Gnostic Insights

Memes are the cultural expressions of societies, and their content is information. Memes, in other words, are the “stuff” of symbolic thought. Everyone holds their own personal bundle of memes tightly against their soul, and these memes influence every aspect of our lives.

Today I am going to read you a chapter out of my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, and we are going to speak about a simple model of memes.

Memes are the cultural expressions of societies, and their content is information. In human societies, memes are often propagated through mass media, such as magazines, films, and the Internet, in addition to word-of-mouth and tradition. Every discrete concept, mythology, or icon is a meme.

The Beatles is a meme. Andy Warhol’s iconic poster of Marilyn Monroe is a meme. Football is a meme. Patriotism is a meme. All isms are memes. The cross and the crescent are memes. Loyalty and honesty are memes. Indeed, each and every particular idea that a person can know is a meme. Even basic concepts like chair and mother are memes.

Memes, in other words, are the stuff of symbolic thought. Some memes are held in common by most human cultures. The wheel, the ideal model of a caring family, archetypal heroes and villains like the wise sage and the shadow, even universal human values such as liberty and safety.

Other memes are exclusive to their particular culture. This especially applies to memes dealing with local traditions, religions, politics, and regional myths. Humans are not the only units of consciousness affected by memes.

All social aggregations of units of consciousness propagate and utilize memes. Cats, for example, bury their waste because there is a strong waste-burying meme that resonates in all cats. Dog is man’s best friend is a shared meme chord continually repropagated and reenacted by both humans and dogs. Flying in formation is awesome may well be a goose meme.

Memes can be described as energetic waves of cultural information patterns fueled by repetition or starved by lack of usage. As waveforms, each meme has a distinct vibratory signature akin to a musical note. Each individual meme can be likened to a string on society’s harp. A single meme is like a single note. A group of related memes is like a chord.

If, for example, we look at the meme chord for America, we can quickly list a variety of memes and complex sets of memes that contribute to that chord. Constitutional government, the Old West, consumerism, slavery and emancipation, American politics, elections, liberty, capitalism, The Founding Fathers, Hollywood movies and television, justice, popular music, baseball, and so on with all of the other memes associated with America. Each meme chord vibrates to the particular concepts that make it up. Units of consciousness who share the same memes are like members of a choir cloaked in the robes of their common meme chords, all vibrating in unison with one another.

memeflag
We are not all affected by the same memes. Most memes pass us by unnoticed. A meme must be either instinctually acquired through prenatal karma or learned in order to be invoked by a unit of consciousness. Once a unit of consciousness does acquire a meme, it becomes a part of that unit of consciousness’s unique vibratory bundle. If you do not wish to continue holding that meme string in a personal meme bundle of memes and chords, you must detach the string from your grasp.

Some memes are easy to detach because they do not fit in well with your overall bundle of strings and chords. You may, for example, forget the details of a foreign film as soon as it is over because its memes do not bond well with your personal meme bundle. Some memes are very difficult once they are acquired because their vibratory pattern is so intense.

Emotionally evocative memes such as victimhood, shame, or jealousy are difficult to detach due to the intense synergistic coupling of thoughts and emotion. Post-traumatic stress disorder is one such condition that bonds unwanted memes with crippling emotion. Addictions, likewise, tightly cement their disabling meme bundles onto an addict’s ego.

You may pick up entire chords of associated memes, but it is also common to pick and choose from among a chord’s individual strings. Happy marriage, for example, is a complex meme chord that means different things to different people depending upon their personal selection of particular strings. One prospective couple may resonate to the big wedding meme and so expect to invoke that meme at the onset of the happy marriage. Another couple may not be holding on to that memetic string and so do not need or want a big wedding. For most couples, the happy marriage chord includes children. Other couples do not resonate to the particular offspring meme, so no children are necessary.

For many couples, the bouncing baby meme may be adequately invoked by the man’s best friend dog meme. So, while we all have an idea of what happy marriage means, we each hold a slightly different set of memes that define it. But, the bottom line to marital bliss must begin with a couple’s shared and harmonious meme chords.

The importance of memes is that a huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we collect and hold on to. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the memes we hold dear, as well as the memes we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of and we are repelled by memes we disapprove of.

The Sanskrit word for these provocative memes is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the ego that interfere with soul consciousness. The memes each of us cling to, both those we like and those we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now.

When we unthinkingly lock onto a meme or a set of memes, it is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular meme bundle. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters.

Literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke called this meme filter a terministic screen situated between each person and reality, both selecting and deflecting their perception of the world. Burke said this terministic screen was activated during information exchanges with others and within oneself during self-talk. The filter of our terministic screen blocks unacceptable memes from affecting our comfortable perception of reality.

We see the terministic screen at play every day on the interpersonal level. For example, Person A, whose meme bundle includes a belief that others are out to get me, will interpret events in a manner that reinforces that meme. The most innocent statement on Person B’s part will activate Person A’s out-to-get-me meme, even when no such insult was intended or even imagined by Person B. Clearly, Person A’s own meme attachment hurt Person A, not Person B. The same meme filtering mechanism holds true for groups in the form of cultural ideologies, complex bundles of memes shared by members of a group.

