Gnostic Insights

The absurdity of random evolution

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I’ve been sharing these Gnostic Insights for a few years now, and I’ve discovered that the one topic that flares people up, the most controversial aspect of Gnosticism, doesn’t really have anything to do with the nature of God, or the Archons, or where we go after we die. Believe it or not, Darwinian evolution is the thing that really gets under people’s skins when I say, I don’t believe it, I believe in intelligent design–that we are second order powers sent from the Fullness of God, fully loaded with everything we need to know, because we carry within us the consciousness of the Father.

So let me step through this notion once again—try to explain it in a way that will make sense—and if you find yourself just going livid with reaction against what I’m saying, well, that’s what I’m talking about. This is the hot button topic.

I remember when I was taught evolutionary theory, and they said it took thousands of generations of minute changes to populate a beneficial mutation to the stage where you could say it had evolved. For instance, in 2012, Michigan State University researchers were very happy to demonstrate the evolution of citrate-eating E. coli bacteria after only 56,000 generations. 56,000 generations!

I remember the day in elementary school when I first learned about evolution. There was an illustration in the textbook mocking the concept of Lamarckian evolution. Lamarck had promoted the idea that giraffes who stretched their necks to reach the leaves on higher branches gave birth to calves with longer necks. No, no, Darwinians said, natural selection is the way it happens, as only long-necked giraffes survived the lean years to give birth to more long-necked calves like themselves. And that logic was supposed to have settled the argument concerning Darwinian evolution.

Mama giraffe and baby giraffe
The reason Darwinian evolutionary theory won out over Lamarck’s theory of epigenetic trait inheritance was that Lamarck’s type of evolution requires learning and volitional repetition, whereas Darwin’s creatures were either born lucky to have long necks or were doomed to be short-necked losers. Even as a child of ten or so, I recall wondering, if long necks were so valuable as to have evolved into our familiar high-nibbling giraffes, then why don’t all large grazing animals have long necks?

Then I came up with my own Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything and developed a theory of evolution in keeping with the Simple Explanation. My theory of evolution reinserts learning and choice into the equation and removes the element of dumb luck.

Seriously, who would ever look around themselves at the varieties of natural adaptation and believe that dumb luck at the material level accidentally brought it all about? It just doesn’t even make sense. It defies the basic rule of 52 pickup. You’ve heard of that, right? 52 pickup is, if you throw a deck of cards in the air, it never comes down stacked and in order. It never does.

In other words, randomness cannot lead to an organism such as we humans that can contemplate and comprehend the universe. It is completely illogical to think that randomness can account for intelligence.

Did you ever hear that old expression that given enough time a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typewriters could draft a copy of Shakespeare or the Bible? That’s preposterous. It would never happen.

Now consider how much more complex our biosphere is at all scales. The interior of a cell is extremely complex in its interconnected functions and parts. Then scale that up to the functions and parts of an organism and scale it up again to the interconnected ecology of forests and again to the interconnected biosphere of the planet. It is simply impossible to achieve without the guidance of an intelligent design.

Stop and consider. Please use logic.

So here is my Simple Explanation of evolution. First, we accept that the basic matrix of our universe is consciousness. The Simple Explanation’s model of evolution is information driven rather than happenstance driven as the conventional model would have it. What I mean is that the Darwinian model we’ve all been taught relies upon the brute force of superior survival mechanisms that allow the superior creature to procreate and thereby pass on their superior genes. And after a tremendous number of such superior generations, the inferior fade into extinction and the superior organism becomes the new normal.

In the Simple Explanation, there is an ontological pull upward toward more complex aggregations of consciousness. Darwin’s model is, on the other hand, a case of the blind simply bumbling by happenstance, by lucky accident, by dumb luck to be a superior adaptation from the norm. Where I find it unlikely is that there would be countless such bumblings in the same direction that by dumb luck keeps heading in the upward and onward direction. The Simple Explanation would say the patterns of superiority are few and they are fractal. So the wheel does not need to be reinvented over and over. The golden rule and the hierarchical distribution of increasing complexity and responsibility cover much of it. And due to the transpersonal nature of universal knowledge, basic mechanisms like hands and eyes only need to be invented once and then deployed or copied as needed.

There are no such mechanisms in Darwinian evolution. There is no way for one creature to transmit the importance of the development of an eyeball to a different creature in a different part of the world. They don’t believe in transpersonal consciousness. They don’t believe in fractal knowledge or the golden rule.

Consciousness is not a byproduct of the human brain or even of a complex system of any sort. Consciousness is the ground state of reality. Think of consciousness as the medium upon which is written the formulae of our universe. The Simple Explanation refers to this ground state as the metaverse. And by the way, the Gnostic gospel (jumping ahead) refers to this consciousness as the Father. You might think of it as God. And it contains every law of the universe as potential expression that manifests when and where appropriate. Smaller derivative units of consciousness are fractals of the originating units of consciousness that express themselves in every single material expression of our universe.

consciousness flows in an unending stream from the God Above All Gods
In the Gnostic gospel, we call those the second order of powers of which we and all living creatures are a part. The most ambitious units of consciousness, or we would say second order powers, continue to find themselves occupying larger and more complex physical forms. Some of the units of consciousness that started in Earth’s primordial soup have remained in the soup, never attaching themselves to anything more complex than a single-celled organism. The most ambitious little life forms found themselves returning to slightly more sophisticated organisms with each incarnation. Lessons learned are carried forward, always incarnating more and complex structures and occasionally jumping to a more complex hierarchical level, driving the evolution of planetary life via memes accrued through karma.

Was my self-unit of consciousness ever a single-celled organism? Probably so, beginning about four and a half billion years ago on this planet. Was my unit of consciousness ever a jellyfish? Good chance it was, since the toroidal-shaped jellyfish is the oldest multi-organ animal on Earth, swimming our seas for the last 700 million years and surviving countless planetary die-offs that killed other organisms.

Was my unit of consciousness ever a dinosaur? Well, maybe, but maybe not. I’d imagine the dinosaur memes and karma informed the development of reptiles and birds, not my mammalian lineage. The first mammals are thought to have descended from a different lizard called therapsids.

Was my governing unit of consciousness ever a lemur or a chimpanzee or a bonobo or perhaps an australopithecus or a neanderthal? Probably was, since their proto-human memes and karma would have informed human development and the self-unit of consciousness is attracted to familiar patterns.

In the Simple Explanations evolutionary model, no war is needed between natural selection and creationism, between science and religion. My Simple Explanation proposes that everything in the cosmos is created through metaversal principles embodied in all units of consciousness and that each governing unit of consciousness evolves according to personal inclination and ability through established patterns of meme acquisition and adaptation and the utterly fair and impartial mechanism of karma.

In the Simple Explanation evolutionary schema, I am currently a human and probably have been for a long time. Does that make me more evolved than my dogs? No, not really. The family dogs are at the same level of hierarchical sophistication as the humans. The dog’s aggregate units of consciousness and their Self units of consciousness have all made decisions every step along the way that steered them into this life as these dogs.

Every governing unit of consciousness is an integral part of one aggregate or another, hierarchically upline and downline. Every slot needs to be filled. The most you could say of my state of evolution is that ambitious meme collectors evolve into ever more complex instantiations. And my unit of consciousness and those of my aggregate units of consciousness that make up my body are attached to some highly ambitious collections of memes. But whether or not this is anything to brag about is debatable.

