Gnostic Insights

Is transgenderism a mental disorder? Is transexualism a delusional pursuit? Is sexual identity a cultural value arbitrarily assigned at birth? This is the topic of today’s discussion. My first experience with a person seeking transexual modification was as a private practice marriage counselor in Idaho, back in the early 1980’s. This fellow was seeking an official diagnosis of transexualism as required by the state in order to proceed with surgical procedures. He had been denied certification by other psychologists and was hoping I would provide him with the needed diagnosis. One session was enough for me to deny his claim. Why? After hearing his story, it turned out that his wife had recently decided she was a lesbian and no longer wanted to have sex with him. In order to save his marriage he decided to have his genitals surgically removed so he could “become a woman” to save their marriage. Though motivated by love for his wife, this reason would not qualify him for surgery under any transgender or transexual definition. I can tell you he was plenty pissed off by my refusal to go along with his plan. By definition, a transgendered individual is one who identifies with a gender incongruent with their body. They prefer dressing in clothing usually associated with the “other” gender and purposely minimize their secondary sexual characteristics. They may prefer engaging in activities more popular with the “other” gender. Population estimates of transgender persons has jumped from an historically steady 0.6% of the total population as of 2016 to 1.0% of the population surveyed in 2025, with young people ages 13-17 now accounting for 3.3% of the general population. Transexual is defined as taking the extra step of body modification through surgery or hormones to bring the body into closer congruence with self-identity. It is estimated that 25% to 30% of transgendered individuals now undergo body modification, up from an estimated 10% to 15% in the early 2000’s. What accounts for this rise in trans identity? Is it merely a rise in societal acceptance that grants the freedom to declare one’s identity publicly as many claim, or is there another, more gnostic, interpretation of this phenomena? Let’s consider this carefully. Many gnostic texts suggest that the spiritual plane is gendered and populated by male and female entities, which gives rise to tidy mythological pantheons of male and female gods. However, I question the meaning of the term “gender” as it applies to the aeonic realm. At least one important book of the Nag Hammadi makes no mention of gender in the spiritual realm, and that’s the Tripartite Tractate upon which this gnosis is based. [I take that back. Actually, there’s one mention of the fallen Aeon being as one stripped of their masculinity, but that’s more a statement of overall loss of integration and power arising from the fall.] Everything I’m sharing with you today is based upon the Tripartite Tractate and the logical conclusions that arise from that book. Yes, the terms “Father” and “Son” are assigned to the originating consciousness out of which our consciousness flows, but the meaning of those terms has nothing to do with sexual attributes or form. Neutral names like “Source” and “Offspring” would do as nicely but lack the personal relatability of family and the familiarity of traditional names. Sexual orientation and activity only applies to us creatures here in the Deficiency for purposes of reproduction. The portal between the ethereal and the so-called material cosmos requires a mechanism for fruiting the 2nd Order Powers arriving from the Fullness. Sexual activity is primarily responsible for populating the 2nd economy for all creatures above the level of bacteria, amoeba, fungi, and some plants and invertebrates. It would seem that the rules for fruiting changed from asexual to sexual as the complexity of the 2nd Order creatures arriving on the planet changed from smallest to largest. The Aeons are not male and female. They are fully integrated units of consciousness. What we call male identity and female identity reflect our lack of integration of our complete identity, or what Jung referred to as the lack of self-actualization of our animus and anima. In other words, our essential identities are neither male nor female but both. So identifying with either is actually a deficiency that represents incomplete individuation hampered by overidentification with the physical form. Male identity is misclassified as belonging to a man’s soul identity, or what we here at Gnostic Insights call “ego” identity. The same goes for female identity. Remember, all 2nd Order Powers share the same One Self consciousness that flows unimpeded from Above. What distinguishes us is our ego identity—our self-identified name, position, place, and duty. The same goes for the Aeons. The Aeons share their One identity with the Son as fractals of the Son, and are distinguished from one another by their self-iden

I had another episode planned for today, but at the last minute I decided to rerun this Christmas episode for you. I think this will become our traditional Christmas episode here at Gnostic Insights. And, if you are new to this podcast, welcome! Next week’s episode will be controversial, so I thought it best to wait until after Christmas for its release. Today, we’re going to look at the nature of the Christ—the who, what, why of Christ. Most people are familiar with seeing the baby Jesus in the manger and that’s what we celebrate at Christmas time, the birth of the Christ on Earth in the form of a human. But the Christ is an ethereal creature that predates the birth of Jesus. Jesus and the Christ aren’t exactly the same, although Jesus was fully Christ. The Christ predates the birth of the human known as Jesus. So, let’s learn more about the Christ and why the Christ figure is so essential to us Second Order Powers. Gnosticism is the forerunner of the modern Christian faith. As such, a better understanding of the figure of the Christ is essential to understanding both Gnosticism and Christianity. The cosmology that I talk about here on the podcast was well known to Jesus and his original followers, but it was cut out of Christianity about 1700 years ago by the Nicene Council, at the urging of the Pope and the Roman Emperor. Because this theology was subtracted from orthodox Christianity, many of the ideas of gnostic cosmology sound odd and unfamiliar to modern churchgoers. Some of the ideas may even sound heretical at first glance due to their unfamiliarity. Yet the theology contained in these early scriptures makes sense of so many puzzling aspects of Christian faith that they must be reexamined. That’s why I call the Substack The Gnostic Reformation. I’m confident that once you understand gnostic Christianity, you will better understand your relationship with God. According to gnostic cosmology as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, we humans and all other forms of life on Earth, from bacteria and eukaryotes on up, are the fruit of the Pleroma and Logos. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked in a never-ending battle for dominion over the Earth with forces that were generated as a result of the Fall. Due to the law of mutual combat, we have forgotten our origin in the Fullness and our mission to bring love and harmony to creation and have instead taken on many of the characteristics of the shadows of the Deficiency. The Second Order Powers are locked in a never-ending war with the Deficiency. Here below, we constantly battle the physical forces of death and entropy, as well as the spiritual forces of vice, sin, delusion and despair. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of this focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness, along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father. The singular fruit of the Fullness and the Father is known by various names: the Christ, the Savior and the Redeemer, the Advocate, the Light, and the Beloved. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled-up into one perfect form. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believed the same. Here is a more complete explanation of who Jesus was. It’s said that Jesus was conceived without sin because he carried within his body the perfection of man and God. This would mean that Jesus was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity. Hence the importance of the virgin birth that then imparted that perfect DNA to the baby. Jesus was also without negative karma attached to his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. The components of Jesus’s body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate. As Colossians 1:19 says, “For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on Earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.” This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic Gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and Son came to material instantiation on Earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggle between birth and death that plague us all. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures describes this process: “As for those of the shadow, Logos separated himself from them in every way, since they fight against him and are not at a

Last week’s episode, The Key to Gnostic Cosmology, was well-timed to greet the slew of new subscribers who joined The Gnostic Reformation as a result of the wonderful review by The New Unhinged that appeared on Mariah’s Substack website on November 28, 2025. It’s titled: Roast for Relief #17: The Gnostic Who Broke My Brain in the Best Way If you haven’t seen the piece yet, please hightail it over there and take a look. It’s funny and reverentially irreverent at the same time. I feel honored by Mariah’s appreciation and the hours she spent on the review. Today, I’m going to run through the Gnostic Cosmology again, this time pairing the explanations with illustrations from my kid’s book, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth . My brother Bill thinks the kid’s book will be the version that survives into the far future as a new Gnostic Gospel in some distant version of the Nag Hammadi codices. Personally, I’m not so sure there will be a far future here on this material plane, but we’ll see… In any event, I’m doing my best to get the hard cover edition into libraries and bookstores in the here and now. Meanwhile, we need more reader reviews to help the book rise up in amazon. So, please, buy the paperback or download the kindle version for free or almost free and then leave your review. You will be supporting gnosis and love. ALL of the following illustrations are from Children of the Fullness. For the purposes of this episode, I have removed the text from the pages and am only presenting the images as I narrate a grown-up version of the pictured events. Believe me, the kiddie book is written as a young child’s bedtime story. And because of that, the Gnostic characters are personified into recognizable forms. The Father looks like a father. The Son looks like a son. The Aeons are personified as Angels, although in truth, not all Aeons are angels. But kids can relate to angels, so I gave the Aeons wings and halos. I’m putting the illustrations into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you can go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustrations. The gnosis is simple. It has to be, because all living creatures know and embody it. So, if my dog can’t understand the gnosis, it ain’t gnosis, it’s just knowledge or good or bad information. And if you can grasp today’s illustrated gnosis, then you will have enough to go onward and upward. Sure, more explanations are nice, but they are not essential. All we really need to know is that we come from Above, and we will return to Above. That’s it in a nutshell. The rest is a lifetime of practicing love and embodying virtue. So let’s get started. The Father’s mind is the initial, illimitable consciousness. Consciousness is the ground state that predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows. There is no gender associated with this Father. Obviously the Father is not a man with a beard and long robes, rather “he possesses this constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through perception.” The Tripartite Tractate describes the Father this way: Whence also comes the title, the incomprehensible. If he is incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along with his form and his greatness and his magnitude. Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity—into a monad , as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father. This first illustration shows the Father holding his baby Son and showing Him the contents of His imagination. The facing page shows the mature Son releasing Aeons into the vision. The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the ALL were formed. The Totalities of the ALL are all of the variabilities that make up the Son, all broken out and enumerated. The Totalities of the ALL do not recognize themselves as individuals. It is only through their giving of glory to the Father and Son that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. In the children’s book, we skip the step where the Son divides itself into all of its discreet variables and jump right to the self-aware Aeons populating the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Now, back to the children’s book. The next page shows the Aeons giving glory to the Father and Son by singing their songs of praise.