For example, Conservatives have identified a complex meme bundle they call “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” TDS refers to the phenomenon wherein people on the political Left interpret everything the President says or does as negative and harmful, irrespective of Trump’s intention or the actual outcome of the policy. People on the political Right interpret Trump’s speech and actions in an entirely different light than people on the Left. This is the result of their respective meme bundles.

What is and isn’t allowed in the minds of members is determined by which memes are included and which are excluded from the group’s ideological meme chord. Because of this, information exchanged between members of different cultures will resonate more strongly with the sender’s memes than with the receiver’s memes. For example, when an American speaks of free and democratic elections, his or her memetic definitions for free and democratic may differ radically from another culture.

The extent to which communication may occur between cultures is determined by their overlapping memes and the permeability of each culture’s deterministic screens and the extent to which they are open to foreign memes. Another example of delimiting memes occurs during problem-solving. The more tightly held one’s memes are, the fewer solutions will present themselves.

If you think only a hammer will drive a nail, you will not even consider the flat side of the heavy wrench lying nearby. If a group thinks outsiders are untrustworthy, then they will not trust any outsider. The ability to consider solutions outside the box and to engage in lateral thinking comes about through non-attachment to the shoulds and oughts of how things work.

One must be willing to set aside treasured beliefs in order to perceive memes outside one’s own bundle and thereby discover fresh solutions. In the same manner that a person’s personality is defined by its unique meme bundle, institutions are also defined by their sets of treasured memes. Memes are even more important to an institution than are its members in the sense that members come and go, but memes persist.

As President John F. Kennedy put it, people may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Each and every cultural institution we belong to—family, workplace, church, mosque, tribe, nation, and so on—not only comes with its own bundle of shared memes held in common by its members, it also comes with a filter that limits members from acknowledging or adopting ideological incompatible memes. Institutions are defined as much by their excluded memes as they are by their included memes.

An exclusive institution holds tightly to the identity provided by its current memes. Its border is strong and its filter is powerful. An inclusive institution allows members more latitude in the memes they may hold.

Its border is less defended, its filter less opaque. An open-minded institution allows that there may be memes out there in the larger culture of value. Its filter is more permeable.

Conservative institutions hold tightly onto their memes, which are usually formally codified into law. Whether embodied in the rulings of a Supreme Court or issued by a tribal chief, these reckoning rods declare the boundaries of the institution’s acceptable memes and are the mirrors by which members define themselves as part of this group rather than that. Now, it’s an interesting thing—at this point in my book, things have completely turned upside down here in the year of 2021, because the next paragraph is about what is called progressive institutions. But this definition of progressivism no longer holds true. Listen.

Progressive institutions, on the other hand, hold an overarching inclusive meme that requires an open and permeable meme boundary that can accommodate diversity of thought and expression. Because of this inclusivity value, open institutions look to their members as living sources of shared memes in preference to codified documents or singular authority figures. And my comment is that in the United States, for example, and I believe it’s worldwide at this point, progressive institutions are no longer inclusive. They talk as though they’re inclusive. They talk as though they accept diversity of thought and behavior. But actually, they only currently accept their particular view. So they are no longer actually progressive and inclusive. They are as tightly conservative as any conservative group has traditionally been. But they’re still calling themselves progressive.

Here is a statement from President John F. Kennedy that expresses the traditional view of progressivism. Quote,

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.

And so, continuing my aside, the current state of progressivism still talks the good talk about inclusion and diversity, but what they say about their opponents is hateful and divisive. The current progressive meme of identity politics separates and segregates in contrast to the meme of John F. Kennedy that unites and integrates.

Okay, back to the more esoteric now. Transpersonal memory is defined as memories that are shared at a cultural level rather than as personal memories. Personal memories reveal themselves in many ways, through societal archetypes and archetypal dreams, through subconscious assumptions, stereotypes, and expectations, and through strange occurrences such as the purported 100th monkey phenomenon. Carl Jung referred to this transpersonal memory as the collective unconscious. The Simple Explanation identifies these transpersonal memories as collective memes and meme chords and locates them at the level of our aggregate consciousness. They constitute the mind of the culture’s unit of consciousness.

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written extensively about a scientifically controversial process he calls morphogenetic fields. How does an oak tree develop from an acorn? By information carried in the morphogenetic fields surrounding the acorn. Sheldrake explains that morphogenetic fields are to life forms what quantum probability clouds are to subatomic particles, carrying the information that gives rise to particular biological manifestations of form. In the case of the acorn and the oak tree, the morphogenetic field of the oak tree provides the genetic blueprint, while the mama tree’s karma and memes provide the individualized epigenetic pattern that tells which genes to turn on and off.

So, what karma can a tree have? Its karma is the record of its life, nutrients, weather, history of water availability, pest attacks, and so on. What memes can a tree hold? Ooh, the sun feels good on my leaves. I like to follow the sun.

The Simple Explanation agrees with Sheldrake that personal memories do not reside in the meat portion of our brains, but are vibratory patterns held in the zero-point field as are Jung’s collective transpersonal memes. Furthermore, apparently personal memes are actually harmonics of collective memes and are shared in common with all who hold on to that meme. The particular shadings of one person’s memes differ slightly from the next person’s, as is to be expected among fractal replications of a single phenomenon, but all who hold a particular meme know its pattern and are affected by it.