Now all of that theory that I’ve been sharing with you comes from my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was published many years ago. And you can still pick that up on Amazon or through the Gnostic Insights website. It’s entirely consistent with the Gnostic view of evolution, as I came to discover many years later.

So let’s look now at the Gnostic view of evolution in particular. We are what are called second order of powers. The first order of powers are the Aeons in the Fullness of God. We are the fruit of the Aeons. We are the second order of powers. We’re also known as those of the remembrance.

And I suggest that what was sown in the second order of powers that lifted them above the imitation was the remembrance. And for life forms, that remembrance is contained in our double helix DNA. We also have a pure remembrance of the Fullness of God, our aeonic progenitors, contained in our Self with the capital S. But at our cellular level, the DNA is carrying the remembrance forward.

As it turned out, the second order of powers became infected with the same lust for dominion that had infected those of the imitation due to the law of mutual combat. And the two orders began a never-ending war over resources in the limited ecology of our early earth. The second order of powers are also known as the likenesses, because we are alike the Aeons. We resemble the original Aeons of the Fullness, but we lost ourselves in the confusion of earth.

The Demiurge and its archons are the other entities of the fall that we haven’t talked about yet, since we have only been talking about the physical universe, and archons are immaterial. They are not physical. They are influences. So when we talk about the never-ending war with the living forms, it’s the archons doing battle with the living forms. And those influences of the archons on our material bodies are death, aging, illness.

Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, verses 84 and 85,

The powers of the remembrance were adorned with the names of the pre-existence whose likenesses they were. [And that’s the Aeons of the Fullness.] The order of this kind was in harmony with itself and with each other. It fought, however, the order of those of the imitation.

And the order of the imitation is the forces of the archons, which include entropy and death. Quoting again,

It fought, however, the order of those of the imitation because that order waged war against the likenesses as they were producing various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers mixed with one another and in great number. Now the whole establishment and organization of the images, likenesses, and imitations has come into being for the sake of those who need nourishment, instruction, and form so that their smallness may gradually grow as through the instruction provided by the image of a mirror. That, in fact, is why he created the human last after having prepared and provided for him the things that he created for his sake.

So do you hear how that verse from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi says that second order powers develop from the smallest to the largest and that the humans were the last to develop? It goes along with this notion of evolutionary development because we humans couldn’t have just been plopped right into the middle of the primordial soup from the get-go. Look around you. We needed the smaller creatures to come before us to create this environment, this ecology in which we could thrive. And I’m not simply saying it’s all for us humans because every creature that comes along is providing through the Simple Golden Rule all of the needs of all of the other creatures.

Let’s talk about the Simple Golden Rule before we end this discussion of evolution. Our job is to reach out to others with love, aid, and information for the betterment of all.

The Simple Golden Rule
That’s, again, another theory from my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. So if you’ve never read that book you might like to go back and read it.

This goes for all units of consciousness, all second order powers from the cells and organs up to the organisms and to the ecosystems beyond. Every physical manifestation links up with others of its kind in this universe. Cells link together to make organs. Organs link together to make organisms. Organisms link together to create societies and so on. And these are the building blocks of the next level of hierarchical aggregation. This is re-instantiating the hierarchy of the Fullness in this bounded material universe.

And this is what is called the new ecology. It was a way to put the consciousness of the Fullness—the Aeons—into a physical form and manifest them on this earth. And then this will go forward and become the next ecology. The first ecology was the hierarchy of the Fullness. The second ecology is this material universe of ours. And then once this universe is fully redeemed by the Christ it will become the next hierarchical organization—the third ecology. And the way this happens is to reach out to others with love, assistance, and information for the betterment of all.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this review of my Simple Explanation Theory of Evolution and how it is logically superior to Darwinian evolution and how it all fits into Gnosticism and the Gnostic Evolutionary Theory, as presented by the Tripartite Tractate.

Until next week, God bless us all and Onward and Upward!

Please pick up your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel and leave a review!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I’m currently teaching my second round of Gnostic Insights to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, also known as OLLI, at Southern Oregon University, and we’re going through step by step this concept of Gnosticism that I share with you here at Gnostic Insights and on the Gnostic Reformation. So I’m going to back up with you and take a deep dive into the scriptures of the Tripartite Tractate that we use as the basis here for the Gnosticism that I share with you.

Today we’re going to talk about how the Aeons of the Fullness of God were generated. And the reason we talk about the Aeons so much is because we are downstream from the Aeons. We are representatives of all of the traits of the Aeons—we second-order powers, and we humans in particular, since I am a human talking to other humans here. So everything I say about the Aeons and how they relate to the Father and how they relate to the Son and to each other, we have that nature inside of us as well, because it is a flowing stream of consciousness that begins at the Father, passes through the Son, passes through the totalities and into the Aeons, and then down into us. So let’s review this basic Gnostic wisdom here.

The instant the all became self-aware, the all fell out of their unthinking, blissful union as one, and arranged themselves into what’s called the Fullness.

“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, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names.”

By this point in the Tripartite Tractate, the Son comes to be referred to as the Father, because the Son is the Father of the third glory, that is, the Aeons of the Fullness. We see here that the Son, although a singular monad, is still a unity of many Aeons. The Son becomes knowable through the innumerable properties and names of the Aeons.

What does it mean by names? I think that these names are the first appearance of what we would come to call ego. These disparate identities include names like flower, tree, dog, human, even parts of living bodies who themselves are alive, like kidney cells. They’re not names like my name or like Frank or George. They are not those types of identities. These are functional identities.

The Aeons then arrange themselves into a hierarchy of,

“minds of minds, which are found to be words of words, elders of elders, degrees of degrees, which are exalted above one another. Each one of those who give glory has his place and his exaltation and his dwelling and his rest, which consists of the glory which he brings forth.”

Now, the hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the fractal patterns of our universe. Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, as Thomason’s translation puts it, refers to the personalities and how they relate to one another. Elders of elders and degrees of degrees refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered—first, second, third, superior, inferior, and so on. Each with its own place, exaltation, dwelling, and rest reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own unique place in the grand scheme, its own personal expression or exaltation, a location different than its neighbors, thus possessing its very own point of view.

So it’s not about hierarchies of men the way humans tend to think of it. It’s not about, well—look at the hierarchy of government or the hierarchy of the Catholic church. It’s not about the peons at the bottom, and then you come a little higher into the elders, and then you have the priests, and then you have the cardinals, and bishops, and the pope. That isn’t the kind of hierarchy we’re talking about. It’s the way that our bodies go together, for example. Our cells are smaller than our organs. Our organs are smaller than the organism. They stack upward, and part of the Gnostic gospel is the higher the fewer precept.

You hear that a lot in Gnosticism, the higher the fewer. That simply refers to how a hierarchy stacks, like a pyramid. There’s more objects at the bottom and fewer as you go up and up until you culminate in one. So that is what it means to be the hierarchy of the Fullness. The Fullnesses at the bottom are more akin to the cells in our bodies, and then as you go up and up the pyramid, you finally arrive at the organism.

The Aeons sorted themselves into the Hierarchy of God

“It is he, the Father, who gave root impulses to the Aeons, since there are places on the path which leads toward him, as toward his school of behavior. He has extended to them faith in and prayer to him whom they do not see, and a firm hope in him of whom they do not concede, and a fruitful love which looks toward to that which it does not see, and an acceptable understanding of the eternal mind, and a blessing which is riches and freedom, and a wisdom of the one who desires the glory of the Father for his thought.”