In 2019 I posted an article to my new Gnostic Gospel blog called, If All Are Redeemed, Why Not Be Sinful? And I’d like to share that with you today. One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ and all will someday return to the Paradise of the Fullness. Yay! Everyone’s going to Heaven! No one is going to hell, not even the Fallen angels. What joy! This seems to fly in the face of Christian orthodoxy that promotes the idea that only those humans who confess a belief in Jesus as the Christ will make it into Heaven, and those who don’t believe in Jesus will go to an eternal damnation of suffering in hell. Conventional Christianity states that Jesus came to save humanity, but only those who acknowledge Jesus as the only Son of God and invite Him into their hearts will be saved. This is the basis for all evangelism and all churches that follow the Nicene Creed, which is to say, all Christian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. This is why Christians are so keen on saving souls. They don’t want you to suffer for eternity in hell. The Gnostic Church begs to differ with that common interpretation of Christ’s mission. According to the books of the Nag Hammadi library, all of creation will be redeemed and returned to the Fullness and the Father’s home in Heaven. All of creation, everyone and everything, will be made clean and pure and holy by the end. As they say, it’ll all be good in the end, and if it’s not good yet, then it’s not yet the end. Gnosis refers to the ability to use reason and logic to arrive at spiritual truth. So, let’s think together about this idea of Christ and redemption and who does or does not go to Heaven. First, if Christ’s redemption were a matter of your belief, then Christ’s mission of salvation would be limited to what you believe. In other words, you would be the one holding the power of salvation, not Christ. Does that make any sense to you? Are you the one who redeems or is Christ? Can you see how making your belief central to redemption actually limits the power of Christ? Can you see how that makes sinful humans more powerful than the mission of Christ’s redemption? Limiting Christ to your belief, it seems to me, is the greater heresy than simply trusting Christ to accomplish the mission. It is Christ’s job to redeem humanity, not yours. Second, according to Gnostic texts, all creatures great and small will be redeemed. This means that all creatures are going to Heaven. My dog has never professed a belief in Jesus as the Christ, yet my dog is going to Heaven. The fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the insects, the forest animals, all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ. It is the job of the Christ to redeem creation, irrespective of creation’s ability to confess that fact. Do you think that only good dogs go to Heaven? Or nice fishes? Maybe only herbivores? Perhaps only parrots who can say, Jesus saves! Once we concede that it is only the Christ that can redeem, then what is the point of leading a virtuous life? Why not sin up until the end, have all kinds of fun, and then waltz into Heaven without repentance? Repentance, by the way, means to feel sorrow and regret. Are we allowed to sin willy-nilly with no negative consequences? An even more profound question is, why were we created in the first place? According to the Tripartite Tractate, the Second Order Powers were created in order to rescue the Fallen Aeon known as Logos. The most perfect and complete of the individual Aeons, Logos crowned the top of the aeonic hierarchy. This single Aeon consisted of all the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled up into one individual. And as you know by now from listening to the first eight episodes of Gnostic Insights, Logos had fallen from the Fullness and smashed to smithereens in a lower dimension. The broken bits of Logos scattered into space, forming our material universe along with a host of powers and personalities, including demons, evil djinn, and archons. Logos imagined he could build the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and possessed all of the necessary talents. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father. As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits. Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness, now there was a division and a turning away. The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos, “could not bear to look at the light but looked at the depths, and he faltered.” That’s verse 77 of the Tripartite Tractate. Going on to verse 78: “What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance—[by the way, that’s another word for ego]—what issued from his ego had existed

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I think we’ve got a lot of new listeners now and new subscribers. And since you haven’t been with us from the beginning, I’d like to review the Gnostic cosmology. A basic premise of Gnosticism is that we are all born with gnosis inherent within us. We already have the answers. We already are our perfect Selves. But because of the nature of the never-ending war that we find ourselves in here in this material cosmos, we forget our inherent nature. And we begin to engage in the war through what the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi calls the law of mutual combat . That being, since we are attacked, we attack back. And then we engage in that back and forth enough that we completely forget our mission and our goal and who we are. So today, I want to run through what I call the illustrated Gnostic cosmology. And I’m putting the illustration into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you really would do well to go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustration that we’re talking about. Now, when you first look at this Gnostic cosmology, it’s very strange looking, and it’s probably incomprehensible. But by the time I talk you through this, you’ll be able to follow the steps. There are 15 steps in this Gnostic cosmology. And once you recognize these stations, then you will literally understand Gnosis. You will remember your Gnosis, and you’ll understand what all of the various versions of Gnosticism have been trying to say. One reason is that this is a pictorial presentation. It’s not just words, because I’ve noticed when reading the various books of the Nag Hammadi, for example, some of which are Valentinian Gnosticism, some of which are Sethian Gnosticism, some are straight-out Greek philosophy by Plato. They use different words, but the concepts are the same. So what I always attempt to do is to level up to a meta-level, above the words, and envision and then picture it so that you can describe it with the words you prefer. So let’s get started. The background image of this entire Gnostic cosmology key I picture as pure inky blackness, like the sky with no stars or moons. That is the ground state of consciousness. And that is the Father’s mind. Now the Father is another one of these words where many people would like to disagree with saying Father. They want to say Source, or, for example, as it is called in the Secret Book of John, the One, the Parent, the Invisible Spirit. However, in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, which is the book that I mainly use as a reference, that initial, illimitable consciousness is called the Father. Now, that’s the ground state. That’s the first principle. Consciousness is not a byproduct of the little gray cells. Consciousness predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows. Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity, into a monad, as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the All were formed. That’s step number three. And the Totalities of the All are all of the variabilities that make up the Son. So, the Totalities and the Son are coexistent, but it is all of the characteristics broken out and enumerated that form what are called the Totalities of the All. The Totalities of the All do not recognize themselves as individuals. They are only spokes on the wheel. They have no personal identity. They know that they are part of the Son, and they glorify the Son, and they glorify the Father. So, they are glorifying upstream, as we like to say. And it is through this giving of glory that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. Now, instead of one singular unit that is coexistent entirely with the Son, they blossom into self-identities, and they arrange themselves in a hierarchy. So, step four is the Totalities of the All migrating from a burst of sunshine that’s sitting within the Son into a pyramidal shape, because the pyramid is the essential shape of a hierarchy. There’s more at the bottom than there is at the top. Everything keeps leveling up, following a basic Gnostic rule of the higher the fewer , until you eventually arrive at a capstone at the very top, just like our physical pyramids look. And this entity, at number five, is called the hiera

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week we started an episode called Gnostic Psychology Slideshow, Part One, and today we’re going to wrap that up. It’s a slideshow that I presented at my class at Southern Oregon University on the Simple Gnostic Gospel, and so I will be describing for you and posting the transcript on the GnosticInsights.com website and also at Substack. In the written transcripts, you’ll be able to see the PowerPoint slides, which really, I think, helps to clear things up, to clear up confusion, by the imagery. If you’re listening to the audio-only version, you might want to go to the websites, one or the other, and look at the slideshow too. Last week in Gnostic Psychology Part One, we talked about Who am I? Who is a human being? Who are you? And in my way of thinking, we are a combination of units of consciousness; memes and the memes we carry in our meme shroud; karma; and our One true Self, which is a replication of the One consciousness of the Father; the aeonic inheritance we have from our parents in the Fullness; and our body, our material body, which comprises our DNA and our human parents, our inheritance, as well as the units of consciousness of the 37 trillion cells in our body. There’s a therapeutic application for this Gnostic Psychology. And if you look at my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, or you go to my 20-year-old website and look up https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com you can find this particular explanation in depth. I think that would be a good bumper sticker or t-shirt. Gnosis you can trust. Again, if you’re following along with the slideshow, and this will be called Gnostic Psychology Part 2, the values on the left are egoic and they are demiurgic and they are from the deficiency, the imitation. The values on the right are from the true Self, from the Fullness of God, and they are traits of the Father. So, I don’t want to read through this whole list. It’s a very long list, but for example, a vice would be to be hateful, spiteful. The virtue that’s the flip side is to be loving, charitable. So, if you find yourself hating someone, it’s not virtuous, it’s not righteous, it’s demiurgic. We are called to love others, and indeed that is our Second Order task. We were sent here to remind the fallen demiurge that there is a Father above, that there is life and love, and that it comes from above. The Demiurge is a fractal of Aeonic ego, being the ego of fallen Logos. We are also fractals, so we want to dwell on the Aeonic Fullness side rather than the fallen demiurgic side. Another example would be hard-hearted, ruthless on the left, and the virtuous side is to be merciful. One of the vices is to be slothful, lazy. The virtue side is to be useful, to be part of the solution. The left is illogical, incoherent. It makes no sense because it’s built on lies. The right is logical. The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything theory of everything that I developed starts with a single premise that consciousness is the ground state of reality, and then everything derives from that first premise. The Gnostic gospel that I teach, or that I share with you, because I don’t have to teach you Gnosis, we’re all born with the Gnosis, so it’s inherent in us. We just need to be reminded because we’ve been caught in a never-ending war. So, for example, if a person has an eating disorder, and let’s say you eat uncontrollably, you eat far too much, and you eat the wrong things, and you know you should cut back, and you know you should eat better because it’s just not good, because you feel sluggish, and your health is suffering. That is because you’ve allowed your organ system of the digestive tract to rule. It’s an even further down fractal iteration than ego. Your ego wants to lose weight because you want to look good. You want to fit into that new outfit or whatever. You want to be attractive to the opposite sex, but you can’t control your eating. That’s because you have ceded your control to your digestive system. Willpower is difficult because that food is very attractive, and your digestive system is very powerful because you’ve given it so much authority, and it’s become accustomed to ruling you. You have to go a step to the right. You have to get on to the virtue side, and instead of being gluttonous, which is a vice, you want to be temperate. So, how do you get on the virtuous side? By turning your eyes upward to the Fullness of God, by asking for the Father’s assistance, or asking for the Son’s assistance to overcome this demiurgic slavery that you’ve found yourself in. This works for all vices, for all addictions. Now, if that’s too difficult, this is where the Christ comes in, because the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. So, it’s y