There was a popular meme chord known as the condescending Wonka meme, and you can look that up as an image online, wherein the image of actor Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka has come to personify condescension. Why? Because the image presents a facial expression that is easily recognizable and not likely to be misunderstood. Whatever silly lines the Wonka says follow an expected pattern of sarcasm designed to put someone in their place. When this meme appears during a discussion thread, everyone gets it.

Meme chords can be incredibly complex, as is the case with religious meme chords and constitutional meme chords. Religious meme chords are codified in the holy book of the religion and taught to all believers. Violations of religious memes are called sins.

Governmental meme chords are written as constitutions, laws, and court rulings, and all citizens are expected to learn them and obey. Violations of governmental memes are called crimes.

Academic meme chords represent the field of study. Accumulation of academic memes is what makes a person educated. Scientific meme chords, for example, consist of the subject material of each scientific specialty—geology memes, astronomy memes, chemistry memes, virology memes, and so on—plus the meme chord known as the method that specifies how inquiries are to be handled and what constitutes proof. Axioms, theorems, and proofs are memes. Violations of scientific and academic memes are considered to be either honest mistakes or academic fraud.

We like people who share the same memes we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with one another, and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme chords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes. Citizens share their nation’s meme chords. Subcultures share their subcultural memes.

What happens when meme chords collide? What happens when the memes I believe in and hold on to contradict the memes you hold dear? Herein lies the source of all human conflict.

In Gnosticism, we call this the Endless War. The disagreements, the fights, the wars, are all conflicts over incompatible memes. I may believe that my memes are vastly superior to yours. Does that mean I should kill you? Well, that’s a ridiculous idea.

Oh, but what if I strongly believe my memes are the best? No doubt about it. Does that mean you have to believe every meme I believe or else I’m going to burn your house down and loot your business? Well, that’s pretty absurd.

Yeah, but what if I know in my heart that my memes are so much better than your memes? Does that mean you are stupid or systemically racist? Does that mean you are a fraud? Does that mean you just don’t get it? Maybe, maybe not.

Most of our memes came embedded in larger meme chords handed down by others. Most of us have no idea what meme chords we hold and how we came to hold them. In any case, you can’t force someone else to adopt your memes any more than you can force someone else to adopt your gender or your skin color. It is an impossibility. The Simple Explanation suggests that live and let live would be a great meta-meme for everyone to adopt.

If we could appreciate the fact that each of us has a unique perspective, then perhaps we could allow each other to hold the memes that make the most sense for our own lives. This is my meme chord. That is your meme chord. If I don’t like your meme chord, then I can talk it over with you and see if we can move our meme chords closer together in agreement. If neither of us is willing or able to swap memes with the other, then so be it.

Either accept the other person, memes and all, or move on. Find someone else who more closely agrees with your memes. There is enough room in this world for each of us to hold our own chords, but only if live and let live is an overarching meme. Live and let live is the democratic ideal.

We now find ourselves in the midst of a social epidemic of intolerance. Intolerance is the opposite of live and let live. When we are intolerant of others’ memes, we are declaring that our memes are correct and their memes are wrong. And then we take it a step further. We refuse to tolerate the others’ memes. We throw up resistance. We throw up roadblocks. We close our ears and refuse to listen to the other. We do not merely disagree, as reasonable people may do from time to time. When we are intolerant, we look for ways to force the other to abandon their memes and adopt ours. We shout them down because we feel we are shouting the right memes, and theirs are not only wrong, they are evil, and they have no right to be heard. And once you declare the other evil, it is no longer a disagreement in good faith, but a fight for the soul.

God is on our side, therefore we can do whatever it takes to crush the opposition. That is a dangerous and usually delusional meme to hold. And if it entitles the holder to disregard rule of law, then it is not a democratic ideal, and it has no place in American politics.

Once words can no longer be exchanged, frustration builds, and violence follows. This is what we are seeing now, because free exchange of memes has been thwarted through intolerance. Exchange of ideas is the key. You needn’t agree with the other person, but you must hear them out. Because once you agree to sit and exchange ideas and concerns, whether you adopt the other’s ideas or not, the very act of hearing each other creates a shared space that acts as a balm to soothe both your soul and theirs. When you are too angry, frustrated, or afraid to listen to the other, you perpetuate the intolerance that leads to violence.

This intolerance is not helpful. We hear a lot about the importance of diversity nowadays in America. True diversity can only thrive if we allow each other to live and let live.

When you seek to silence those with whom you disagree, you are not encouraging diversity. You are actually partaking in, and dare I say it, fascism. Because fascism advocates the forced suppression of those who express opposing views.

Disagreement, on the other hand, is not forced suppression. It is merely disagreement. Shouting others down when they have the floor, shunning those with whom you disagree, unfriending people on Facebook because they hold opposing views, refusing service in a restaurant to paying customers who voted for a different candidate—this does not help us come together to make things better for the common good.

In Gnostic terms, it is a violation of the Simple Golden Rule. It is a continuance of the never-ending war. It engages the second-order powers in endless war, chasing each other, like the uroboros, which is the snake eating its own tail. It does not build, it merely enslaves.

Okay, this is about half of the chapter on memes in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book, and I will bring up part two of memes in our next podcast. Part two has to do with exoteric and esoteric religious memes, and we will talk about religion, faith, and belief in terms of meme bundles.

Thank you for spending this time with me. Onward and upward, and God bless.