The originating Father continually emanates a holy spirit out through the Son that entices its generations to seek out their source. The Tripartite Tractate says,

“It is by virtue of his will that the Father, the one who is exalted, is known, that is, by virtue of the spirit which breathes in the Totalities, and it gives them an idea of seeking after the unknown one, just as one is drawn by a pleasant aroma to search for the thing from which the aroma arises, since the aroma of the Father surpasses these ordinary ones, for his sweetness leaves the Aeons in ineffable pleasure, and it gives them their idea of mingling with him, who wants them to know him in a united way, and to assist one another in the spirit which is sown within them.”

And remember, all of this applies to us humans as well. This is the way we are to seek the Father, the way we are to relate to each other. It is said that although the Father put an unquenchable thirst to align themselves with the one into the minds of the Fullness, he did not reveal to them the Father’s ineffable nature and the impossibility of reuniting with him and surviving to tell the tale. This was doubtless to keep alive the hope of reunification with the Father as a motive for continually giving glory. Now all of this has been from Tripartite Tractate verse 75.

“The Aeons of the Fullness sat in perfect equilibrium in their hierarchy of ranks, stations, and names. They were a congress of one accord,”

meaning they agreed on everything and they cooperated together to bring about a single dream of paradise. You could note one difference between the ALL and the Fullness is that while the ALL sings their songs in blissful union, the Fullness sings their songs in perfectly tuned, multi-toned harmony. In addition to their identities,

“the Aeons of the Fullness were all given wisdom,”

which is the ability to reason with logic and prudence. You see, by the way, they weren’t given emotion, which is the ability to get passionate about things whether or not it’s reasonable or logical. So we are to follow the path of logic and prudence. Prudence means knowing to do the right thing at the right time.

“They were given a thirst to seek after the originating consciousness of their creator and a desire to align themselves with the Father’s will through the process of giving glory.”

And they were all creative geniuses, able to dream up a fully functioning mental paradise where whatever they willed in the Father’s name happily happened. This dream of paradise is our foretaste of heaven shared by cultures around the world.

The hierarchy of the Fullness of God sits as One and dreams of Paradise
The generation of the Aeons was not a one-and-done deal. And by the way, generation used in this sense of the word, it’s not generation like I am one generation and my parents were a different generation. It’s not that kind of generation. It means to generate, to create, to emit. The generation of the Aeons was not a one-and-done deal. After their initial emanation out of the ALL, the Aeons continued to generate more and more Aeons through various combinations of Aeons giving glory.

The pattern by which these younger Aeons were generated was the same as the manner by which the original Aeons of the Aeons were generated as an exchange of love and admiration passed between the Father and the Fullnesses. The Aeons of the Aeons praised the Father together and together they received the Father’s reflected glory.

You see, these Aeons of the Aeons, what we are calling the ALL, did not have self-identity. They were all for one and one for all. You can remember it that way. This exchange of praise from the Aeons and reflected glory from the Father resulted in the generation of new aeonic emanations.

As we have already noted, the exchange of admirations and glory between the Father and son was like,

“the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good insatiable thought. The kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses.”

And like all fractals, this pattern replicated itself throughout the generations that followed. These kisses first formed the generation of the ALL. Then the ALL, also known as the Totalities of the ALL, procreated,

“innumerable Aeons also in an uncountable way. They too beget by the properties and dispositions in which it exists. For these comprise its association, which they form toward one another and toward those who have come forth from them, toward the Son, for whose glory they exist. As a result, just as they were brought forth in glory for the Father, so too, in order to appear perfect, they appeared acting by giving glory. Since each one of them individually does not exist so as to give glory in a unitary way to him whom he loves. The fruit of the third glory, however, consists of honors of the will of each one of the Aeons and each one of those properties.”

This is saying that the entire system of the Aeons has a love and longing for the perfect, complete discovery of the Father, and that the Father,

“grants that he be conceived of in such a way as to be sought for while keeping to himself his unsearchable primordial being.”

So this is why we have a desire to seek after the Father, you see. We aren’t ever going to reach the Father. We’re not going to plug back into the Father in a mindless, self-effacing way, the way that, for example, Hindus or Buddhists might think. We will retain our identities because, as you are about to find out, the Aeons of the Aeons gave birth to Aeons who had self-identity.

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that the Father,

“gave root impulses to the Aeons since there are places on the path which leads towards him as towards a school of behavior. He has extended to them faith in and prayer to him whom they do not see and a firm hope in him of whom they do not conceive and a fruitful love which looks toward that which it does not see and an acceptable understanding of the eternal mind and a blessing which is riches and freedom and wisdom of the one who desires the glory of the Father for his thought.

“They have begotten for he has knowledge and wisdom and the Totalities knew that it is from knowledge and wisdom that they have come forth. They would have brought forth a seeming honor, the Father is the one who is the Totalities, if the Aeons had risen up to give honor individually. Therefore, in the Song of glorification and in the power of the unity of him from whom they have come, they were drawn into a mingling and a combination and a unity with one another. They offered glory worthy of the Father from the pleromatic congregation, which is a single representation, although many, because it was brought forth as a glory for the Single One and because they came forth toward the one who is himself the Totalities.”

This verse describes how the Aeons mingle and combine with one another to give glory to the Father. All possible combinations of Aeons are needed in order to express the complexity of the otherwise ineffable Father. Each and every Aeon combined and recombined and the glory they gave the Father was returned to them as additional Aeons, earning their designation as the Fullness of God.

“Those of that place are ineffable and innumerable in the system, which is both the manner and the size, the joy, the gladness of the unbegotten, the unnamed, the unnameable, the inconceivable, invisible one. It is the Fullness of paternity so that his abundance is a begetting of the Aeons of the Aeons. They were forever in thought for the Father was like a thought and a place for them.”

In their desire to give glory to the Father, that is to align their wills with the Father’s will, Aeons of the Fullness were required to follow these three simple rules. They were to only,

give glory to the Father, not to the Fullnesses. Aeons were to remain aligned with the Son and not shift their focus to the Fullness as a whole.

give glory to the Father, not to individual Aeons. Aeons were to remain always mindful of the Father and not to give glory to themselves and their talented neighbors as individuals.

give glory to the Father to the best of their own ability. Each Aeon was to give glory from its own location in the hierarchy. They were not to sidle up next to an Aeon who appeared closer to the Father in order to borrow that Aeon’s station to give better glory. Rather, the individual was to develop its own voice and talents through the process of giving glory to the Father.
These rules come from the Tripartite Tractate, verse 74.

By following these rules, the Aeons kept their focus on the Father and their motivations pure. While this may be a description of Aeons and how they think and feel, it is also a description of us, because we are the fruit of the Aeons. So every characteristic that the Aeons possess, we also possess.

In other words, we are supposed to give glory out of where we are, who we are. We’re not supposed to adopt the gnosis of a master or a leader or a pope or a priest or a person in a workshop that you’ve run across on the internet. We have our own wisdom. We are to look inward for the gnosis that we bring to the table, and we give unique glory from our point of view.

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. Logos was not the equivalent of the Pleroma, though. Rather, Logos contained within itself a fractal iteration of all the other Aeons. Because of this, Logos in his entirety resembled a model representation of the hierarchy of God, a fractal level down from the Aeons. That’s why in my illustration of the Fullness, I depict a large pyramid of golden orbs, those being the Aeons, topped by a smaller pyramid resembling the entirety of the Pleroma. That smaller pyramid on top is Logos.