Welcome to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp and I’m your host. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack . And welcome to my new listeners and readers. So glad to have you aboard. And of course, I’m always very grateful for those of you who have been with this series since the beginning. This week was my final lecture at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University on the Gnostic Gospel and the topic was Gnostic Psychology. So I’m going to share with you that final slideshow today because it’s easier than coming up with a brand new episode when I’m having to work on these lectures. Of course, this Gnostic material is complicated and yet it’s simple. Once you get it, everything falls into place, but I can understand that it’s difficult to grasp it initially. I’m happy to share with you that my students that have been with me for nine weeks now, they’ve got it. They finally got it. It’s all fallen into place. So it happens. So let’s look at the slideshow from this week’s lecture on Gnostic Psychology. And if you’re listening to this as an audio only podcast, I suggest you go either to Substack, to the Gnostic Reformation, or to my home base website, GnosticInsights.com, and visualize the slideshow because it’s pretty and the diagrams really help the audio information make sense. When we talk about Gnostic Psychology, I’m going to answer the question of who we are, and we’re going to cover six topics. We’re going to talk about units of consciousness, memes, karma, Self, Aeonic inheritance, and then how your body even gets into the picture when we’re talking about the psychology. All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception. Let’s start with units of consciousness . This concept comes out of my original theory of everything called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, but it’s very useful and it works in the Gnostic setting as well. And that would be an infinite number, because the Son reflects the infinity of the Father. The Totalities of the ALL have no self-identity. They still identify with the Son. They’re parts of the Son. But during the giving of glory and the singing upstream to the Father and the Son, the Totalities recognized their individuality and immediately sorted themselves into the hierarchy of the fullness of God. And I would say that that differentiation of the Aeons into self-identity was the formation of their egos. The next concept is distributed fractal consciousness . Now we’ve talked a lot about fractals here at Gnostic Insights, and if you don’t know what a fractal is, please go to GnosticInsights.com and look up the episodes about fractals, and you’ll learn about it. Because consciousness is fractally distributed. Another factor in our psychology is memes. My illustration of that is to show that torus, that donut shape, with all these strings lying on the outside of it. Just tons of strings stuck to the outside of your torus. That’s not an official gnostic concept. That’s out of my Simple Explanation and I’ll talk a little more about the torus later. These memes are units of thought. They’re vibratory things and each one carries a thought. The memes dwell, I think, in the transpersonal unconscious or the akashic record. They are immaterial. They’re thought forms. Memes and karma go together. Now, comparing Freud and Jung’s theories to this Gnostic psychology: In terms of fractals, the body’s units of consciousness are smaller fractal iterations of the Fullness of God than my governing unit of consciousness. The Self is connected to the Fullness of God at all times, though we often ignore it. The Ego sits on the outside because it is in contact with others and the material world. Okay, we’re going to stop there for today. There are a few more slides in this slide show, but this is a good place to stop. Perhaps I’ll pick them up next week and we’ll talk more about Gnostic psychology and then how it is applied therapeutically. Until then, God bless us all and onward and upward! Please do what you can to support this independent Gnostic ministry. You can show your support by leaving comments and questions that prompt me toward sharing gnosis with you. You can also show your support by subscribing to Gnostic Insights and/or The Gnostic Reformation on Substack. And, of course, financial support is always welcomed! Thank you for whatever you can do to contribute. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form. Name * First Last Email * Stripe Credit Card * Choose your item * Item A - $10.00 Item B - $25.00 Item C - $50.00 Total $0.00 Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to share with you the PowerPoint lecture that I gave yesterday at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University, and the topic is Christ and the Third Order of Powers. We began with a review using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart, and this is just a very… this is too difficult of a chart to describe to you. You’ll have to see it, so I recommend that you go to GnosticInsights.com and find this episode, or the Gnostic Reformation. This is the current episode here on Substack, but I begin every class with a full review of what we have done before using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart that I have designed, and I was very heartened to see that yesterday the class was able to name all of the parts. I think that is extraordinary, and so good for you, class! Now after the chart, here we begin the lecture. Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance, and it is also called Synagogue of Salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought. Now what does that mean? “The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability.” That is Logos after the Fall, and now he has returned back up to the Fullness of God, pulled up there by the prayers of the Fullnesses, his brothers. He has returned to his stability. He’s sitting at the top of the pile again like he used to be before he fell. Now his shadow remains below, his shadow being the Demiurge and all of those broken imitations of his original Pleroma. You know the Logos is a fractal of the entire Fullness of God formed by when the Fullnesses gave glory to God all together in unison, and what they produced out of that unity was the Logos, and he contains a fractal representation of every one of the Aeons within him. However, it is a fractal level down, and it was that Logos that fell, and so the shadows of the fractals of Logos are what remain behind and become our material universe. Now back to this quote, “the thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him.” Those who had come into being because of him is all of us second-order powers, not the shadows, because they are not really beings. They do not really exist, but we second-order powers are the fruit of Logos and the Fullness together praying for help to come into the deficiency to rescue his abandoned ego that we called the Demiurge. So this sentence is saying that the thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him, that’s us , “was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance.” You see, we second-order powers, which is every living thing in the cosmos , we were brought forward in accord with the ordinance, which I believe to be something along the lines of the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to the other Fullnesses, and they held hands and prayed together, and we were brought forth as fruit. So that was the ordinance. And it says that Logos is called the Synagogue of Salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, and that dispersal was after the Fall when his Pleroma rolled out and became the material universe, which he abandoned down here. And it says that “the dispersal was the multifarious thought, and he returned to the single thought.” So that multifarious thought, which means a whole lot of different thoughts, multifarious , that’s all of those independent little tiny egos that are the shadows of the ego of Logos that fell, the shadows of the Demiurge, the parts of the deficiency, those are the multifarious thoughts. They don’t come from the single good thought of the Father, but they come from an infinite number of egoic, selfish thoughts. It says that he healed himself from that dispersal, and that’s when he abandoned it down below and went back up to the Fullness, and he returned to the single thought. The single thought is the good thought of the Father, the good thought of the Son. God is one giant good thought, the God Above All Gods. The true Self, with a capital S, that we all carry inside of all of our living parts, is the single thought of the Father. And we’re born with that. That’s all that we need to remember. That’s all that we forget. But when we’re in ego, we’re part of the multifarious thought. We’re thinking anything but the Father. There is one of the second order powers for every one of the likenesses of the Fall. Whereas the likenesses are shadows of the Aeons, we second order powers are the true fractal fruit of Logos, and we bring life, co

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, and I’d like to welcome our new readers and listeners. What is the Antichrist? By definition, of course, the Antichrist would be the opposite of the Christ. So, before we understand the Antichrist, it would be helpful to understand what we can about the Christ. Christ, according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, is composed of the Aeons of the Fullness, both in their aggregated entirety known as the Pleroma of the Fullness of God, or the hierarchy of the Fullness of God, along with their personal individual forms, which are the Aeons, the infinite infinity of variations of the Son that are called the Fullnesses or the Aeons or the Totalities. So the Christ is powered by the full force of the Holy Spirit, the Son, and the Fullness of God. The Christ has all the mojo of the ethereal plane. In order to restore memory, reason, and redemption to the second-order powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of their focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father, and that is what we call Christ or the Christ. So here’s how the Tripartite Tractate describes the Christ. “They gathered together asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above from the Father for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one.” And the defective one, in this quote, has to do with the Demiurge that arose from the Aeon known as Logos. “Then from the harmony and a joyous willingness which came into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit. And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which was his beloved Son. “But the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased put himself on them as a garment through which he gave perfection to the defective one and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, the one who is properly called Savior and the Redeemer and the Well-pleasing One and the Beloved and the One to Whom Prayers have been Offered and the Christ and the Light of those Appointed in Accordance with the Ones from Whom He was brought Forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given him. Yet what other name may be applied to him except the Son, as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know.” This paragraph describes the fruit of the Aeons called the Christ, that he possesses all of the traits, that is the names of the positions and all of their characteristics, all of the virtues of all of the Aeons of the God Above All Gods, and all of that essentially adds up to the original Son of the Father that came directly from the Father. So the Son and Christ aren’t exactly the same because the Christ was created later than the Son. However, the Son and the Christ share the same characteristics, so by this time it is the Son. That’s kind of confusing, but they are different entities because they were created in different ways. The Son is directly emanated from the Father itself, from the original consciousness. The Son is the monad version of the otherwise illimitable Father. But the Christ is the Fullness of God, both as the Fullness itself and the individual Aeons that had differentiated out of the Son, all rolled up together, with the blessing of the Father. So it’s a slightly different character, yet they do have all the characteristics. So I can see why the Tripartite Tractate finally rolls it up into saying, you might as well say, it’s the Son. And this is interesting about the Christ. “Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but they also generated their own. For the Aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony.” And by the way, we’re talking about the Fullness of God. We’re talking about the hierarchy of the Fullness of God and all the Aeons, the infinite number of Aeons that dwell in the Fullness of God. And so when the Christ was formed, he came forth not simply as Jesus Christ with the face of Jesus. He c