Buy the book!

A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is Dr. Ropp’s theory of everything, first published in 2012, that forms the backbone of her interpretation of gnostic philosophy.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. For the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at the ancient Chinese wisdom book called the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. I shared with you some verses, and I’ve shared with you the means by which I translate it into Gnostic terminology.

Since beginning this series, one of my most regular and faithful followers wrote to tell me that David Bentley Hart has a new 2026 edition of the Tao Te Ching that he calls A New Translation. So I immediately purchased the book, and it’s good. You know, David Bentley Hart loves the big words. He doesn’t care if you know the vocabulary or not, but he uses the most perfect words that he can.

Another thing that’s amusing about this book is that he co-authored it with his son, Patrick Robert Hart. And there’s a picture of the two of them on the back flap of the book cover. And it’s so funny to me. The reason I’m laughing is because Patrick looks exactly like his dad, only 40 years younger. It’s worth buying the book just to look at those two pictures. It’s really something!

Anyway, this week I picked at random one of the verses from the Tao Te Ching, verse 53. And today I’m going to read to you out of David Bentley Hart’s version of verse 53, and also Jonathan Star’s version of verse 53.

I mentioned previously that in the Jonathan Star edition, called the Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition, there’s a very special section at the back of the book that gives you the pictograms of all of the verses, every pictogram in every verse. And then to the right of that, there is a chart. To the right of those pictograms is probably not every possible translation, because you can see that there are probably as many translations of these pictograms as there are readers, because they’re pictures, abstract pictures, with no definitions. So you can interpret the picture for whatever it means. So what I’ve been doing is reading the Tao Te Ching from the chart that Jonathan Star provided.

And I have found that if you read along that right side of the chart of all possible translations of each pictogram in any verse, your own gnosis will guide you to the interpretation, to the words to use, if your gnosis is far enough along to do that. Otherwise, you can stick to the definitions or the translations that the people who have been paid to write and publish these books put out.

So what I’m going to do today is read to you Jonathan Star’s version and David Bentley Hart’s version, and then I’m going to read to you my version of verse 53, interpreted using my Simple Explanation of Gnosticism vocabulary that I hope you are becoming familiar with by now.

And if you’re new to Gnostic Insights or to the Gnostic Reformation, I urge you to go back and read and listen to as many of them as you can because they’re all there in the archives at GnosticInsights.com. I urge you to go back and acquaint yourselves with the earliest episodes that you can find at GnosticInsights.com. They go all the way back to the very first episodes I posted in 2021.

So let’s begin today by taking a look at the Introduction to Tao Te Ching, A New Translation by David Bentley Hart, and we’ll see what he has to say by of introducing the Tao Te Ching to the readers.

In his Introduction on page three, Hart says,

Among the crucial texts to have reached us from that epoch, moreover, the Tao Te Ching is one of the most relentlessly subversive of the common tendencies and categories of human thought and ambition. True, in one very important sense, it advances a metaphysics that is familiar from the speculative and mystical grammars of many peoples. Sometimes it does this in a mythic or metaphorical idiom, sometimes in oratory maxims, sometimes in unadorned philosophical assertions.

But at its heart, it offers a vision of life as a single, pervading power present in all things, of a world charged with spiritual forces, and of an original and ultimate participation of all things in a single source that is inexhaustible precisely because it is perfectly empty, perfectly pure of any discrete essence that the mind or the will can fasten upon. The Tao is not a thing among things, but rather the nothingness, or better, the no-thingness, from which all life emerges, to which it returns, and in which it exists as part of an eternal spiritual communion. The Way of Heaven is not some kind of being among all other beings.

One might instead say that it is, to employ a more Western and scholastic turn of phrase, the act of being as such, in its most original and perennial unity, not a being but rather the let-there-be that is the fountainhead forever pouring itself out in all that is, without ever being depleted or waxing jealous of what it gives. Or, to adopt an older Platonic or Neoplatonic terminology, and one closer to the language of the Tao Te Ching itself, it is that which is beyond being, or beyond essence, the nothingness, or again, the no-thingness, from which being is born. And that same unity dwells within each and every one of us, and in all the living things around us.

So let’s pause there for a moment, and I hope you can recognize how close this is to the type of Gnosticism that I share with you here at Gnostic Insights. This Tao Te Ching is literally the ancient Chinese version of a Gnostic book. And just as we had buried in the Nag Hammadi, in that big six-foot pot that they dug out of the ground in 1945, just as we had all of those various types of Gnostic books, including books of Plato, I’m so surprised and disappointed that the Tao Te Ching wasn’t among them, because it would have fit perfectly with the Gnostic books.

And that is exactly why I am sharing it with you here now, so that you can see that this Gnosticism has nothing to do with the history of the Middle East or the history of Egypt. It has to do with the nature and source of being. And that knows no human history. That transcends history. It transcends groups and peoples. And that the ancient Chinese had this same vision of the source as the Gnostics later did, and as Plato did, is confirmation that this is a universal force.

Hart says,

In a world that has always been the plaything of violent and avaricious buffoons, as we’ve been reminded with special vividness in recent years, the saint or sage who represents the human ideal in this book is someone who instead refuses to strive for mastery or ownership or personal aggrandizement. Instead, he or she seeks to imitate the flow of nature and of life as a gift that arrives from a source beyond itself and moves toward an end over which no one at the last can wield control.