The aeons name themselves and sort themselves into a hierarchy. Logos crowns the Fullness.
And, like Logos, we also carry fractals of the Fullness of God within our Selfs, and that’s Self with a big S, Self, to contrast it with the ego. The ego is our designation, it’s our address, it’s our duties, places, positions, things we do in the world. Ego is what relates to others around us. Ego is what brings us the things we need to sustain our bodies. But our big S Self is the fractal of the Fullness of God within each one of us, and within each part of ourselves. It’s within each one of our cells. The way we have DNA, we also have the fractals of the Fullness of God. And these are the fractal consciousness that has come down to us.

People sometimes say to me, oh, this is all so complicated. But hey, if you’ve read the Nag Hammadi or any other Gnostic traditions, you will find out that this is way simpler than those are. It isn’t complicated as long as you remember and realize that our consciousness is a direct emanation from the Father above, passing through these various stations, that’s all. And each time consciousness passes through one of these stations below it, it branches out. It keeps branching out into a more tangible form, until it reaches us down here in this material world. It’s the same consciousness as the Father we carry within us, the Fullness of God.

And as long as you remember where you come from, and you remember that this world we live in is temporary, and the death and destruction and disappointment that we experience down here is a result of the fall away from the Fullness, then we have hope. We have that fragrance of the Father drifting us back upward for reuniting with our parents in the Fullness of God. So I’m just describing this all to you, but it’s not like you really have to know it. It’s nothing you need to memorize.

All you need to know is that you come from above, that you are loved, that you carry the very consciousness of the Great Father, the God above all gods within you, and the love and joy and sweetness of the Father. And then if we live our lives down here as the Aeons do, all will be good, not governed by ego, but governed by that One Self that we carry within us, the love, the consciousness, the sharing, the simple golden rule of reaching out to our neighbors with love, information, and assistance for the betterment of all. And that none of us can do it on our own, because we’re just one small fragment way downstream from the Fullness and the Father.

God bless us all, and onward and upward!

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On today’s episode, we’re going to talk some more about fractal stories and archetypes. These fractal stories make up our lives. We have very little original material in our lives. It’s as if we are each a character in a play. And this play was written by the Aeons of the Fullness before time began. These are archetypal stories. And when Logos fell and broke open all these stories into the world, and then we came down and populated the world from the Fullness, it is these stories we are reenacting.

We play our parts in complex fractal stories
Everyone’s life is different and unique because we each have our own point of view in the entire scheme of creation. We are monads, which means a singular point of view. We are monads out of the Fullness of God. And each of us, with our own point of view, are like actors cast in a play. We have free will. Everything in the universe does have free will. Well, all second order powers have free will. And we are free to react within the stories we find ourselves freely. We can go with the flow of the story and fully embody the archetype that is cast, such as a scorned woman screaming and railing at her man who has done her wrong. We can do that. Or we could choose, and this is the difficult part, to break the story and step back and observe the story unfolding without such active participation on our part. These are called complexes in Jungian psychology, these complicated interactions of archetypes and wills and powers that we find ourselves in.

And you know you’re in an archetypal fractal story by the tremendous force and power it seems to have all on its own. There you are, just cruising along, minding your own business, and suddenly you turn a corner and here you are in a fractal story. And you can feel the difference in the power. Or you can just blindly go along and play your part and then wonder why you’re so miserable. Oftentimes I have thought, boy I’m really doing well. I’m really cruising along here. Everything’s going great. Boy aren’t I enlightened or whatever. And then boom, I walk right into a fractal story and complexes are stirred up.

One fractal story that is very popular right now, because it is being pushed upon us, is this notion of victimhood. Victimhood is a fractal story. It’s an archetype. But the deal is, it causes powerlessness in the person who then takes on the mantle of being the victim. Oh everything’s against me. How am I supposed to get ahead? What can I do? I’m just a victim here. Oh man I’m so upset. I’m so frustrated. But if you refuse the title of victim, then you’re no longer constrained by the requirements of being a victim. You’re no longer weak and powerless with no freedom of will and no ability to move forward. You can reject that box. Step outside of it and then carry on without being a victim. Have a more powerful life.

I had a marriage of 38 years that seemed to be absolutely a wonderful marriage. And it was consecrated as far as I could tell. We actually spent every morning, first thing, doing yoga together. We would open up a holy book, either the Bible or the Tao Te Ching, and we would read out loud. We would discuss the principles involved and we would pray out loud together. And then I came to find out around the 30th year of that long marriage that this husband was actually cheating on me the whole time. Now being a cheater is a fractal archetype. And when I say a woman scorned is a fractal archetype, believe me, I understand it from the inside out. Because one minute I’m this calm, happily married wife doing all of my wifely duties in a most happy way. Dutiful, yet happy. And then come to find out about the cheating. And then it was nothing but outbursts and fights and tears and screaming for the next eight years. And just on the flip of a switch, this husband and I were plunged into the midst of this maelstrom of the fractal of the scorned woman and the cheating man. And the scripts are already written, the words that come out of your mouth when you are in the midst of one of these things.

You see it in movies, you read it in literature, you hear other people doing this. And once you are in that complex, then it is quite easy to recognize the complex when you see it in other people.

When I had my bed and breakfast in Ashland, I had a number of repeat guests, right? They’d come every single year to come to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. And they’d stay for a week or two at the bed and breakfast. One year, this couple came up in separate cars. And they stayed in the same room, but they never sat with each other at breakfast. And all she ever did was shoot daggers at him whenever she looked at him. And I couldn’t understand then what was going on. But now, having been in that particular complex myself, I can look back and say, ah, he must have cheated on her in that year. And they had still carried on, they had their reservations, they had their tickets to the theater, they had their reservation to the bed and breakfast, but they were no longer in harmony whatsoever. They were in the midst of this archetypal story of the scorned woman. That is what I imagine as I look back upon that situation, having been in that situation myself.

So you may be finding yourself in the midst of some sort of fractal story, not of your choosing. Victimhood, addiction, bad marriage, disappointing children, whatever it is—just realize that these are gigantic forces that were written before you came along. You do not need to completely inhabit that story. You can step out of it.

Okay, after having revealed all of that about myself, let’s take a look at some of these typical fractal stories. These stories are typically referred to as archetypal, and they’re generally credited to Carl Jung and his concept of Jungian archetypes. However, I don’t know if you know this yet or not, but Carl Jung actually purchased one of the first books out of the Nag Hammadi after they were discovered in the 1940s. He purchased one and had it translated into German, and it is from his reading of this ancient Gnostic text that he came up with his notions of archetypes, from the Aeons of the Fullness.

So what it is, is that there are major events and characters that appear in all of humanity’s different stories of origins in their different mythologies. Common archetypes are birth, death, leaving home, initiation into a new thing, marriage, the union of opposites. Archetypal characters include mother, father, child, God, the wise old man or the wise old woman, the trickster, and the hero. Some of the archetypal motifs are apocalyptic visions, the flood, and creation. We actually enact these stories, these gigantic world-embracing stories, in our little lives over and over and over again.

Here are some of the archetypal characters of literature. The caregiver, often a parent character, desiring to protect and care for others, usually associated with compassion and generosity, sometimes martyrdom. The creator is a creative and imaginative character, could be an artist, an inventor, a writer, a musician, an innovator, a visionary. The explorer, who wants to experience new things and freedom, self-discovery explorations or physical journey explorations, seeking a more authentic life, not conforming to the status quo. Adventure around every corner, could be pilgrims, an individualist, or a physical wanderer about the earth or the cosmos.

