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Gnostic Insights

Gnostic Insights

By: Cyd Ropp Ph.D.
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Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained Personal Development Personal Success Spirituality
Episodes
  • As Above, So Below

    As Above, So Below
    Aug 3 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I’m going to re-record and re-present an episode from October of 2021. You probably haven’t heard it or don’t remember it. I had just gotten braces in 2021 and the actual recording itself is pretty poor. Well, you can tell it’s a person who just has fresh braces on their teeth, so we don’t have that trouble anymore. It’s a pretty long episode and it was originally entitled, As Below, So Above, Inferring the Transcendent. I’ve also dropped in some new insights concerning politics… You realize that the manner by which we are mining gnosis here at Gnostic Insights often involves using analogies between what is known and what is less tangible. As Below, So Above provides a handy tool for inferring otherwise undetectable aspects of the spiritual dimension. If we start with the premise of a singular consciousness that pre-exists everything that came after it, then we can follow the genesis of our universe from that consciousness step by step. In today’s episode, we’re going to map aspects of our human personalities onto the Gnostic Gospel to see what we can infer about ourselves down here below and about forms of consciousness above. So, what do we know by now? We generally begin at the beginning and build outward from there, so we start with consciousness. We know that all life forms are conscious and we infer from that a ground state of consciousness and that is what we call the Father. The Father, or consciousness itself, is not the same as having thoughts. It is simply self-awareness. It is the no-thought state that people seek through meditation. Then we say that consciousness, or the Father, or what we call in the Simple Explanation, the metaverse, had a thought. This thought is a ripple in consciousness that arises out of the undifferentiated state of no-thought. The Gnostic Gospel calls this thought the Son. The Son reflects the consciousness of the Father in a circumscribed form. That is, circumscribed means contained, like drawing a circle around something. And in this case, the Son was a circle drawn around the Father’s consciousness. Yet, the Son is not lesser than the Father because there’s no size or distance here and there is no time or space in the eternal omnipresent. The Tripartite Tractate says that no sooner did the Son arise than it had its own thought, which differentiated into every possible thought, like rays of light shooting out from a central star. The Son, mirroring the creative act of the Father, gave rise to himself in the form of countless thoughts. These thoughts became aware of themselves in the same manner that the Son became self-aware. The moment they became self-aware, they named themselves, and the moment they named themselves, they sorted themselves into a hierarchy of relationships with one another. These thoughts of the Son are called Aeons, and the hierarchy into which they arranged themselves is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. The Aeons consist of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. This is another way of saying that the Aeons form a kind of geometry of functions and forms that we all know where and what and who they are in relationship with each other. Within the Hierarchy of the Fullness, all Aeons have their own identities, as well as their self-assigned locations and functions. Everyone knows who they are and where they stand in their intermingled ecology. Each Aeon occupies a unique place and perspective within the union of the Fullness. No one is left out, and no one is more important than any of the other Aeons in the hierarchy. The Fullness reflects the entirety of the Son. They coexist and overlap. The Son wears the Fullness as a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son in the manner that our own bodies can be said to be a garment for our souls. Our bodies contain and coexist with ourselves. The Fullness is a singular entity composed of countless Aeons in the same way that our bodies are a singular organism composed of countless cells. The Aeons sat in a unified state. All for one and one for all is their motto. Their main function is to love and to be loved. They love each other. They love the Son. The Aeons love the Father and give constant glory to the Father, so happy were they to be alive. The Aeons yearned for communion with the Father, for they recognized themselves as the fruit of the Father. In the same manner that blood flows throughout our bodies, delivering oxygen and nutrients to every cell, the Holy Spirit of the Father’s consciousness flowed through the Aeons of the Fullness, constantly feeding them love. Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent self. Their immense variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. It was only in their unanimity that they reflected the perfection of the Son, and only...
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    23 mins
  • As Above, So Below pt. 2

    As Above, So Below pt. 2
    Aug 9 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week we revisited an episode that was originally posted in October of 2021. It was originally entitled, As Below, So Above, Inferring the Transcendent. We only got through the first half of that original episode because it was a long one and as I was re-recording it, I added some new insights about the current state of politics and how it relates to the Demiurge. If you didn’t hear last week’s episode called As Above, So Below, you may want to back up and start there. In last week’s episode we reviewed the Gnostic cosmology and the path of consciousness from the Father through the Aeons of the Fullness, and then down into creation as a result of the Fall of Logos. We talked about the chaos of the Fall and the rise of the architect of this world, known as the Demiurge, who is the creator god of this cosmos, not to be confused with the Father Above. The Demiurge is the fallen ego of Logos, and it does not remember where it came from. Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory. The ego of Logos believes that it is all that exists, having forgotten the true nature and source of consciousness. The ego of Logos does not remember love or the life of the Pleroma. As the isolated Ego of Logos, cut off from the Father and the Fullness, the Demiurge cannot generate life or consciousness. The Demiurge brought order and form to the chaos of the Fall and continues to control the material world. We humans and all other living creatures are not generated from the mud up. We are generated out of the Fullness above. Our consciousness and life flow directly from the consciousness of the Father. At conception, we are melded to the material world and use those molecules as building blocks for our bodies. Our mission is to bring love into the world and to ultimately remind the Demiurge of its origins in the Fullness above. The Demiurge doesn’t know this, of course, and it thinks we are simply more material for it to control. It doesn’t know we are conscious, and it thinks we are chaotic because it does not understand the free will we bring into creation. We left off last week’s episode with a discussion of free will versus tyranny in the realm of worldly politics, and noted that the way the Demiurge controls molecules through strong bonds of power like a puppet master pulling their strings is the pattern that tyrannical politicians are using to control the citizens. They’re following the Demiurge’s example, and they attempt to control us with strong bonds of power and strings of control. The end goal is not to build a better world but to quash free will through power and control. The Demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects Our Ego is often mistaken for the Self. But, it is the Self that is the true reflection of the Father and of the Fullness of God. The Ego is merely a Fall away from the Self; and when you fall away from the Self, or the Fullness of God, you mistake your own Ego for Truth. But it is not Truth; it is a reflection of the world. It is a reflection of those things around us in the material world that are created by the Demiurge. The manner by which the Demiurge becomes the God of this universe is logically self-evident, considering the Gnostic fable I shared last week. The reason for the Fall is that Logos forgot about the rules of cooperation and unanimity that allowed the Fullness to sing their song of glorious praise. Presumptuous thought brought the Ego of Logos to the forefront and replaced its spirit of cooperation with self-centered ambition and lusting for power. Left on its own, what the Demiurge lacked in terms of the cooperative structure of the Fullness, it made up for with brute force. The Demiurge was able to create order in the material world by a system of bondage and close supervision. The Demiurge took the disordered material of the quantum foam and caused it to level up in a manner reminiscent of the aeon’s Golden Rule. Particles to atoms, atoms to molecules, molecules to elements, elements to minerals. But where the Golden Rule uses the principle of reaching out to others to willingly hold hands and share information, assistance, and love for the betterment of All, the Demiurge uses strings that bind and entwine from a central source, giving no choice in the matter. The Demiurge fills in the lack of consciousness within the deficiency with its own egoic power and plans. The Demiurge is a tyrant who exercises complete domination. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. We who are conscious here below are not simply puppets of the Demiurge. The Gnostic Gospel explains that Logos and the Fullness sought a solution to overthrow what had come into being through the Fall. The Aeons fashioned a fruit that reflected their own lives, and imbued this fruit with life and a memory of the Fullness and the Golden Rule of Cooperation. This fruit was sent into the deficiency, our ...
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    18 mins
  • What Is Gnosis?