When Hart is saying the sage or the saint, that could just as easily be translated as the Gnostic. Skipping down the page, he says,

And the book tells us that we find this Way of Heaven, and that is a translation of the word Tao, Way of Heaven, and live according to its power, [and power is a translation of te], not through heroic effort, force of will or spiritual conquest, but rather through wu-wei, not striving, or in the term of the great 13th, 14th century Christian Rhineland mystic Meister Eckhart, Gelassenheit, letting go. But neither wu-wei nor Gelassenheit is merely a matter of passive disengagement. Each is an active ethos whose nature is one of charity and constant concern for others. One lets go of one’s self so as to embrace the world.

And of course, in the terminology that I use here at Gnostic Insights, I use Self with a capital S to distinguish it from ego. And I think when most people are writing and they talk about letting go of one’s self, they’re actually talking about letting go of your ego. But we use the word Self as a fractal representation of the One Source. So we have a slightly different slant on how to use these words. But early on, when I was writing out these Gnostic thoughts, it was important for me to put together a consistent vocabulary so that I’m not in one article writing about self and in another article writing about ego and meaning the same thing. We needed to be able to distinguish the true Self or the fractal part of our unit of consciousness that represents and reflects the Fullness of God.

So the Self with a capital S is our personal embodiment and reflection of the Fullness of God. Whereas our ego is also part of our original unit of consciousness, but once we’re incarnated into this world, our ego becomes confused and lost and forgetful in the same manner that the ego of the fallen Aeon Logos did. So ego is not inherently bad. It’s simply easily confused and deluded by the chatter around us.

My Self is at the center of my consciousness, aligned with the Fullness and the Father. Ego looks outward, not onward and upward.
Later on, on page eight of the Introduction, Hart says,

This is not a book about finding the smooth middle course between ethical extremes. The saint or sage, [or I would say Gnostic], of the Tao Te Ching is not an Aristotelian or a Confucian, or for that matter, an English gentleman, but rather something of a lunatic, by most worldly standards at least, or perhaps something of a holy fool. As much as the Tao is often described in these pages as a path of natural prudence, restraint and equilibrium, it is also a path of paradoxical extravagance, utterly uncompromising in its rejection of many of the seemingly indispensable supports of worldly life, and in its embrace of an altogether unworldly ethos of self-abandonment and unremitting generosity.

And you see, here’s an example of where I would be saying ego abandonment and unremitting generosity. Hart says,

The Tao Te Ching did more than any catechism ever had to make me keenly conscious of how unconditional the moral commands of the New Testament were, the insistence on humility, charity, and self-denial, the refusal of wealth and even of any personal possessions at all, the dedication to the least of these, the militantly guileless trust in divine largesse, and how much more disturbing Christ was than Christianity so often is. Similarly, when one looks to the Tao Te Ching, one finds that, as much as wu-wei is a practical ethos, allowing peace and humility to absorb and thereby conquer the violence and ambitions of men—and occasionally women—it is also a scrupulous avoidance of the balance of the ideal mean.

And this realization also helped awaken me to something about the real nature of the agape, the love of the Gospels. I would never wish to subordinate this book’s genius to the dogmatic or ethical categories of Christianity, but it remains startling in its power to make other traditions come to life in a new way.

Wu-wei, again, means non-striving. There’s a saying amongst Christians that says, Let go and let God. That’s wu-wei.

Okay, we’re going to jump to verse 53 now. Hart’s translation says,

If I have only a little common sense,
I shall walk upon the great Way
and dread only to stray from it.

The great Way is so very even and easy to walk,
and yet so many people prefer the byways.

When the royal court is drowned in gauds and splendors,
the fields are thronged with weeds,
and the granaries are desolate.

Some there are who disport themselves in sumptuous finery,
wearing keen swords at their hips,
gorging themselves on food and drink,
storing up ever more possessions.
This is just the gross extravagance of brigands.
Nothing could be more contrary to the Way.

Now we’ll hear the same verse translated by Jonathan Star.

If I had the least bit of wisdom
I could follow the path of Tao quite well
My only fear would be trying to go my own way.
The Great Path is simple and direct
yet people love to take the side routes.

See how magnificent the courts have become
The women dress in colorful gowns
The men carry well-crafted swords
Food and drink overflow
Wealth and finery abound
Yet in the shadow of all this splendor
the fields grow barren
the granaries are all but empty

I say this pomp at the expense of others
is like the boasting of thieves after a looting
Surely it is contrary to Tao
Surely it cuts against the grain of the whole empire.

Now here’s how I translate Verse 53. A Simple Gnostic translation.

If our leaders remembered only a little of their gnosis
They would walk the great path of Tao in accordance with the will of the Father and dread putting their egos first.

The path of Heaven’s truth and righteousness is straightforward and smooth
Yet people become sidetracked by worldly desires and cling to their treasured memes.

Our government buildings are exceedingly splendid
While the farmers’ fields lie fallow and choked with weeds—
The silos and storehouses all but empty.

People wear designer clothes and ornate jewelry
And carry gleaming phones at their belts as if they were sharpened blades;
They gorge themselves on rich food and drinks
And accumulate an abundance of material possessions.

Surely, this is nothing but larcenous pride at others’ expense.
It is the opposite of the Father’s Will. Truly!