The hero character is very common in our movies and television and stories. That is a person who seeks to prove their worth through courageous and heroic acts. I think here of the American Ninja Warrior television program, and the incredible feats of physical prowess those ninja warriors exhibit as they go through the obstacle course, that each time they go through the obstacle course, it’s a hero’s journey. Warriors, rescuers, soldiers, police, team members, these are heroes.

There is a character called the innocent, an optimistic person whose worst fear is doing something bad. The innocent is always seeking to do the right thing, and there is a certain naive innocence about them. They can be in a romantic dreamy place, always dreaming about perfection and wonder. I would characterize myself as one of these innocents.

The jester wants to enjoy life and have a good time. They like to joke around, make people laugh, make the world a happier place. The jester also includes the trickster, or could be a fool, or a comedian, a comic.

Another archetype is the lover—the loyal companion. The fear is not being loved, not being wanted, so the lover is passionate and committed and wants to be very attractive to others and to please other people. So they could be a people pleaser, as well as a romantic partner, a good friend, or a spouse.

The magician is a visionary. They understand the way the world works. They like to find win-win solutions to problems. They can be manipulative. The magician can be portrayed as a shaman, a healer, or a charismatic leader of some sort.

The orphan is a character who wants to belong more than anything in the world. They fear being left out and alone. They are often down-to-earth and empathetic, but they can easily lose their identity while they try to fit in. This can be the everyman, or the girl next door, or the guy next door. I’m thinking of Tom Hanks in The Castaway.

The rebel believes that rules are meant to be broken and wants to change something that isn’t working. They might start out with a good goal in mind, but they can easily cross the line from rebellion to crime. So the rebel can be portrayed in literature as a revolutionary or a misfit. You know, like the motorcycle movies of the old days, Rebel Without a Cause, or the outlaw movies of the westerns. A lot of people that are rioting in the streets nowadays are enacting the rebel mode.

The ruler is an archetype that wants control, wants to be the top dog in a successful community. Their fear is being overthrown, and so because of that they have a tendency to become authoritarian and to not delegate any roles to the people that are supposed to be advising them, or to, for example, Congress. They like to be the boss, the king, the queen, the president, the politician, or the role model that people look up to.

The sage is a truth seeker who uses their intelligence to analyze the world. Their greatest fear is being seen as ignorant, and they spend a lot of time studying and reflecting upon the self. Sometimes they are subject to analysis paralysis, which means you study, study, study, but you’re afraid to go forward, you’re afraid to enact. The sage is a scholar, a philosopher, an academic, a teacher, a Gnostic.

I am both innocent and a sage, and I’m pretty sure a lot of you listeners are also sages, or else you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast. So these archetypes, they’re not singular and pure. You can combine them in various combinations. I just said, for example, I’m a sage, and an innocent, and a woman scorned, for example. Well, complicated type of personality there.

We humans have been using the same major archetypal characters in our large mythologies, our cultural mythologies, our origin stories, and our literature since the beginning of recorded history, and they’re the same archetypes. They’re popular because this is the human condition, and we’re not inventing it as we go along. We’re stepping into these roles and these stories, and that’s what I mean by them being fractals. And when I consider this logically, it seems to me that these stories must have been imagined in the minds of the Aeons of the Fullness.

I always imagine the Aeons sitting there in their golden stack of cannonballs, but in their minds, they’re all dreaming the same dream. They’re writing these plays, and they’re casting these imaginal characters, and they’re sharing one dream that’s kind of like a big movie, a big walk around. And our world is a physical enactment of that dream of the Aeons, because it was in the mind of Logos when Logos fell. And also, it’s in our DNA, because our DNA has encoded all of the messages of the Aeons of the Fullness. We have the Fullness of God fully within us, and therefore we have this imagination.

The Pleroma sits in perfect stillness and harmony, sharing a dream of Paradise.
And I’ve said on this Gnostic Insights podcast before that our imagination of heaven, our foretaste of paradise, is the dream of the Aeons, literally. And the reason this world of ours is so disappointing is because it’s fallen. We want to be in paradise with the Aeons. We want to be enacting these stories, but we always want the happy ending. We want them to be happy and to be going along on the positive side. We don’t want them to flip to negativity. And of course, in the Fullness of God, it is all positive by definition. The Fullness of God does not embrace shadow, darkness, disappointment, or death. And so, our expectation of love, fidelity, success, courage, all these stories, they are actually in their perfection in the dreams of the Aeons. And that’s why we expect it, because it’s in our DNA.

Okay, that’s enough for today. This has been my take on fractal stories and an introduction to the Jungian archetypes, although I don’t need to credit Jung with that, because they do pre-exist. It’s just that if you want to read more about archetypes, you can do some reading with Jung.

Onward and upward. See you next time. God bless.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. And Happy Easter, everybody! This is the time of year when Christians all over the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. Holy Week leading up to the resurrection is a rough one because it’s the passion of the Christ where the scriptures talk about and people reenact the trial of Christ, his walk with the cross to the hill of Calvary, and then his agony on the cross.

We all know that story. But what does it mean? Why is there such a story? Many people who doubt the veracity of the early Christian histories think it’s all made up, think it’s a fairy tale. But I’ve got a couple of ways to talk about that.

One way is this. If the story of Jesus is nothing but a made-up story, who made it up? And how did they know exactly how to make up the story to create this gigantic movement that is called Christianity? You can’t accidentally bumble into the salvation story. People aren’t that clever. And if someone was that clever to write a believable salvation story that wasn’t true, to what end? Why would they want to do that—making up a gigantic lie that is going to hoodwink millions and millions of people, do such a thing and get away with it and be so successful at it? And why would they do that? Because the salvation story I’m telling you does save people, does pull people out of their traps and their desperation and their addictions.

You may be saying to yourself, hey, wait a minute, I thought this was a Gnostic podcast. What’s all this talk about Christ and Easter? Well, there is a branch of Gnosticism that’s referred to as Christian Gnosticism or Valentinian Gnosticism, and that happens to be what I believe in. And Christ is a central salvific figure in that form of Gnosticism. The conventional Christian church desperately needs Gnostics. They need us to bring them the depth of understanding of the Gospels, the depth of understanding of the writings that have been admitted into the New Testament, as well as the writings that were excluded from the New Testament, such as those found in the Nag Hammadi books and the Tripartite Tractate in particular.

These are as Christian as Christian can be, more so than most conventional Christians’ understanding of their role and the role of Jesus and the role of Christ and the nature of the Father, the understanding of virtue and vice. We Gnostics carry that knowledge with us. We remember. That’s the process of Gnosticism, is remembering. That’s called anamnesis. You might have run across that word before. You know, amnesia means don’t remember, anamnesia means I remember. Just like agnostic means I don’t know, but gnostic means I know.

Now, why do I say that the Christian church needs Gnostics? You know, they don’t want us there. They think we’re misleading people, taking them away from the cross, taking them away from heaven and salvation. But it couldn’t be more incorrect. Gnostic Christians are true Christians, because in order to consider yourself a Gnostic, you need to be in touch with the Holy Spirit. You need to have a relationship and an understanding of the Father and the Son and the Fullness of God. Almost by definition, if you are Gnostic, you carry the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Now, these things are very important to Christians, but they have excluded the means to get there. They have excluded the books from the same period as the books of the New Testament. They’ve excluded the ones that speak of Gnosis and speak of the way things are and who the nature of the Father is and how the Christ came about and who is the Son. Is the Son the same as Christ? Not exactly.

The Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. And by the way, the Holy Spirit, that’s what we Gnostics call the Fullness of God. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God as an aggregate, as a place, as an entity, is what is called the Holy Spirit in conventional Christianity. You have the Father, the original, illimitable, omnipotent, omniscient consciousness that predates everything. And the Father conceives in his own mind or in its own mind, because obviously the Father is not an old man with a beard, even though we tend to represent him that way. That’s more of a metaphorical expression. Even in my children’s book, Children of the Fullness, I picture the Father as the old man in the beard and the Son as his small child being held in his arms.

But it’s not really that. That’s a metaphor. The Father is consciousness, pure consciousness, without form. The Son is all of the Father’s consciousness and omniscience and omnipotence, but in a place, in a form. He’s a monad, or it’s a monad, because again, there’s no sex, there’s no gender, there’s no DNA. So, we shouldn’t be getting all hung up with the pronouns for the entities of the ethereal plane.

Now, in the other form of Gnosticism, the Phoenician, Egyptian-derived mythologies that make up Sethian Gnosticism, they do have genders, but I think that’s because they are adopting the gendered pantheon of ancient gods that were written about. But in the purest philosophical form, there is no gender, because the Aeons do not procreate through sex, the way second-order powers do down here on earth. You know the way the Aeons procreate? By giving glory together to the Father, by singing. It’s vibrational. And in various combinations, the Aeons sing together, like a choir here and a choir there and a choir over there. And those various combinations of giving glory give birth to more and more Aeons. That’s the way Aeons multiply.

Where conventional Christianity differs from Gnostic Christianity is that we have a different Genesis story. We have a different backstory to how we all came to be here. Now, it doesn’t seem to me that that should be enough to separate us as brothers and sisters in Christ, because we all agree on the importance of the Christ. The Christ, the Christ as we Gnostics say, Christ as conventional Christians say, and it irritates them to hear the in front of the word Christ. The Christ was conceived by all of the Aeons praying as one for salvation to come to the cosmos and all of the second-order powers that populate the cosmos.

The Aeons are the first order of powers. Everyone that was conceived by the Aeons and sent out of the ethereal plane into this material plane are the second order of powers. That’s all of us. It’s the humans, but it’s everything that’s alive on the planet. The Christ is the third order of powers. The Aeons were the first order of powers. We living creatures here in the cosmos are the second order of powers. And Christ is the third order of powers. And it comes with the entirety of the Fullness and the blessings of the Son and the Father.

The backstory where we disagree is the idea of who the fallen angel is, because the Christians also believe in fallen angels, and they often say that Lucifer was the most beautiful and highest of the angels who fell to Earth and became Satan. Well, it’s a version of the Gnostic tale. In the Gnostic mythology, the highest Aeon wanted to go out and create paradise on its own, and in the Sethian Gnosticism, that’s Sophia. In the Valentinian or Christian Gnosticism, that character is known as Logos. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I study, the name of that Aeon is Logos.

And this Aeon overreaches, takes more upon itself than it was assigned. It wasn’t supposed to go out and build paradise on its own, and so when that Aeon, Sophia or Logos, attempted to do that, it fell from the ethereal plane, and it is the brokenness of that attempt that is our material plane. That’s what materiality is. It’s the shadows of the effort of the fallen Aeon. That’s why our material existence is solid, dark, heavy, full of confusion and forgetfulness, full of ego overreaching—because ego is what characterizes that Aeon who fell.

And the character who stays down here and becomes the god of this world and puts it all back together is the shadow of that fallen Aeon. Sethians call it Yaldabaoth. We Gnostic Christians call it the Demiurge, as did Plato. Plato used this word Demiurge as architect–what it means. So the Aeon who overreached had all the plans in mind, knew all the blueprints. The Aeon who overreached, Logos, carried within itself a little copy of all the knowledge of all the other Aeons.

We are children of the Elohim of Adonai Elohim
The Aeon who fell was a fractal level down from the entirety of the Fullness of God, you see? So whatever you picture the Fullness of God to be, and I always picture it to be a pyramidal stack because it’s a hierarchy and that’s the shape of hierarchies, not because I am a worshiper of ancient Egyptian traditions or Phoenician or whoever came before them and actually built the pyramids. The pyramids themselves are replicas of the hierarchy of God. That’s the nature of the pyramidal shape. The mountain of God is a hierarchy representing the Fullness of God.

So the Aeon that was sitting at the very top overreached, fell, and split off from its overreaching ego. That stayed down below and became the God of this universe, of the cosmos, that we call the Demiurge, even though that’s a Greek name. Same concept—the architect of the universe. And we second order powers were sent into the cosmos to bring the life, consciousness, love, knowledge, and remembrance of the Father down into this shadowy place that we live in.

However—same catch as happened to the Aeon who fell—we forget. When we become melded to the materiality of this thick and slow cosmos, we forget our primary mission. And our primary mission is to bring life, consciousness of the Father, love, knowledge, remembrance into this cosmos, primarily to remind the Demiurge, the piece of the fallen Aeon that’s stuck down here, of where it comes from, that it is not the highest power, that it is not the ultimate God. And in Christian Gnosticism, the Demiurge, when it remembers, this entire physical, material space will disappear, and everything will roll back up into the ethereal plane from whence we all came. So that’s our mission, to bring remembrance to the Demiurge, and remembrance to each other, because it takes all of us working together to bring remembrance and demonstration of love to the Demiurge.

We’re not doing a very good job, are we? All of the hatred, all of the violence, the wars, the fighting, even just the quibbling inside of families and friends, this is not a demonstration of love. It’s about power and control.

And that’s what rules the cosmos, power and control, and at the godly (small g) plane that is wielded by the Demiurge. And the archons of the Demiurge are extensions of the Demiurge, they are not in themselves self-aware, conscious entities, because the Demiurge forgets where it all comes from. The Demiurge doesn’t realize consciousness itself. It’s the shadow of the consciousness of the fallen Aeon, who is no longer down here, by the way, who went back up.

So that fallen Aeon who went back up and abandoned the mess down here below, that Aeon, the entirety of the Fullness of God, and the Son, pray together to the Father to bring stability and order, remembrance, love, and salvation to this earth, to the cosmos as a whole. And that is the Christ. So the Christ is not exactly the same as the Son, although the Christ embodies all of the power and remembrance of the Son.

But he came a bit downstream, although frankly there is no such thing as time in eternity. But there are steps, there are places, and the Christ embodies the entirety of the Fullness of God that includes the Son and the full knowledge and presence of the Father. And in that sense, Christ is the Son of the Father. So when Christ says, I and my Father are one, that’s true.

Why do we even need Christ? Because we can’t do it on our own. And you know that whenever you fall, whenever we have our mistakes, our forgetfulness, when we fight with someone, when we make big mistakes and hurt ourselves, when we find ourselves in some terrible situation of our own doing, or someone else’s doing, you can’t pull yourself out. You know that. All you want to do is lie down and cry. You feel weak. You feel burdened. It is the job of the Christ to lift that burden, to bring remembrance, love, and the consciousness of the Father to you, to remind you that you’re not abandoned. You are not a motherless child, a fatherless, child. You are a much-loved, designed, desired child of the Fullness of God who has lost its way. We second-order powers, particularly the humans, become confused down here, forgetful, just like the Demiurge. And most of us latch on to the leading of the Demiurge, mistaking the Demiurge for God. But the Demiurge is not God the Father. Our Father lives in eternity above, and Christ is the emissary of that Father. And Christ came to earth in human form so that we would identify with Him, so that we would recognize Him, so that we would believe Him when He says, I have come to save you.