This is the lecture I delivered to my adult education class this week. It caused quite a stir. One dedicated atheist dropped the class at this point in a huff. It seems that the class is quite alright discussing gnostic concepts in the abstract, but when it comes down to Earth, then it gets real. Suddenly it’s a war between science and religion. The part that ticked off some of the students was demonstrating conscious life within the cells. In other words, consciousness comes down to the cellular level and then levels up through intelligent design to become us through cell division and differentiation. This slide show has three embedded YouTube videos. The links within the pdf are not active, so I have included them here at the top of this transcript. Note that the Harvard biologist who narrates the first video is personifying consciousness within the cellular proteins. This is not an accident of language, but demonstrates that even biologists ascribe consciousness to these proteins although they would be loathe to admit it. Note that there is a pulldown bar immediately next to the images so you can proceed through the entire lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp6qRNNGPj4&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGPflE5eHrU&t=2s Second Order powers– the new pleroma of Download

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

We recently had an episode called Synchronicities, broadcast on September 13th of 2025 . In that episode I reviewed a Why Files episode about synchronicities and shared some amazing synchronicities that look like coincidences, but they’re just too precise to be coincidental. They give an indication of this very strange nature of the universe that we live in, and in that episode we discussed how the quantum mechanics of this universe at the quantum level seem to explain how these amazing synchronicities occur. In the synchronicities episode, I talked about one of the funny things about quantum mechanics—that whenever someone looks at an object in a scientific experiment at the subatomic level, peering into the subatomic level through their experiment, it is said that “observation collapses potential” and makes the reality. This is because before we observe something, it exists in a state of what is called superposition . Remember, at the subatomic level there’s no such thing as particles. It’s all waves and probabilities. It’s more like a blur, and it doesn’t stop spinning through all of its possibilities until it is observed and then, at that point in time, when it is observed, it stops being a blur of all possible positions and it collapses into one position, solely through the process of being observed by a watchful consciousness. Another strange aspect of quantum mechanics is known as quantum entanglement. This is when two—and it’s not even right to call them objects or particles because they’re not, there is no material reality, it’s all waves and probabilities and forces—when two such subatomic objects have a relationship with each other, no matter how far the space is between them, then when one of them is observed in an experiment, and it stops its superpositional blur at that moment in time, landing on a particular way of being or way of appearing, then the object it is entangled with also collapses at the same exact moment, even though it’s not the one that’s being observed. Furthermore, this entangled “collapse” is instantaneous—faster than light. Quantum Mechanical entanglement at a distance Not only that, but balance is always occurring throughout the universe, because when one entangled thing collapses in a spin right direction, for example, its entangled partner collapses as spin left. Or when one photon, for example, moves vertically, its polarized partner moves horizontally. In this manner, the universe remains balanced and symmetrical. You can think of it this way: imagine two entangled quanta were a pair of gloves spinning so fast you couldn’t tell which was right and which was left. Once you observe object A to be a the right glove then object B instantly becomes a left glove. If the same object A had been observed to be the left glove, object B would have instantly become the right glove. And before observation, both gloves were simultaneously right and left, left and right, both states at once. Now let us think about this with some gnostic logic. We say that the mind of God is the ground state of all of the consciousness. Another way of saying this is that consciousness permeates every corner of everywhere—both on the ethereal plane and down here on the material plane. So, if observation affects quanta, then quanta are being observed all of the time by the mind of God. It is this Godly observation that holds the cosmos in its balanced physical state. This is how entangled quanta can affect their partners instantaneously. There is no distance or time in the ethereal realm and all of creation is held in steady state within the mind of God, so this is how and why a quark that is observed by a human is instantly balanced with its entangled partner, even if it is on the other side of the universe. In that Synchronicities episode, we talked about quantum field meditation—visualizing potential and then collapsing it into reality. Let’s say that you are moved to want something good for you that’s within God’s will. According to the quantum field meditation as discussed in the Why Files episode , your intentional desire and focus is said to collapse that intention into reality. Quantum field meditation visualizes the potential and, “collapses it” into reality. That’s what happens in healing meditations. You intentionally visualize getting well and it eventually heals the part of you that’s broken. Setting clear intentions is the first step. Quoting from the Why Files’ episode: “every nanosecond, infinite decisions are being made that cause the infinite possibilities to collapse into this one reality. But you can learn to influence the outcome of all those decisions. You can alter your small corner of reality.” My brother Bill and I had a follow-up conversation last week about that concept. He had come to the realization that there is no “collapse” in the sense that the superpositional blur changes int

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what Gnosis is, and hopefully be able to actually realize Gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts. You may purchase my original Gnostic Gospel at gnosticinsights.com or any online book dealer. By the way, what is Gnosis? We keep talking about Gnosis and Gnostic. Gnosis means knowing, and in the Gnostic frame of reference, Gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our creation, and the creation of the entire cosmos. It is thought that we hold all of this knowledge within ourselves, and we have complete access to the Creator of the universe at any time that we turn our focus on the Creator, and it is this direct conduit to the Creator that gives us what is called Gnosis. G-N-O-S-I-S, that’s a Greek word. Another related word to Gnosis, and this is a big word, is anamnesis. You know the word amnesia means forgetting? Anamnesis means not forgetting. So, the process of coming to Gnosis is a process called anamnesis. Today we’re going to talk about the qualities of the All, and how the All became what is called the Pleroma, and the Aeons of the Pleroma. Many people claim that it’s impossible to know or describe the full glory of the transcendent, immortal Father of Consciousness due to our own limitations. I mean, how could limited beings such as ourselves possibly imagine the greatness of the Originator of the universe, much less our place in the grand design? Wouldn’t lesser beings reflect a diminished view of God? Wouldn’t these lesser beings be limited to offering a tarnished glory that falls far short of the object of their praise? The Tripartite Tractate, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I’m working off of, the Tripartite puts it this way. If the members of the All had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who Himself is the All. Thus, creation would have been doomed from the outset to never comprehend the full glory of either the Father or itself. According to the Gnostic gospel, the Father realized this impossibility and so built a helpful workaround meant to aid comprehension: selfless union and cooperation with others in a shared task. Quoting from the Tripartite again, For that reason they were drawn into mutual intermingling union and oneness through the singing of praise. From their assembled Fullness they were one and at the same time many. Accurately reflecting the One who Himself is the entirety of the All. Out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the All gave glory to the Eternal One who had brought it forth. The glory given out of this perfect communion left the All perfect and full, as it was perfect and full to begin with, and the object of their glory was also perfect and full. This phase of the All is referred to as the second glory, with the Son being called the first glory. Then when the Son differentiated into all of its variables, into all of its individual parts, like rays bursting out of a central star, that is called the All, and this is what we’re discussing today. The Son’s variables all differentiated is the ALL Now, this perfect state of union with the Son and communion with each other didn’t last. Because of their combined effort, the All became self-aware, and it became they. So at first the All was a singular entity that was a complete duplication and reflection of the Son, who itself was a complete duplication and reflection of the Father of Consciousness itself. So at first the All was one singular organism, since it was freshly evolved out of the Son, but then it became self-aware, and the various variables within the Son, the various parts of that singular entity, each of those parts became self-aware. And that is what is causing this evolution of consciousness from the singular It of the All to the They. No longer simply an unaware member of the All singing in unison with the same song of praise, the All became aware of its individual traits, and the singing came to be produced by the will of each individual Aeon. An Aeon is spelled A-E-O-N. And in Gnosticism, an Aeon is an entity. It is a singular consciousness. So each Aeon is a reflection of the Father’s countless qualities and powers. The Aeons conceived themselves in order to know themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for pure consciousness to become differentiated and self-aware. And in philosophy, this is called monadism, not that you have to know that, but the Son is a monad, that is a singular thing. And the Father wished to have company, let’s say, and so the monad split into individual POVs, or points of view. The moment It became They,