Star’s footnote under the first stanza describes the word shih as “the raising of a banner,” which implies a claim to individuality and name. Star says,

Thus, shih is associated with personal or ego-motivated action and is the opposite of wu-wei, non-action. Acting individually—seeing your action in a limited context—is a by-road, a path leading away from the truth.

The second stanza contrasts the Way of Heaven with ching. Ching is variously translated as

by-paths, side roads, deviations, to be sidetracked, “devious paths,” “by-roads of the mind—too many thoughts.” [and in modern parlance, ‘going down a rabbit hole’]

I translate this concept as our egoically-constructed meme bundles we gather and wear as cloaks that obscure our true Self. Every person has their unique meme-bundle composed of the thoughts and values they love and the thoughts and values they hate. Our meme bundles define who we are in society and what information we gravitate toward and those we run from. Our meme bundle serves as a filter that frames and limits our ability to reason and think for ourselves. [Next week’s episode will review, in depth, my Simple Explanation concept of memes.]

The fourth stanza speaks of the people carrying sharp swords at their sides. I interpret this as our cell phones. The phone is the modern belt-sword and serves the same function for us as the blade did in olden days. The phone is carried everywhere, like the sword. It signals status. It is used for display and ego enhancement. The phone is the personal talisman of modern life, just as the sword was in ancient China. It signifies readiness to do battle. It is required for participation in society.

Thus, verse 53 points to the division between operating out of the true Self that is a fractal of the Fullness of God, versus acting out of ego and pride—fractals of the fallen Demiurge. It aligns ego-enhancing riches such as lavish lifestyles, expensive clothing, and the latest and greatest electronic gear to bad government policies that encourage slothfulness and eventual poverty and starvation.

I feel like launching into some politics here, but I will hold myself back until next week when we will review what memes are and what they have to do with our Gnostic self.

Until then, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

If this gnosis is making sense to you, and you feel as though you are benefitting, please let me know by donating just $5 or leaving a Comment. I greatly appreciate your involvement.

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My Self continually evolves according to the selection of memes influencing the decisions I make here and now and the karmic record I create that loops around to become my potential futures.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. We’re proceeding through a study of the Tao Te Ching and how it relates to our Gnostic beliefs. Today we’re going to have a look at verse six of the Tao Te Ching.

First, I’ll read the version translated by David Bentley Hart in his Tao Te Ching, A New Translation. It goes like this.

The goddess of the valley is deathless;
She is called the mysterious Mother,
deep and subtle, the Mother’s dark womb.
The gateway to the mysterious Mother’s abode
is the foundation of Heaven and Earth.

The one origin lasts forever and ever,
like an endless strand of gossamer,
ceaselessly drawn out, yet never depleted.

So it’s a fairly short verse. In comparison, Jonathan Star’s translation draws it out quite a bit. He uses more words in his translation of the Tao Te Ching, from The Definitive Edition.

He says,

Endlessly creating
Endlessly pulsating
The Spirit of the Valley never dies.
She is called the Hidden Creator.

Although She becomes the whole universe
Her immaculate purity is never lost
Although She assumes countless forms
her true identity remains intact
Whatever we see or don’t see
Whatever exists or doesn’t exist
Is nothing but the creation of this Supreme Power

Tao is limitless, unborn, eternal—
It can only be reached through the Hidden Creator
She is the very face of the Absolute
The gate to the source of all things eternal

Listen to her voice
Hear it echo through creation
Without fail, She reveals her presence

Without fail, She brings us to our own perfection

That’s how Jonathan Star puts it. We can see we’re talking about what Gnostics call the Divine Feminine.

I don’t talk much about the Divine Feminine. Actually, I don’t know that I talk at all about the Divine Feminine, because it’s not brought up in the Tripartite Tractate. But as we discovered by studying the Tao Te Ching in our previous several episodes, the Divine Feminine in the Tao Te Ching is translated as a yin force. And yin is receptive. Yin draws in.

Yang is active. Yang puts out. In Gnosticism, the Father is a yang force. He is the Origin. And the Origin has to be, by definition, emitting, emanating, putting forth. This is why it’s called the Father. Do you understand?

This is not a slight against women. This is not like saying, Oh, patriarchy wants God to be male. It’s not that at all. It’s that yang force is outward pushing. Yin force is inward pulling. Women receive. Men penetrate.

So the Divine Feminine force is that womb of creation that receives the emanations of the Father.

It says in verse 78 that after the Fall, when those parts of Logos that were left behind that formed our material cosmos, Logos rushed back up to the Pleroma to be with the other Aeons. It says in verse 78 of the Tripartite Tractate,

When He who produced Himself as perfect actually did bring Himself forth,

[and we’re talking about Logos—He produced Himself as perfect. He was a perfect fractal iteration of the entirety of the Fullness]. So it says,

When He who produced Himself as perfect actually did bring Himself forth,

[and that bringing Himself forth, that becomes our material cosmos. That is the womb of creation.] Because, listen, it says,

He became weak like a female nature, which has abandoned its virile counterpart.

