Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review the relationship between fractal consciousness and the outflow of consciousness through Logos and the Aeons, and how the consciousness of Logos led to the Fall. I’ll be reading several verses from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi books. If you are new to Gnostic Insights, don’t worry about grasping everything I say. Just listen and go with the flow. The gnosis will reveal itself, so relax. AEONS “Each one of the aeons is a name, <that is>, each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another. It is possible to speak of him because of the wealth of speech, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names…” The Aeons of the Fullness of God became self-aware by the giving of praise and glory to the Father. This giving of glory is not for God’s benefit, but for the Aeon’s benefit. It gave them a righteous task to perform alongside their neighbors, which brought them to self-awareness and gave each of them a unique identity. The Aeons are innumerable because they reflect the totality of an infinite consciousness. “… the aeon of the Truth, since it is a unity and multiplicity, receives honor in the small and the great names according to the power of each to grasp it – by way of analogy – like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into streams and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root spread out beneath trees and branches with its fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.” LOGOS The final Aeon that was produced as an emanation of the Pleroma of the Fullness arose by all of the Aeons giving glory together. The Fullness thus produced a final Aeon whom the Tripartite Tractate calls by the name Logos. Because Logos was produced through the entirety of the Pleroma giving glory as one, this Aeon possessed within itself all of the characteristics of the entire Pleroma. This youngest Aeon carried within itself all of the traits of every other Aeon, perfect and complete. This was a very talented Aeon resembling the Son of God himself, who also carried all of the traits of the Aeons within its singular self. This final Aeon was named Logos, because he was also endowed with the ability to reason thoughtfully and to figure things out in a step-by-step manner. The word Logos in Greek means reason. “This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit…” All of the Aeons have free will, because the Father has free will and everything that emanates from the Father carries the attributes of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says, “for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one,” ( this one being Logos) , “such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.” “This aeon was last to have <been> brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude ,” [referring, I think, to this concept of fractal iterations…] “In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. This exhibition of similar patterns at increasingly smaller scales is called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry; if this replication is exactly the same at every scale, as in the Menger sponge, the shape is called affine self-similar.” [wikipedia] The construction of a Menger sponge can be described as follows: Begin with a cube. Divide every face of the cube into nine squares in a similar manner to a Rubik’s Cube . This sub-divides the cube into 27 smaller cubes. Remove the smaller cube in the middle of each face and remove the smaller cube in the center of the larger cube, leaving 20 smaller cubes. This is a level 1 Menger sponge (resembling a void cube). Repeat steps two and three for each of the remaining smaller cubes and continue to iterate ad infinitum . The second iteration gives a level 2 sponge, the third iteration gives a level 3 sponge, and so on. The Menger sponge itself is the limit of this process after an infinite number of iterations. The reason we’re talking about fractals is because consciousness is a fractal. Consciousness rolls out from the Father very much in the manner of any other fractal, where you have the Father’s consciousness to begin with, and then it keeps dividing, dividing, dividing, dividin