So it’s not a foolishness. It’s not a fairy tale. It’s the truth incarnate.

And whether or not you happen to believe in the historicity of Jesus the Christ is really very immaterial to your salvation, because it is possible to believe in God the Father directly. It is possible to feel the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within you directly. And that’s where the gnosis comes in.

The cross of Jesus bridges the gap between the Fullness and the Demiurge and overcomes the never-ending war we second order powers are trapped in.

Gnostics commune with their aeonic parents, the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And through the Aeons, we commune directly with the Son of God. And by communing with the Son of God who loves us, who knows us, we were known and pre-designed by the Son and the Aeons before we came down to populate this earth. We were supposed to bring their love and consciousness down here and make everything nice and right, but we have failed. That’s our failure.

It’s a failure to remember. It’s amnesia. And what the Christ does is bring us anamnesia. We remember. And when you accept the Christ into your heart, whether you call yourself a Christian, whether you call yourself a Gnostic, or whether you are in some other tradition, when you accept the salvation of the Christ directly into your heart, and you open yourself up and you pray for help, salvation, remembrance, forgiveness, take this burden off of me—that’s the job of the Christ. And that’s why all Gnostics need Christ, and everyone, all second-order powers need Christ.

I think the flowers and the dogs and the cows and all the other animals, they’re not as fallen, if you want to use that term, as we humans are, because we get all balled up with the Demiurge. But the other second-order powers, they seem to be more true. They seem to be more in touch with the love of paradise and the consciousness of paradise, as they bask in the sunshine, doing their jobs of bringing life and love.

And there will be a tipping point when all of us second-order powers believe in the mission of the Christ, which brings us the salvation and remembrance of the Fullness and the Son and the Father. The Christ comes to us all. Jesus, the Christ, was the first incarnation of Christ here on the Earth. But whenever one of us accepts the Christ, it comes into us the same way it inhabited Jesus, although the Christ inhabited Jesus to perfection, because Jesus never erred. He was born with the Christ and he lived his entire life embodying the Christ. We all embody the Christ when we accept the Christ into our hearts. That is where we get the true power to overcome the Demiurge and the problems and confusion of this world.

And when we have that realization, we’re able to exit this material plane. And when we exit this material plane and all of us start sticking our landing up above, the Demiurge is going to look around and go, What? Where’d everybody go? And he’s going to remember. And then everything rolls up and it’s all ethereal once again.

The Tripartite Tractate refers to “heaven” as the Third Economy. The First Economy was the ethereal plane and the Fullness of the God. The Second Economy is the material cosmos. The Third Economy is coming and it’s all good. We will live with the Aeons above. No shadows, no Demiurge, no archons, no strife. Only joy.
And as my Greek mother taught me to say, Ο Χριστός ανέστη. Αληθώς ανέστη. O Christos anesti. Alithos anesti, which means Christ has risen. Truly He is risen.

Happy Easter. Remember the Christ. Remember the Son and the Father. Remember your Aeonic parents above. God bless us all and onward and upward.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week, I had a good conversation on the telephone with my brother that I thought I’d share that with you today. It’s another aspect of what I call Gnostic Psychology that my brother Bill, Dr. Bill Puett, and I have been developing. He wanted to share with me an article about psychopathy and his Gnostic insight about the article.

These conversations started when I was probably about four years old, and Bill was a young teenager at that point. He was already a philosopher, and he and I would have these conversations together. So I grew up with these sorts of interactions with my older brother concerning the nature of reality, God, physics, astronomy, psychology. We’ve been talking about these things now for well over 60 years.

from left: Billy, Cyd, and brother David. Recently returned from a sojourn in Japan, 1958.
When I became a PhD, I imagined that I would be able to have these sorts of conversations with other people, especially with other professors at the universities I taught at. I expected that this is the nature of conversation, to have this give and take, this interaction, this sharing of information, interrupting each other, getting excited, moving on. But I haven’t found that with anyone else except my brother.

I think that when we pass out of this particular material life and return to the abode above, I expect this sort of conversation to be happening up there. Well, certainly in the philosophers’ cafes, if there are such things up there. You know, my vision of the afterlife is very much like what we have here on Earth, because this is, after all, a deficient copy, a deficient imitation by the Demiurge of the land above. And so I expect that we will have these sorts of communities and churches and experiences, but without any of the death, destruction, disappointment, the negative memes, the vices, that will not be there. It’s all going to be good. It’s all going to be on the up and up. And so what I’m hoping for, what I’m expecting, is that there will be gatherings with people like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, and of course, Christ. Jesus is going to be there, no doubt. And we’ll be having these interesting conversations about things.

School of Athens, a fresco by Rafael, painted in 1509 to 1511
So let me bring you up to speed with a thumbnail sketch of what Gnostic psychology is. What I have gleaned from the Tripartite Tractate and other Gnostic books is that we are all fractals. We all carry the Spirit of God within us. We are made in the image of God, it says in the Old and New Testaments.

And that image of God, as I see it, is the pleroma of the Fullness of the Hierarchy of God, which itself is a breaking out into all of the variables contained within the Father and the Son, but broken out into their individualities. So if you can imagine that the Father or the Son knew all of music and all of mathematics and all of everything, right? Well, the breakout personalities of those knowing everything would be the philosophers, the mathematicians, the musicians of various types, and everything else.

All other personalities are represented in the Fullness of God. And not only the personalities are in the Fullness of God, and by the way, we probably refer to those as angels. Angels are not in the Tripartite Tractate—we use the word Aeons. Those are the inhabitants of the Fullness of God, and they are each one a particularity of the Son, and they have come to self-awareness. But the Fullness of God is not only those personalities, those angels, as we think of them, but it’s concepts like mathematics, like music, like dynamics—up and down, in and out—chemistry, physics. Every concept that can be broken out into a particularity is also part of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God.

The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise.
Okay, so back to the psychological aspect. Each of us second-order powers, and I’ll talk about us humans since we are humans sitting here, we have a fractal copy of that Fullness of God– the image of God as they put it in the Bible. So we have that pure, idyllic self that is a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God.

So it’s all good, it’s all loving, it’s the consciousness of the Father and the Son, it’s the purity of talent. So for example, when someone is in the zone, if someone’s a great basketball player, and they’re in the zone in the game, and they’re sinking those baskets like nobody’s business, that’s an aeonic trait of the great basketball player in the sky, you could say. It’s like that, but for every particular skill, for everything that humans are, we each represent constellations of those personalities that are represented in the Fullness of God.

We’re each unique in the distribution of those talents. We have the Fullness within us, but certain parts of ourselves are highlighted, and those are our personalities. And so that’s what I call the capital S self. In a lot of spiritual writing, they call that your spirit or your soul. We also have an ego, and the ego is not a negative thing. Even the Aeons above have egos, and the ego is simply your designation. It’s your particular place, position, power; it’s your talent, it’s your duty in the hierarchy. And so when we are born into this material world, we bring that identification of our particular ego with us.

Now here’s where the Gnostic Psychology comes in, once we’re in this material world and we are attached to the molecules that make up our body, which are not from above—they come from the Fall. In Gnosticism, this materiality of the cosmos, this materiality of our physical space, is a demiurgic construction based on the Demiurge’s blueprint memory of the Fullness of God, except that the Demiurge doesn’t realize that. The Demiurge thinks he cooks it all up.