This week I appeared as a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. I’m going to make that YouTube video this week’s episode. The interview went well and the viewers like it very much, judging by their Comments of the episode. I’m including the YouTube link here on the transcript. The episode is called “What Is The Gnostic Pleroma? ” The episode lasts an hour and a half. People in Comments said it was their favorite episode from Aeon Byte. Seemed to cause quite a positive stir among the viewers. It’s funny, when the interview was over and we were saying our goodbyes, I failed to say “onward and upward” to Miguel and he noticed and called me out on it. He wanted to hear the blessing! Isn’t that sweet? On this Aeon Byte appearance I also give a reading of my new kiddie book “Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.” I encourage you to go watch it and let me know what you think. All of my gnostic books are available for purchase on amazon.com. I always price my book as low as amazon will allow in order to make them more accessible to the greatest number of people. PLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW ON AMAZON! Thank you, ONWARD AND UPWARD! AND GOD BLESS. cyd Here’s the YouTube transcript of the interview below . My name is Miguel Connor and I am still your pompatus of Gnosis– that man across the waters of creation. And good to see everybody on this moon day. And very excited today because we will be discussing a topic that is very important and often uh misunderstood about Gnosticism and that is the pleroma. And I can’t think of anybody better to engage in this conversation than our guest Dr. Cyd Ropp. She will be discussing her new work, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Gospel. And of course, we will touch upon the great ideas from her other recent book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And yeah, check it out. Definitely check it out if you’re looking for a good audio book. I do the narration and you will be taken on an amazing Gnostic journey of awakening that is useful for you. Cyd, thank you very much as always for coming to the virtual Alexandria. My pleasure. I always like to be here. Thanks, Miguel. We always like to have you here. Life the the world is better. Well, the world is the world, but at least uh the psyche is better. And with us, too, we got Mr. Graham Pong. Graham, how are you doing on a Monday? Are you Garfield or something other? Oh, no. I’m something other. I’m definitely uh this week I’m much more a fan of one of my favorite uh existential philosophers, Alfred E. Newman. You know “what me worry?” seems to be the answer to this mad world we’re in. Exactly. Exactly. There are answers and you got to find them where you find them. Again, I keep quoting Julian of Norwich. “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner things shall be well.” It’s going to be okay. And certainly Cyd’s work and mining the Valentinian Tripartite Tractate tells us that. So uh well where do we start? First we want to look at your new book. We’ll talk about the pleroma but first Children of the Fullness. This is something you’ve been working for on for a long time, right Cyd? Well, one of my listeners, I also have a podcast– Gnostic Insights– and one of my listeners suggested a children’s book. She’s a young mom, little kids. She goes, “I can’t find any Gnostic children’s books.” And I believe that I have written the first ever Gnostic kiddie book. And it’s ironic because people have this idea–and of course the way a lot of gnosticism is presented, it is very labyrinthian– but they have this idea that gnosis is impossible to achieve or it’s so difficult how can we grasp it? And I have actually simplified it down to uh well the book is 34 pages long but it’s double page spreads like kiddie books are. It’s a big size book and so it’s actually simplified down to only 17 story boards that aged 2 to eight can understand. And really, their parents. I’m thinking they’re the ones that are going to be sapping it up the most—the people that are reading this book to the kids. So, it’s very exciting to be able to produce a book in a cartoon type of way for little ones that’s true. Brilliant idea. Love it. Love it so much. And what’s was the process? I mean, your process was to even simplify it more while it’s still understandable. The script. Yeah. How did you find an artist? What was the process? Okay, I’ll tell you the whole thing. First of all, the whole simple thing because I want to mention that to people. I believe in simplicity. Truth is simple. The more excess verbiage you slap on it, generally the further it wanders from the simplicity of truth. And the most profound truths are the simplest. So whenever I write anything, I’m not only thinking of writin

This week I re-watched an episode of The Why Files. Are you familiar with The Why Files? It’s a very fun show I watch on YouTube regularly. The episode I watched again was called Synchronicities, the Science Behind Your Meaningful Coincidences , and this was first broadcast in June of 2025. I enjoyed it a lot. I’d seen it before, but I wanted to watch it again. You know, we talk about synchronicities in the Gnostic community. It’s a word that was created by Carl Jung, and as we know, Carl Jung was Gnostic, and he, in particular, appreciated the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book out of the Nag Hammadi Codices that we use, the Tripartite Tractate. That’s our major focus here on Gnostic Insights. Well, anyway, the name of the host for YouTube is AJ. The episode on synchronicities that AJ talked about was a really astounding episode, and if you haven’t seen it or if you’ve never seen the Why Files, I recommend it. [Another thing I learned this week was that it’s possible to get the transcripts of episodes from YouTube videos. I didn’t know how to achieve that before, but I think now it’s part of the new AI “enhancement” of our world. I put enhancement in quotes because the verdict is out as far as I’m concerned, whether AI is an improvement or not. But anyway, I was able to ask the new YouTube AI for the transcript, and then it magically appeared, and so I have the transcript from that episode that I’m working off of.] The thing I liked most about this episode were the synchronicities that AJ cited. There’s some pretty incredible stories, and I’m going to share a few of those with you today. Then Bill and I talked about it. It was his favorite episode that I’d ever recommended to him, and so then we had one of our long talks yesterday about this episode, and I wish I had recorded it, but I didn’t, so instead I came away with three pages of notes as we were talking on the phone. I’m going to try to coordinate here my notes with the transcript and do it all in a way that makes sense. So here’s the story that AJ tells during this episode of The Why Files, and since I have the transcript, I think I’ll just quote him because he tells it well. Listen to this. “In June of 2001, Laura Buxton released a balloon at her grandparents’ anniversary party. She was 10 years old, living in Stafford, England. She wrote her name and address on a tag, tied it to the balloon, and let it go. The balloon traveled 140 miles south. It landed in a hedge in Wiltshire, where another 10-year-old girl found it, and her name was also Laura Buxton. The second Laura wrote the first, and they arranged to meet. Both girls showed up wearing pink sweaters and jeans. Both brought their pet guinea pigs. Both guinea pigs were orange and white, and of course the guinea pigs had the same name, and the coincidences kept piling up. Both Lauras were the same height. Both had brown hair and blue eyes. Both had three-year-old black labs at home, and both also had gray rabbits. When they opened their bags, both had packed the same stuffed animal, identical. And the odds of all this happening are so crazy that it’s mathematically impossible, but it happened. There’s plenty of photos and video. The news covered the story. This is not an urban legend.” So that raises the question, how does such an impossible thing happen? Well, Bill and I talked about that, and we have a good theory that fits in with our jello universe concept. Let’s go on to another amazing synchronicity. Quoting AJ again, “Anthony Hopkins needed a book. The book was The Girl from Petrovka. He was playing the lead in the film and searched every bookstore in London with no luck. It was out of print. Hopkins had finally given up when he was sitting on a bench, waiting for a train. Someone left a book on the bench. He picked it up. It was The Girl from Petrovka . But this wasn’t just any copy. This one had handwritten notes in the margins, personal observations, character analysis. Hopkins studied the book for his role. Two years later, while shooting the film, Hopkins met the author, George Feifer. While they talked about the book, Feifer mentioned that he’d lent his personal copy to a friend, that the friend had lost it on the London Underground. All of his notes, his analysis, gone. He was disappointed. Hopkins heard this and said, wait here. He ran to fetch the book from his trailer. He showed Feifer. It was the same book. Feifer’s handwriting, his notes, everything. Somehow the universe sent that book to the actor playing the lead, and then the universe sent the book back to its owner.” I’m going to share one more astounding synchronicity with you, and then we’ll get to the discussion of it. Quoting again, “Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son, attracted death, presidential death. April 14th, 1865, Robert was

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Boy, am I busy lately. I’m preparing a 10-week course to teach “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel” at Southern Oregon University, which begins in a couple of weeks, so I’m busy with that. I’ve also been doing a lot of publishing. I’m waiting to receive the hardback copy of Children of the Fullness, a Gnostic Myth . Once I see that and that it looks good, I can release that book as a hardcopy and hopefully get it into libraries. That’s my ultimate goal with Children of the Fullness . It’s available now, of course, on Amazon for only $9.99 or free on Kindle for $3 if you don’t have a Kindle subscription. So, it’s affordable and it’s really neat. It’s got beautiful illustrations. People like it. It’s very short. Everyone can understand this version of the Gnostic Gospel. Children of the Fullness is the first ever gnostic kid’s book! I have an upcoming appearance on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, the YouTube version, and that will be on September 15th of 2025. Miguel asked me to be prepared to discuss the Children of the Fullness book and also the concept of pleromas. So, we’re going to review pleromas in today’s episode. This is from an original broadcast that was in November of 2022, but it always bears repeating. “Pleroma” is a common word in gnostic scriptures, and it has a particular meaning that only relates to the Gnostic Gospels. In fact, we gnostics are expecting to wind up at the end of days in a Pleroma that others usually call “Heaven.” Today, I’d like to take a closer look at Pleromas in order to discover where we all came from and where we will wind up at the end of days. Pleroma is a Greek word for “all that which is contained within a body or organization.” The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the Pleroma we most often refer to here at Gnostic Insights. The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the sum total of all the individual characteristics and powers of the originating consciousness of the Father as manifested in the monad known as the Son. Here is how the Pleroma of the Fullness is described in the Tripartite Tractate: “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…” This first differentiation of the properties contained in the Son is known as the ALL or the Totalities. The Pleroma of the ALL is pictured as a central star with rays going out in all directions, yet unified without personal identity within the single body and will of the Son. When the Totalities of the ALL become self-aware, they name themselves and sort themselves into the Pleroma of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. “… 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.” This passage tells us that the aeon of the Truth—which is another word for the Fullness, or Pleroma, of God goes forth by way of fractal branching. You may review the concept of fractals by looking back to the Gnostic Insights episode called, “A Fractal Model of Human Nature,” posted May 18, 2021. which you can find at gnostic insights dot com under the tab, “Complete Episodes Library.” I’m also linking it in the transcript of this episode. The Pleroma of Logos is the sum total of all of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness that exist as fractal iterations within the body of the Aeon known as Logos. “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; for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.” My illustration for the Pleroma of Logos is to show Logos as a miniature copy of the Pleroma of the Fullness of God, sitting at the top of the Fullness. “This aeon was last to have <been> brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude. And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…” So, this

