the original Son of the God Above All Gods, is consubstantial with the Father. He’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. He’s there and he was not created. And he is not changeable because he is the full essence of the Father and the Father is immutable—the Father never changes. It doesn’t matter what goes on down here in the Earth, it doesn’t get upstream. That’s why after death or after judgment or after the end of the material realm, none of the bad things go back up because the Father, the Fullness, and the Son are immutable. They never change. So our crap that goes on down here below is what gets burned up in the fire. It is what falls away and is forgotten. That’s why we need to repent, to be redeemed. We can’t be redeemed if we’re carrying a bunch of crap with us, because that can’t go back. You have to repent of the sins, repent of the misunderstandings and the mistakes and the lack of love. Repent of the hatred and the divisions. You repent of it. Then you turn around and accept the redemption of the 3rd order that’s standing right there with your face on it, and then you can go up.
And that’s going to happen sooner or later to everybody. It either happens while you’re living or it happens during the transition of death. Or it happens in your next life, or your next transition of death. You will keep coming back down until you repent so that you can be redeemed, because the bad stuff has to be thrown into the lake of fire. You’re not going in there. It’s the bad stuff that you’ve repented of. You don’t want it anymore. Forget about it. Kick it out of the nest. It’s gone.
And then, in the Constantinople version of 381, it ends by saying, “We believe in one holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.” OK, so Catholic used to just mean correct, but it’s come to mean that particular Catholic Church, and then Martin Luther came along and said, oh, you don’t have to be Catholic, you can be this thing called Protestant because we protest the Catholic Church. So now you’ve got to be a Protestant or a Catholic. And they all still believe in the same Nicene Creed. They acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.
So what is baptism? Is that really the ritual of being dunked into water or having water sprinkled on you, either as an infant or as a person who comes to the faith and accepts the Christ? Well, I would say it’s greater than that. The baptism is the Holy Spirit being invited in to baptize your entire soul. It’s when you exchange your 2nd order nature with the 3rd order power that you have invited in. The physical baptism of the water is a ritual that represents that baptism. It’s not the ritual that confers remission of sins. Remission means going away, the sins are gone. Being dunked in water doesn’t make you go to Heaven. What allows you to go to Heaven is to repent and be redeemed by the Christ. It’s the power of the Christ that does everything. It’s got nothing to do with what you do other than repenting of your sins. You do need to repent so that you could turn around and instead of facing the world, you turn around and you face the eternal. It’s a physical action and that allows for the sins to go away. They’re thrown away into that lake of fire. They’re forgotten.
And then we look for the resurrection of the dead, it says. There’s various views of resurrection depending on the church. Is everybody resurrected at once? The Rapture. If you’re still alive at the time it’s called the Rapture because you will be caught up and you won’t die, you will just fly up in Heaven. Or if you’re already dead, you’re gonna be pulled out of the ground and you’re gonna fly up into Heaven. Well, it’s not the physical body, of course, that is resurrected. It’s our spiritual body. It’s our aeonic inheritance. It’s that 4% now made 100% with the full knowledge of the Christ, because the 3rd order powers have come to indwell in me, and now I can go back home.
So we’re all going back home, even the Demiurge. “And the life of the world to come.” Yes. Amen. I’ll give that an Amen because that is our hope. We hope for a better world. We believe this is a fallen world and our hope and eternal life is above. The particularities of which Heaven, or how many levels of Heaven or blah blah blah—that really isn’t important. That’s nothing you need to know. It’s kind of above our pay grade, I think. All we need to know is repentance which leads to forgiveness and redemption. And acceptance that we are the fruit of the Fullness of God and to the Father, the God Above All Gods, we shall return.
OK. That’s my take on the Nicene Creed and how it relates to this Gnostic Christianity that I’ve been teaching. I hope this clarifies some aspects in your own mind. I hope it does not bring confusion. If you ever get confused by something I say, I urge you to write to me. Go ahead and contact me through the “contact me” form at gnosticinsights.com or you can go over to my substack, Cyd’s Gnostic Newsletter, it’s called. It’s also called the Gnostic Reformation, and that has comments open. You can go there and engage in actual dialogue with myself and with other people on these topics. God bless us all. Onward and upward.