[So the female nature is yin, receptive, bringing in what comes from the yang force. The virile counterpart is the yang force. The female nature is the yin force]. So once again, it says,

When He who produced Himself as perfect actually did bring Himself forth,

[that is when Logos, who was perfect, fell, He brought Himself forth, fell],

He became weak like a female nature,

[that is, He became yin, receptive],

which has abandoned its virile counterpart,

[that is, the yang force]. It goes on to say,

From that which was deficient in itself, there came those things which came into being from His thought and His arrogance, but from that which is perfect in Him, He left it and raised Himself up to those who are His. He was in the Pleroma as a remembrance for Him so that He would be saved from His arrogance. The one who ran on high, [that is Logos], and the one who drew Him to Himself, [that is the Father or the Son who was sometimes called the Father], were not barren, but in bringing forth a fruit in the Pleroma, they upset those who were in the defect.

So this is saying that the yin space that was left behind after the Fall, when Logos retreated, when His yang force retreated, He left behind the yin vacuum and that it was not barren. It brought forth fruit in the Pleroma, that is, creation.

So this is finally here in the Tripartite Tractate where we’re talking about the yin and the yang. The female nature being that which has lost its “virility,” that is, its outward force, and has become yin, is what was left behind here. And that vacuum was filled with creative power from the Pleroma, that is, the Fullness of God—the Holy Spirit of creation, the Great Mother that was the womb of creation.

I don’t really care for the mythology surrounding the Fall of Sophia. So I do not go out of my way to teach the Fall of Sophia. I don’t like the whole business.

It seems to me that the Divine Feminine, the Holy Spirit, is the entirety of the Hierarchy of the Fullness. I think it is an error to equate a single Aeon—Sophia—with the Divine Feminine property of the cosmos. According to the Tripartite Tractate it is the Fullness as a whole that sends life into the cosmos in order to restore the Fallen Demiurge to Logos, not the single Aeon named Sophia. The worship of Sophia, the Aeon, is misplaced. It is the Fullness, the Holy Spirit of the God Above All Gods, the “cloak worn by the Son,” that is the Divine Feminine expressed within our cosmos.

This is from verse 67 of the Tripartite Tractate. It says,

He knows them which things He Himself is, since they are in the single name and are all speaking in it. And He brings them forth in order that it might be discovered that they exist according to their individual properties in a unified way.

And so the He is the Son, and what He brings forth is the Totalities of the ALL, or the Aeons when they become self-aware. So they are parts of the Son that then become self-aware.

The Holy Spirit, the Divine Feminine, is much more powerful and Full than any single Aeon, because she is the entire Fullness of all Aeons. This is how it is that all creatures can be sent into the cosmos with their predesigned attributes—they are all preexistent in the Fullness, not within the single Aeon of Sophia. Sophia does not contain all of the attributes of the Fullness; Logos does, in fractal form.

The Tripartite Tractate says that the Fall was created by Logos. And Logos contains within itself, remember, fractals of the entirety of the Fullness of God. So we might say that Logos is non-gendered, if we want to get into today’s terminology for things. Because Logos contains all possible personalities, all possible forces, all physics, all chemistry, all bonding, and all energy and power is all represented by Logos. But at that stepped down, fractal iteration. And that’s what we have down here from the Fall.

We are children of the Elohim of Adonai Elohim
In my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I did refer to the inception of the universe as the Mother of 10,000 things, as it’s called in China, or the womb of creation. And in my mind, you know, it’s shaped like a big torus, a big donut shape, but we don’t have to get into that here.

Now let me give you my translation of verse six. And I am achieving this translation by looking at Jonathan Star’s Definitive Edition and his chart at the back of the book that gives all possible definitions of each pictogram. So, reading from the all possible definitions side of verse six, here’s how I would put it.

The Holy Spirit that fills the world never ceases.

This mysterious spirit is referred to as the Divine Feminine. This is the gateway, the primal womb that discloses the source and wellspring of Heaven and the creation of Earth.

Ceaseless and enduring without end, it continues on forever.

Her provision never runs dry. Drawing upon it will not exhaust its usefulness.

That’s it. It’s a short verse.

Now, in Star’s footnotes for this verse, the word Shēn—spirit, soul, God, the Spirit that fills this world, the spiritual reality of the void or the Tao—the pictogram is two hands extending a rope plus influx from heaven. So you put those two signs together into one pictogram and it’s the sign by which the will of heaven is known by mankind. And that is known as the Holy Spirit and that’s how I translated it.

The other footnote here looks at the phrase Hsuän pin. Hsuän translates as mysterious, profound, secret, subtle, deep, hidden, dark, abyss, origin, primal principle. That’s the Hsuän part. And the pin part is female, woman, mother, mare, womb, female qualities, creative power, mysterious female, abstruse womb, dark mare. But it also means mystic, mysterious female, mysterious feminine, mysterious feminine element, mysterious femininity, profound female, dark female, subtle female, mysterious mother, mother of the abyss, mother substance of the deep, primal mother, mother of heaven, abstruse womb, mystery of passivity, dark mare, or what we would call in Gnosticism, Sophia, Divine Feminine. So what I take from this verse six is that the Holy Spirit is a female principle— Hsuän pin .

I’ve always felt that; I’ve always thought that the Holy Spirit was feminine. You have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There you have the Father, the Mother, and the Child. So they are all represented in the Trinity of Christianity. However, it’s never so clearly put.