My brother, Bill, and I had a good long talk the other day concerning what humans refer to as “death,” and its connection to the apparent material nature of the universe. Here’s the upshot of that conversation. If you visit my gnostic websites or have bought your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel , you’ve seen my diagrams many times by now. Perhaps you remember that my own gnosis was unlocked through several years of contemplation on the simple phrase: “mud up, spirit down.” That little ditty eventually turned into these two diagrams: Mud Up Spirit Down These two diagrams blossomed out into my theory of everything that I call A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can read on the simple explanation blog or in the book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything . It has proven to be a robust theory of everything that continues to hold up. Later, my own search for gnosis led me into the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices. I find the logical cosmology of the Tripartite Tractate to be the one that resonates with me, unlike the Sethian codices which have their gnosis packaged within an old-school type of mythology not unlike the complex, personified mythologies of other cultures and religions. Yet, if we stand back and take the long view of both Valentinian and Sethian gnostic belief, they have many overlapping features. This leads me to surmise that it is the Big Picture flow of consciousness unfolding, outflowing, and then re-enfolding that is the gnostic takeaway, not the particulars of the mythologies. Whether we call it The Father in Christian gnosticism or The Source or Virgin Spirit in Sethian gnosticism, the matrix of all existence is ethereal consciousness itself—the originating consciousness that we and all sentient beings are heirs to. And whether you call the consciousness that flowed out of the originating Source the Son or the Sethian’s androgynous Barbelo— it is still the first and only monad produced by the originating consciousness. But since he is as he is, he is a spring, which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it. (Tripartite Tractate, verse 60) Then that singular representation of consciousness fanned out into all possible variables of that consciousness—all that was, all that would ever be: the ALL and Fullness of God in the Tripartite Tractate and the Child in Sethian codices such as the Secret Book of John, culminating in an eventual separation called the Fall. Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no one else and the one apart from whom there is no other unbegotten one, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no other, and after whom no other son exists… Furthermore, he has his fruit, that which is unknowable because of its surpassing greatness. Yet he wanted it to be known, because of the riches of his sweetness… (TTT, verse 57) Then that singular representation of consciousness fanned out into all possible variables of that consciousness—all that was, all that would ever be: the ALL and Fullness of God in the Tripartite Tractate and the Child in Sethian codices such as the Secret Book of John, culminating in an eventual separation called the Fall. For just as the Father is a unity and has revealed himself as Father for him alone, so too the Son was found to be a brother to himself alone, in virtue of the fact that he is unbegotten and without beginning… Being innumerable and illimitable, his offspring are indivisible. Those which exist have come forth from the Son and the Father like kisses, because of the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses… This is the nature of the holy imperishable spirits, upon which the Son rests, since it is his essence, just as the Father rests upon the Son. (TTT, verse 58) Both strains of gnostic thought describe an event where an Aeon’s free will deviated from the plan of the Fullness, resulting in the production of our material realm. This Aeon is called either Logos or Sophia, depending on which codex you are reading. Both names are imbued with tremendous knowledge and wisdom. Despite good intentions, the fruit of the fallen Aeon turned out to be lacking in the glorious attributes of the Source and the Fullness, producing a chaotic and unruly pleroma lacking true consciousness and life due to the separation from the will of the Fullness. 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. (TTT, verse 80) We call the result of the Fall the deficiency, commonly referred to as the material cosmos . Here&#82

Here’s your chance to get a free copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I’m giving away free ebook editions this weekend, August 23 through Tuesday, August 26. In return, I only ask your to leave a review for the book on amazon.com. The free book download counts as a verified buyer purchase and qualifies you to leave a book review. We need to boost our amazon reviews so the algorithm will favor the book in searches. Please help out. Don’t feel you have to have achieved any degree of gnosis before leaving a review. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, you already know what to say. Keep it simple. This week’s episode takes another look at the Third Order of Powers, also known as the Army of the Christ. We looked at this back in 2022, so it’s high time to look at it again. Let’s start with a brief review of gnostic cosmology for any newcomers to the podcast. This exploration of gnostic cosmology is uniquely based upon the text of one of the ancient manuscripts recovered from the Egyptian desert in 1945. The concepts that I am sharing with you are universal and applicable to anyone who is seeking the truth about consciousness, God, the nature of life, death, and suffering, and the nature of the simulated reality we appear to be living in. This gnosis is also a “gospel” in that the word gospel means “good news.” The good news is that this gnostic gospel offers the promise of a personal relationship with higher order entities and the God Above All Gods. This is not a challenge to established religions, but rather a clarification of the nature of the Father and our relation to the Father. This gnosis also clarifies so many of the puzzles that established religions, philosophies, and even science have been unable to answer. If a Great Awakening is currently underway, then this gnosis is an integral addition to spreading the Word. We Second Order Powers were the generation of the new Pleroma of Logos when he returned from the Fall. We living creatures were designed to fit into the Boundary so we could operate according to the Simple Golden Rule to bring life, love, and cooperation into the otherwise dead deficiency. The Second Order Powers also bring a remembrance of the Father into his material realm, a memory entirely lacking in the shadows and phantoms of the imitation. We inhabit the deficiency, yoked to the apparent material of the imitation, and find ourselves trapped in a never-ending war with the deficiency. Never-ending War The upward yang side represents the 2nd Order of Powers; the downward yin side represents the imitations of the deficiency The Tripartite Tractate says of us, “It was not from the sickness which came into being that they were produced… but (from) the one who sought after the pre-existent. Once he had prayed, he both raised himself to the good and sowed in them a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the glorious pre-existent one, and he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea, so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.” Logos was content with the beings of thought—those Aeons of the Fullness that form the master formulae upon whom we living Second Order Powers are modelled—”because he had hope and expectation of him who is exalted.” That hope and expectation is another way of saying that Logos had faith in the Father of the Totalities. We humans feel the same way Logos did when we turn to the Father in faith—we feel hope and expectation that something will come of our prayers. On the other hand, Logos was not content with the shadows that came out of him after the Fall. Logos rejected the phantoms of the deficiency that had arisen from the presumptuous thought of his Ego. Sadly, we Second Order Powers are subject to the “law of mutual combat” and, because of the never-ending battle against the deficiency, we tend to forget the harmony and mutual love of our higher Self and instead adopt the anger and violence of the enemy. Logos sought a solution to the hatred and disorder taking hold of his Second Order Powers who were fighting the never-ending war against the deficiency. The Christ was brought forth to “those who came into being according to the thought.” We Second Order Powers are those who were brought into being according to the thought of the ALL. We are fractal representations of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves Self-aware aspects of the ALL sorted into a cooperative Hierarchy “within the exalted boundary.” That’s up above on the ethereal plane. “The one who ran on high became for the one who was defective an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist. When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they wer

A piece of business here– I have taken down the contact me form on the Gnostic Insights website because all I ever get from it is junk emails that jam up my box. So if you want to contact me, probably the best way to do it is to go to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack and then leave a comment underneath the latest podcast episode. Then I will definitely see what you are writing to me. Or you could contact me through LinkedIn, but I don’t want you to contact me if you’re trying to sell me something, some sort of service, because honestly, I get dozens of those a day and it’s just too much. It’s just really too much. And the chances of me saying, yeah , are practically nil. Okay. So that’s why there’s no longer a contact me form there at Gnostic Insights. The children’s book is published and out on amazon.com. It’s already sold three copies. Hopefully that’s just the beginning. And on another matter, I’m going to run another free booksy promotion for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel on Amazon. And you can get the ebook of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for free from August 23rd through the 26th. That way, even if I had sent you a free copy for reviews or anything like that, or if you have been given a copy of the book as a gift, you can still qualify to leave a review on Amazon for the book because it will be a verified purchase, even though you didn’t have to pay anything for it. We really need to boost those reviews, folks. So please do me a favor. Write a review or at least throw some stars my direction for the book. Okay? What we’re going to look at today is basically Chapter Five from A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And that chapter is called The Fall of Logos and the Rise of the Deficiency. I’m going to focus on the deficiency and what that means—why it’s called the deficiency . I’m just going to skim through Chapter Five. We know that in this form of Gnosticism that I teach that comes directly out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, the Aeon we discuss is not Sophia, but rather Logos. And this is one of the big things that sets the Tripartite Tractate apart from the other books in the Nag Hammadi. The Tripartite Tractate talks about Logos. And I prefer this. Let me tell you why. The story with Sophia and her Fall and then her illegitimate child, Yaldabaoth, and all of the things that happened to them down on the Earth—that’s a mythological type of story. On the other hand, the story of Logos, the Aeon Logos and its Fall, it’s not mythological in the same way. It’s logical . It has to do with the way that consciousness rolls out from the Source. It has to come from the original Source and then keep coming down to us as we sit here talking and listening. The Tripartite Tractate follows that course of consciousness from the Source, which is called the Father in the Tripartite Tractate, and then through the first emanation of the Father, which is called the Son in the Tripartite Tractate. And then how does it get from the Son to all of us down here? There is a mechanism for that. And that’s the mechanism we’re going to talk some about today. You see, Logos was the final Aeon produced by the combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God together, giving praise and glory to the Father and Son. And in their combined Fullness, all of them focused on a single topic, that being giving praise to the Father and Son, they gave birth to the final Aeon. And that birth is that Logos, the final Aeon produced by the Fullness of God through their combination, contains within itself a complete pleroma that’s one level down, one fractal level down from the actual Fullness of God. Logos is a true image or representation of the Fullness of God, simply one fractal level down. So Logos looks just like the Fullness. His pleroma looks exactly like the Fullness. Everybody’s in there. And Logos then mistook himself for the Fullness because he was complete, and he knew all of the plans, and he could dream of Paradise like nobody’s business, all by himself. Logos mistakes himself for the Fullness. And so Logos decided to launch himself into the realm of glory to reunite with the Father. But, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos wasn’t able to give proper glory to the Father, and therefore he stumbled and fell. The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way: 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. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 77) … which is just another way to say that Logos took upon himself a great project, and then he f