    What Is Gnosis?
    Aug 17 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Well, the final proof copy of the book is in the mail and on its way to me. I’ll have one more look at it and then I’ll put it up on Amazon for sale. I’d like to personally thank Hathaway, Gabriella, John, Barbara, and Jenny for their very generous support. If anybody else would like to contribute $50 towards this publication cost, actually it’s not the cost of publication as much as it is the cost that will go into promotion, into advertising, because we want this book to go big, don’t we? So thank you so much. If anybody else would still like to have a personally signed copy from me of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, contact me and send me that $50 and I’ll give you a signed copy of the book as well. Also, I’d like to personally thank some people that have written to me to say they can’t afford $50 but they really support the book and really do support this Gnostic Gospel effort that we’re putting out here, and I appreciate you every bit as much. Your prayers, considerations, and good wishes for me are every bit as valuable. So God bless you and thank you so much. And now on to this week’s episode. When I meet people and I start to talk to them about what I write about and what the podcast is about, it’s almost a hopeless task. And I bet you’ve discovered this as well when you try to explain Gnosticism to someone. First off, what does Gnostic mean? Gnostic means to know. It means knowledge, knowing. It’s the opposite of agnostic. Agnostic means I don’t know. An atheist is a person who says no, there’s no such thing as God. They’re an atheist. Theist means godly. A means not. Agnostic means I don’t know, maybe there is a God. Maybe there’s not a God. Whereas a believer is yes, I know there is a God and I believe in God. Now, how is it that we can believe in God? There’s different ways to believe in God. I think that most people that say they believe in God, believe in God theoretically, may even trust that God is looking out for them, but they don’t know God. They are not friends with God. They do not speak to and listen to God, because that would just be weird, right? You know, that’s the believing in something that’s not there, which is how atheists generally regard people who speak to God, that we are simply delusional, that we’re making it up, that it’s fairytale stuff. Gnosis means that you know God and that you believe it is possible to know God. And how can you know God? How do you know that you know God? That’s why Gnosticism is such a difficult and labyrinthian… labyrinthian means, you know, like in a maze. You have to work your way through the maze, picking up a little bit there and trying this way, and then trying that way, and then trying this way. Gnosticism is usually like stumbling around blindly in a maze. And this is why so many young Gnostics or people who seek gnosis dabble in this, and then they dabble in that, and they dabble in something else. They’re just picking up little bits along the way, but it doesn’t necessarily add up to anything. Or you may have a whole bunch of memes that you’ve collected along the way, all these various esoteric religious memes from various Gnostic websites or Gnostic books or Gnostic podcasts, but they’re all just a jumble of memes and you don’t know how to put them together. So the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is a framework upon which you can hang these various things you have learned. It’s no longer going to be just a big bag, a jumble of tidbits, but it is going to fit into a framework, a worldview, an ideological worldview, that is a meme bundle of Gnostic thought. This is not easy to convey to people. So this is why my Simple Explanation model is very useful. And this thing I call the Simple Explanation, this was a thought that came to me many years ago by now, 15 or 20 years ago, and I call it a Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That’s the name of my first blog, and it’s still posted, and I still post to it now and then. It’s a non-religious blog, it’s a mathy-sciencey kind of theory. However, it does talk about world religions, and it gives this framework that I have now applied to the Gnostic Gospel. And once you apply the Simple Explanation to this amorphous, labyrinthian thing that is called Gnosticism, now you have a framework upon which to view and to evaluate and to place all of those memes you have collected that are just bumping around in a big sack on your back at the moment. So when people ask me, well, what do you talk about? What do you teach? It’s very difficult standing out there on the lawn just chatting with someone or at the dog park about what I teach or what is Gnosticism. That’s why we’ve got this podcast and the books. My first book on Gnosticism, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is very short, and heavily illustrated. That’s when I came up with all of these diagrams that are ...
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    26 mins
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