The Demiurge believes itself to be the only pre-existent consciousness. The Demiurge thinks consciousness began with it when it woke up, and that it is now God. And look all the things it can do. It can create the heavens and the earth. It can create all of the minerals and elements. It can build rocks and crystals and mountains. But it thinks it came up with it. It doesn’t remember it fell from the Fullness of God. It doesn’t remember it is the ego of the fallen Aeon. And here at Gnostic Insights, we identify that fallen Aeon as the Aeon known as Logos. And Logos was the last Aeon to be created in the Fullness of God. And it carried within itself the entirety of the Fullness in a fractal form.

When we are sent into this world as a conscious birthing choice by the Aeons above and by our pre-existent spirit, we are melded onto that material, that mud of the Demiurge. Because the Demiurge can build stuff, but he can’t bring it to life. The Demiurge doesn’t contain the life, the light, the love, the memory of the Father and the Son and the Fullness. We bring that into this world when we are born here. So our physical part of our human body, the purely physical part underneath the cells, the molecules, the amino acids, the chemicals, even the processes, these are demiurgic. And we, our Fullness spirit and our ego, that is what is melded into the physical molecules. And then we grow up with those molecules and build up through the stages of gestation and become born as a fully-fledged second-order power. So we’re one third material. We’re also about one third ego identification. Who we are—those are our proclivities, those are our talents and our personality, our recognizableness. We are also perfect Self with a big S. Our Self, which is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So all three of those parts walk around with us.

We 2nd Order Powers are melded to the demiurgic material below us and are infused with life from above
Now, the Gnostic Psychology part is how it is that our ego and our Self share the consciousness of this body. And it’s not just our ego now, because once we’re in the world, especially once we’re in the culture of the world, we start picking up memes. A meme is a unit of information. So we pick up these memes, and the ones we love, the ones we like a lot, get stuck to our egoic structure, like strings wrapped around our egoic structure. We start acquiring memes throughout our lifetime from the culture around us, from our parents, from the books we read, and our education. We not only collect the memes we like, such as, I like dogs. That’s a meme. Obey your parents, that’s a meme. Vote, that’s a meme. I’m an American, that’s a meme.

You see, every thought we have, every discrete unit of information is a meme, and we wrap those around our bundle of the ego. But not only the ones we like, we also pick up the memes we don’t like, the things we are completely repelled by and hate. We carry that hatred wrapped around us as well. So things that stir you up, your triggers, your baggage, those are memes that are wrapped around your ego.

And then this idea of vices and virtues. Virtuous memes are the memes that come from the Fullness of God, the virtues that we think of, such as love, belonging, helpfulness, caring, honesty, all that sort of thing. All the good, good things. Those are virtues. They all have inverses down here. They all have opposites, because in Gnostic philosophy, down here is the shadow of above. So what was a virtue originally is a vice down here, and it’s the opposite. So we have hatred, and lying, and dishonesty, and lack of trustworthiness—these sorts of things. Those are the vices that are shadows of the virtues.

So that is the entirety of our psychological makeup: The perfect Self that is at the core of our being, and the ego, which is who we were born as, who we were meant to be in the personality sense. Your innate talents.

The Self at the center of our souls is a fractal of the Fullness of God
Who are you innately? Are you really good at something? That’s part of your ego that you were born with. And then we have this meme bundle that’s wrapped around our ego. And the things that cause us discomfort, the things we’d like to get rid of, the things that weigh us down, and dishearten us, and make us cry. Those are negative memes that have stuck onto our ego. And we can drop them by deciding to. I’m not going to do it. I’m quitting smoking this time. I’m never going to pick up a cigarette again. That is a decision, for example, to drop that I love cigarettes meme. And so if you can drop these negative memes on your own, and everyone can, if you realize it, decide it. Because we have a very strong willpower. We have free will. Free will is a characteristic of the Father, the Son, and the Aeons. We were born in that line of inheritance whereby we have free will. We just forget about it down here because of the confusion in the world. But if you enable your free will, you can drop your negative memes.

If you can’t do it on your own, you can do it through prayer by appealing directly to Christ to help me. Please, Lord Jesus, take this burden from me. Heal me of this alcoholism, or whatever the thing is, right? You can do it through prayer. It can happen in a miraculous second.

Or you can do it through therapy, if it’s good therapy. The idea in good therapy is to peel off those memes one at a time. Get rid of those negative memes through therapy, not through pharmaceuticals. You can’t peel off memes from pharmaceuticals, either self-administered pharmaceuticals or psychiatric drugs. That doesn’t peel the memes off of you. It just throws a wet blanket on them, but you’re still carrying them around. The best type of therapy is where you realize the negative meme and you decide with the therapist’s help to drop it. That could be something like rational emotive therapy. It can be hypnotherapy.

Before I go any further, let me share with you this article my brother was citing. It’s from the blog known as Aeon. The article is called, There Are No Psychopaths: Virtually everything you know about psychopathy has been thoroughly debunked. Why does this zombie idea live on?

Quoting the article,

Psychopathic personality disorder, or psychopathy as it is commonly called, is one of the oldest and most researched mental health diagnoses. In modern science, psychopaths are typically described with reference to concrete symptoms, like a lack of empathy, remorse, and conscience, or more explicit behavioral signs, like predatory violence, pathological lying, and impaired impulse control.

The psychopath has also become a well-known figure of fascination in popular culture, frequently portrayed in best-selling novels and cinematic thrillers, [such as the movies No Country for Old Men and Natural Born Killers]. However, there’s a problem with this idea of psychopathy. While it has been researched across hundreds of empirical studies, especially since the explosion of research in the late 1990s, there is still remarkably little evidence that corroborates popularized claims about the diagnosis.

Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers
Despite enthusiasm among researchers in the 1990s and 2000s, the past two decades have been sobering. Today, virtually every claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings. Psychopathy may not exist at all.

I’m jumping all around in this article. The article is much longer. The link is included in the transcript to this episode, if you want to go look it up.

In the vast majority of tests, [89% of all tests], no clear distinction can be made between psychopaths and control groups.

That is extremely strong. So there you go. Hence the title of the article, Psychopathy Does Not Exist. This author produced a study of all the other studies of psychopathy, and this is his conclusion.

An alternative answer to this question, that has so far received little attention, is the possibility that psychopathy may be an instance of what scientists colloquially refer to as a zombie idea. Ideas that have the quality of being intuitively appealing, but the idea itself is essentially a fallacious misconception of reality. Just like zombies, when these ideas have been falsified, known to be dead ideas, they somehow still manage to stubbornly stick around in the halls of prestigious universities, only to once again infect another generation of young scientists.

He says,

The aggregation of scientific evidence does not corroborate the idea of psychopathy. If anything, it throws the whole notion into doubt.

And by the way, psychopathy is included as a personality disorder. I couldn’t think of that word when I was talking to him on the phone, but the word I was searching for is personality disorder, and those are pretty much agreed to be impossible to treat. A person is a certain way, and that’s the way they are.

My brother and I both agree that so-called psychopathy is a collection of memes that have stuck onto a person’s personality, because they were not born that way. It’s not part of their eternal aeonic personality. It’s a bundle of negative memes. And like any other memes, they can be pulled off if you understand the psychology in this manner.

At this point in the episode, I had planned to share about 10 minutes of the phone conversation my brother and I had on this topic but we decided to pull that segment. We felt it was possibly too lighthearted for such a serious topic and that our joshing around might be misunderstood. So we’ll leave it at this. I hope you have enjoyed this look at psychopathy and a review of Gnostic psychology.

So until next week, God bless us all, and Onward and Upward!