I thought today what we’d look at is the entire run—the overall big picture. You can’t get a bigger picture than this of our existence and our universe. So this is the overall, overarching flow of consciousness from the Source to us and then after we pass how it all rolls up. This is the entire run, or cosmology, all rolled up into one package and presented for you today. All of this comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. The Nag Hammadi was a set of ancient books that were dug up out of the desert in Egypt in 1945. It’s like a movie plot, this discovery of the Nag Hammadi, what are called codices, ( and a codex is a one of the original books when they were changing from writing all books out as scrolls that you had to unroll to putting them into our current form of a book, which is pages between the covers) . So this gnosis comes from one of those books out of the Nag Hammadi codices, ( codices is the plural for codex ), called the Tripartite Tractate, which is considered one of the most difficult books of the Nag Hammadi to understand but I find it the easiest to understand so that’s why I focus on it. So let’s get into the entire run of consciousness. What I’m using for my visual reference for this episode is the Gnostic cosmogony diagram that appears on the last page of my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, which of course you can pick up at Amazon and that’s what I’ll be referring to. So if you have the book you can go grab it and follow along in the diagram or if you’re listening on an audio podcast this would be a good episode for you to go to GnosticInsights.com at some point and look at the illustrations that accompany this discussion. All right, so we’re looking at the entire run of consciousness. 1: It begins with what we call the Father , other people call it the Source, and that is consciousness itself. The base state, the ground state of everything is just awareness, consciousness—that’s where everything comes from. In my diagrams I picture it as the page itself upon which this story now is to be written. 2: The consciousness of the Father admired itself and in so doing it made itself into another entity that we call the Son . It could be called the Child, it’s not gendered. So you have now the Father and the Son and the Son is the complete encapsulation of the Father. The Son is the bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. It contains everything that the Father contains except it’s now in a place. It has a point of view; it’s a singularity; it’s a monad. So instead of being everywhere, omniscient, omnipresent, unfathomable Source, it’s now a person, a personified place with its own self-awareness. And it says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father and Son admired each other. The Son didn’t leave the Father—the Son stays plugged into the Father at all times. It has an umbilical cord, so to speak, that remains one with the Father. The Son and the Father have identical consciousness. And because the Son has the consciousness or the characteristics of the Father, it’s the complete encapsulation of the Father. It has the same creative drive, the same spark of identity and power as the Father. 3: And because of this creative nature of the Father and the Son, the Son immediately fractured itself into, well, we’re talking about the Son, S-O-N, but the Son is also like a sun, an S-U-N, in that it fractured itself into all of the rays. Generally, I picture the Son as a diffuse cloud, like fog, sitting within the inky blackness of the Father’s underlying ground structure. But the Son immediately bursts into all of its components, into every possible expression of itself, every variable, every thought that would ever be. And so instead of the fog now, it’s like a sunshine. It’s like a glowing body that throws out rays in all directions. And that stage of the Son is known as the ALL . ALL for One and One for ALL, I think of as their motto. Now, each of those individual rays of the Son had no self-identity at first. They were simply part of the Son, the way that you’re walking around clothed in your body. You’ve got all of the cells of your body, and everywhere you go, your body goes with you, doesn’t it? And all of those cells and all of those parts of your body form you . Well, that’s the way that the ALL is to the Son. That’s the same relationship. The ALL is the manifestation body of all of the variables of the Son. So now, instead of the Son being gigantic and unapproachable and illimitable, it is now broken up into an infinite number of variables. And the ALL admired the Father and the Son, and loved them and sang hymns to them. So in their singing together and giving praise and glory to the Father and the Son, the ALL became self-aware. All of those variables became self-aware. They weren’t all j

My neighbor’s dear dog, Morgan, passed away last week. She was a terrific working dog who helped out with Search and Rescue operations, finding people lost in the woods, alive or dead. We held a Memorial service for Morgan on Sunday. All of her doggie friends were invited, puzzled to find her missing at her own party. I sang a rendition of Amazing Grace, adapted for dogs. Here I am singing it, tears and all. Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. ‘Twas God that sent us dogs to love, and God that sets dogs free How blessed is the love they share, when they pass on, how we grieve. When we join our family, pets, and friends upon that golden shore Our hearts will leap with everlasting joy to be with our pack once more. Praise God, praise dogs, praise God again, Morgan is already there She is not dead, she’s romping still in that meadow in the air. She’s diving and swimming and sniffing and searching But no one is lost only found, There are no tears there, no sorrow or fear, nothing but joy unbound. When we’ve been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise and bask in our doggies’ love. Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. Rest in Peace, Morgan

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This is a repeat of an earlier podcast. It’s the most complete explanation I’ve ever given on archons, and since I mentioned archons in last week’s episode, I wanted to give the full explanation of what are archons, because archons are mentioned quite often in Gnostic circles. Also, a piece of news, the children’s book is completed. It’s gorgeous. It’s exciting. It’s for the little ones. It’s for you to read to your children or grandchildren, ages two to six, probably. Beautiful illustrations, and it’s the very simplest rendition of our Gnostic Gospel possible. Imagine—I’ve simplified the Christian Gnostic Gospel, although I don’t mention Jesus or Christ. I talk about the Prince of Peace in this book, and it’s the nugget of Gnosis. So if you’re struggling with Gnosis at all, I’m sure you can understand this children’s book. I’ve published it to Amazon. It probably won’t appear for about a week. They need to do their thing on their end with it. It’s only $9.99, which is the very cheapest Amazon would let me sell it for. The name of the children’s book on Amazon is Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth . Okay, onward and upward, and here’s What Are Archons. This episode is about archons. It’s kind of a long episode because what I’m going to do is read to you directly out of the Tripartite Tractate and then make explanations about that, and that’s a long process. Also, if this becomes too thick and too difficult to understand just by the hearing of it, go to GnosticInsights.com and read the transcript. And in the transcript, I’m going to put links to other episodes that have spoken on this sort of topic before so that you can have a bigger review or a more in-depth study on this topic, okay? So reading from the Tripartite Tractate, and this version is translated by Einar Thomassen out of the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures , edited by Marvin Meyer. I’m reading you three different sections out of the book. The first is called The Word Divided, and that’s verses 77:11–36. “Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.” So when this section says the word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, the word is Logos. That’s another way of saying the Aeon named Logos. And “the perfect single one” is the name for the overarching personality of the Aeon known as Logos. Here at The Simple Explanation of things, we call that the governing unit of consciousness . For example, my body has billions of little units of consciousness in the form of cells and organs and whatnot, but my single one is named Cyd, and that’s my governing unit of consciousness. Within the overarching personality of Logos, was a fractal iteration of every Aeon, one level down from Logos, housed within his perfect single self. Logos was a product of the entire Fullness giving glory to the Father in unison, and all together they fruited this final combinatory Aeon. He was the last Aeon to be born, and he was the sum of all of the Aeons. And those smaller images of the Aeons that were contained within the single one named Logos were all fractals of the Fullnesses of God, one level down. And Logos birthed himself in the sense that his personality, his unified governing unit of consciousness, became aware of itself in relation to this fractal pleroma that he contained. “It was the will of the Father that brought Logos forth as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.” And that ordained economy, that’s our material universe, and that includes time and space. And then it says, “The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations.” You see, what Logos wanted to do was create Paradise, basically, all by himself, because he had fractals of the entirety within himself. But he didn’t realize that they were only fractals, and the fractals couldn’t get the job done. It needed to be Logos in combination with the real Aeons that were up there at his level. And so when he reached for the Father, that’s what caused the Fall. And the deficient things that issued forth from the Fallen Logos were patterned after his ego, not his one undivided self. “They were shadows, phantoms, and imitations.” The archons of the deficiency arose from the Fall. They were small, disordered, unruly, like quantum foam. In other words, they were not real, and they were not true fractals of th

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. We’re having some summertime reviews here. Today’s episode is a replay that was first broadcast on August 20th of 2022, and it’s all about the Demiurge and the boundary that was put up around this material universe. We have a lot of new listeners and readers at the Substack. And so I think that this is new information to a lot of you. And for those of you who have been with me for several years now, it’s always a good idea to review. So, here we go. As we delve deeper and deeper into gnostic cosmogony and cosmology I feel the need to remind you that this information is what gnosis is all about. This information represents the long-hidden knowledge that has been guarded from all but those specially designated the privilege of seeing it. Here at Gnostic Insights we believe that gnosis is written on every person’s inner being, and therefore available to every person that seeks it out. The only sense in which this gnosis is hidden now is the limitation set upon each person’s readiness to receive. But whether or not you grasp these Gnostic Insights, you can take comfort in knowing that none of this is in any way essential to your redemption and resurrection. All you need to recognize is that the Father above is the source of your life and consciousness; that you come from the Father and to the Father you will return. Christian Gnostics recognize the essential role of the Christ in our return to the Fullness, because Christ is the correction that returns us all to full gnosis of the Fullness and the Father. So with that reminder, here is this week’s continuation of The Simple Explanation of Gnosticism. *************************************** In our last episode (The Fall and the Deficiency) , we heard about the Fall and the beginnings of our material universe. The Tripartite Tractate says the irrational things produced during the Fall, known as the imitations of the deficiency , were condemned by Logos. During the chaos and disorder immediately following the Fall, Logos battled against what came forth from him. “Until the one who brought forth into the defect these things which were thus in need, until he judged those who came into being because of him contrary to reason – which is the judgment which became a condemnation – he struggled against them unto destruction…” This passage is saying that Logos had produced these deficiencies that were in need of reason and order. And because they were contrary to reason, Logos judged and condemned them. He initially tried to destroy them, but that didn’t work because the ones who opposed his condemnation and wrath would simply not obey, which is to say that reason and facts are powerless against egoic irrationality. And so Logos gave up trying to cure the deficiency. Instead, what was perfect in Logos separated itself from its Ego and went upward to his own in the Fullness. “The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good.” This passage indicates that Logos changed his mind about the feasibility of destroying the deficiency. He came to a new understanding of the situation and he realized the hopelessness of correcting it on his own. Once he realized this, Logos was able to remember the Aeons of the Fullness—those things that exist—and he responded to a prayer for “the one who had converted himself to the good.” Since Logos is the one who had converted himself to the good, the prayer must have been offered by the Aeons of the Fullness on his behalf to bring their emanation home. It is referred to as “ the prayer of the Agreement ,” which is to say, the prayer of the Fullness . Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it: “The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another; then all of them together; but before all of them, the Father.” The Hierarchy of the Fullness of God is shaped like a pyramid–“the higher the fewer” Here we see that the act of calling Logos back to the Fullness was similar to the act of producing him as an emanation in the first place. After giving up his attempts to correct the deficiency on his own, Logos returned to aeonic awareness. First he remembered the Father and the true source of consciousness and then he remembered the Son. Logos then remembered his brothers of the Fullness as individuals within a Totality, and lastly he remembered the Fullness as an entire gestalt . He remembered everything that existed from the first, before the Fall. And because he remembered, he was able to escape the deficiency and return his Self to the Fullness. “The prayer of the agreement was a help for him in his own return

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review one of the basic original teachings here at Gnostic Insights, and that is how what we call the Fullness or the Pleroma of God—how it came to be, what it is, what does it mean when the New Testament, for example, says the phrase the Fullness of God. For Christians this generally just is an idea that God is big and great and huge and it’s full, it’s full of everything, the fullness. Yes, but it’s actually more than that in Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, the Fullness or the Pleroma of God is a step in the way that consciousness rolled out from the Father through the Son and then differentiated into the Fullness of God. And each part of that differentiation is part of the Son of God. And the Son wears the ALL like a garment, it says, and the ALL wears the Son like a garment, meaning they’re co-existent. So we’re going to review one of the very first episodes of Gnostic Insights. It’s been quite a blessing to discover that over the last four years very little of what was originally taught here at Gnostic Insights has modified or changed, and it’s just the ever so slightest thing here and there, like relabeling one item on a diagram. That’s been about it. Hey, if you live in Southern Oregon or Northern California, I’d like to invite you to come to Southern Oregon University if you’re close enough to commute once a week, because I will be teaching a class at what is called the OLLI, O-L-L-I, which is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University. I’ll be teaching a 10-week course called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and people will be using A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book as the textbook, so this is a very exciting opportunity for me. And to have 10 weeks with the same group of people who sign up to sit and learn, or remember as it were, it should be an interesting process. Here is the OLLI link if you would like to register for the class. This course is for the Fall semester, beginning September 15th of 2025. Buy the book! Available in all formats and prices… Also, another piece of news is that the children’s book is all but finished. Everything was completely done, and I uploaded it, and now I’m waiting for the proof copy to come so I can verify that everything falls within the margins. The illustrator’s having to go back on two of the pages out of the children’s book to move Logos, of all things—to move him into the page, because when you account for the trim size, Logos got cropped off of two of the pages, and we can’t have that! Front and back cover for Children of the Fullness. This is the first and only Gnostic kid’s book, for ages 2+ By the way, I’ve noticed that everybody around here who uses the word Logos, even a school by that name and all the students that go to the school, pronounces it Lo-gahs, and I’ve also heard some radio preachers say Lo-gahs. It’s not Lo-gahs, it’s Low-gohs. That’s how I learned it in graduate school, because we study what Logos means, not from a Gnostic point of view, but from Greek philosophy. Logos was often discussed in the major that I majored in when I was working on my PhD, which was Classical Rhetoric. So I thought, well, how come we called it Logos and everybody around here calls it Lo-gahs? But I looked it up in the pronunciation guides on the internet, and they all say Logos, or Logoze, never Lo-gahs. So I think we’re in good shape to be referring to our Aeon from whom we are descended as Logos. Okay, enjoy this replay of an old episode. I’ll pop in now and then if I need to. Onward and upward! In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what gnosis is, and hopefully be able to actually realize gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts. By the way, what is gnosis? We keep talking about gnosis and the word Gnostic. Gnosis means knowing, and in the Gnostic frame of reference, gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our creation, and the creation of the entire cosmos. It is thought that we hold all of this knowledge within ourselves, and we have complete access to the Creator of the universe at any time that we turn our focus on the Creator, and it is this direct conduit to the Creator that gives us what is called gnosis. G-N-O-S-I-S, that’s a Greek word. Another related word to gnosis is, and this is a big word, called anamnesis . You know the word amnesia means forgetting? An amnesis means not forgetting. So, the process of coming to gnosis is a process called anamnesis. Just to let you know if you want to throw around any big words. Today we’re going to talk about the qualities o

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to read one of the books out of the Nag Hammadi that we haven’t talked about before. It’s called Authoritative Discourse, Authentikos Logos , and it was part of the original Nag Hammadi codices. I’ve been thinking of codices as scrolls but actually they were the first form of bound books. It’s a very short book, unlike the Tripartite Tractate, which is the second longest book in the Nag Hammadi. This is one of the shortest books in the Nag Hammadi, but it was very well preserved except for the first page. It had gotten damaged and is missing a few words, but the rest of it’s intact. And I think it’s such a lovely book, and it goes so well with our Gnostic Gospel teaching, that we’re going to talk about it today. This book is not particularly Christian because it doesn’t talk about the Savior, but what it does talk about a lot is the Spirit and the Soul. And these are two characters represented in this book as a fiancé, the Spirit, which we call the Self, and then the main character is called the Soul, but we refer to that as the Ego. So it’s about the split between the Self and the Ego, and what drives them apart, and what brings them together. It begins with talking about the Fullness, or the Aeon of Aeons, is what I call it. And it says, From the Fullness, From these, came the invisible Soul of Righteousness. One member with them, one body with them, one Spirit with them. Whether she’s coming down or is in the realm of the Fullness, she is not apart from them, but they see her and she looks at them through the invisible Word, or Logos. And by the way, this Soul, which I identify as the Ego, is characterized as a female gender, and the Self is characterized as the male gender. We haven’t talked about gendering the parts of our Soul like that, but in this Authoritative Discourse , they’re a betrothed couple. They belong together, though they have not yet joined each other. It says, Secretly her bridegroom, [ that’s the Self ], obtained the Word, [ that’s what we call Logos ]. He held it to her mouth to make her eat it like food. He applied it to her eyes like medicine, to make her see with her mind, and perceive those who are kin to her, and learn about her root, that she may be able to hold on to the branch from which she has come, receive what is hers, and renounce matter. So this is talking about how the Self is instructing the Ego not to become lost in this world. Then there’s a little discussion about when a man marries a woman who already has previous children from another marriage, how those are different children than the children that he fathers with her, and that the children that he fathers with her are his genes, belong to him as well as to her when it comes to inheritance. And so this is a metaphor for our Self and our Ego to be wed to one another. This metaphor refers to after the Ego comes down to this fallen world, and leaves the Fullness of God, that the marriage she has is to our physical material body, and the children that she begets by the material body are her stepchildren, and that they possess the inheritance of their father, which are, get this, exalted passions, life’s pleasures, hateful jealousies, boastful expressions, foolish experiences, reproachful words. And then there’s a few more missing words here, and it says, If a soul, [ and whenever I say soul, think Ego], if a soul who is ignorant chooses a spirit of prostitution, he casts her out and throws her into a brothel. He has left her to corruption because she has abandoned modesty. That is, the Self, which is still above in the Fullness, allows the fallen Ego to experience the material world, to revel in lust and other material pleasures. It says, Death and life are placed before everyone, and people choose for themselves which of these two they want. That soul will fall into drinking too much wine in a corrupt manner. Wine corrupts. The soul forgets her siblings and her Father. And by the way, her siblings are the other Aeons up in the Fullness of God, or the other parts of her aeonic inheritance that live in the Fullness. The soul forgets her siblings and her father, and sensual pleasures and sweet things deceive her. She has abandoned knowledge and has fallen into the life of an animal. A person devoid of sense lives like a beast, not knowing what one should say or should not say. So now we’re describing the state of our Ego when it is not aware of itself, or of Logos above, or the Fullness of God. The gentle child inherits with joy from the father, and the father rejoices over his child, because everyone praises the father on account of the child, and the child also looks for a way to duplicate what was received. So you see, when we are remembering the Father above, we look for a way to behave like the Father, and so everyone