And we also have, from this verse six, that the universe, or the cosmos, as we call it in Gnosticism—cosmos is another word for universe—it’s bigger than a galaxy. It’s bigger than the Earth. So while these things are often translated as Earth in the Tao, we’ve upped the game to cosmos in Gnosticism, meaning every place that is material. That is here, as opposed to the ethereal realm, the divine, which is outside of the cosmos. And in my Simple Explanation way of explaining things, I think of our cosmos as this gigantic, really infinitely large, torus shape. And remember, the torus is like a donut, but this cosmic torus is like a gigantic donut with a zero point at the middle, and that is the here and now.

And the inside of the donut is our cosmos. Outside of the donut is the ethereal space of the Father and the Fullness. So we have this border, and the border is mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate—that after the Fall, the Father put a border around the broken bits and pieces of Logos that formed themselves into the Demiurge and our material cosmos.

So we have our feminine cosmos, the womb that holds creation, just like the womb of any creature holds its creation inside of it. Life is in the womb.

And of course, it’s always been a mystery. It continues to be a mystery to this very day, how it is that a female, and well, we can talk about humans here, although all creatures have their wombs and their babies, is that the female human nourishes and grows and is her human conduit for the Holy Spirit that is infusing and developing the fetus within her womb.

This is a miracle of birth. It’s truly a miracle, because people have always wondered, how is it? Where does this life come from? It comes through the womb. So the human mother is like the Divine Feminine in that she holds the womb of creation within herself and nurtures it until it is born.

It manifests as its own material creature and grows up the way it was designed in the Fullness. Because, you know, we’re not random folks.

It just kills me that people think that the baby that is developing within the woman’s womb is a random happenstance collection of evolved events that burp out a baby at the end, if they’re lucky and they’re not aborted, that is. The action of pregnancy and then the subsequent birth of a live creature out of seemingly nothing is a mystery. So all pregnant women represent the Divine Feminine and the presence of the Holy Spirit at work in the world.

Of course, the Holy Spirit, the Divine Feminine, permeates the cosmos. It’s in the very air we breathe, the flowers, all the critters, everything that is living. Not the rocks and stones, they don’t give birth, but all of the living creatures do. And that is the Divine Feminine that populates the cosmos.

All that the Demiurge could knock together was the material level of the cosmos—the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals. That is the realm of the Demiurge. And then the immaterial archons that are the subselves of the Demiurge, that are the henchmen, the minions of the Demiurge. And they have their power in the belief systems, the meme bundles that the living carry with them.

So I would like to state here and now, it is clear that abortion is a demiurgic, archontic move. Abortion kills the intended child that the Fullness was sending into the world. And we all have our functions to perform. We all have our position, place, and duty. And when a child in the womb is aborted by a human decision, it is a direct contradiction to the will of God. It is a funeral to be mourned. It’s a sad, sad error.

We serve either the forces of good or the forces of evil. And there is no real force of evil—there is only ignorance. The Demiurge is not evil. The Demiurge is forgetful, doesn’t realize what’s going on, doesn’t realize where it’s coming from, doesn’t respect the Divine Feminine. And this is why other schools of Gnostic thought, other books, show Sophia as a tragic character once she has come to Earth, show her as being raped by the Demiurge or the archons. So the question I pose to you is, whose side are you on?

So let me read for you once more my version of verse 6 and see if this makes sense to you.

The Holy Spirit that fills the world never ceases.

This mysterious spirit is referred to as the Divine Feminine. This is the gateway, the primal womb that discloses the source and wellspring of Heaven and the creation of Earth.

Ceaseless and enduring without end, it continues on forever.

Her provision never runs dry. Drawing upon it will not exhaust its usefulness.

And this is another way of talking about the never-ending stream of consciousness, life, and love that flows out from the Father, that flows down through the Aeons, down through the Holy Spirit—the divine presence that is manifested in our cosmos.

Remember, the Christ came for all of us. The Christ redeems us all. If you have made mistakes, if you have done terrible errors in the past, even killing the life within you, you are forgiven. You’ve been taken care of. The Christ will redeem you. You merely need to ask for the redemption. You need to repent and ask for redemption, and you will be washed clean.

So God bless us all, and onward and upward.

If you are a regular reader or listener of Gnostic Insights, please consider donating to this effort with a little monetary support. I can’t grow the channel without your financial support. I am working on a number of videos to be uploaded to YouTube, but everything costs money. If you can afford it, please help.

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You needn't become a Taoist to be a Gnostic. These are just labels. But truth is truth, and there is only one truth.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week I started hopefully a series, of mining gnosis through the Tao Te Ching. Last week’s episode explained the process by which I mine gnosis through the Tao. I’ve been mining that gnosis for well over 20 years without even realizing that it was going to turn into Gnosticism or a Gnostic interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.

The Tao Te Ching is an ancient Chinese manuscript. It’s full of gnosis, and I have found it to be entirely compatible with the gnosis taught through the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I use here at Gnostic Insights to share my gnosis with everyone. Today we’re going to do another verse from the Tao Te Ching, the next verse in the book, verse 41.

I’m not going to explain to you again the process by which I do this, but let me begin by reading to you Jonathan Star’s interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, verse 41, and here’s how it goes.

The best seeker hears of Tao. He strives with great effort to know it.

When an average seeker hears of Tao, he thinks of it now and again. When the poorest seeker hears of Tao, he laughs out loud.

Tao is always becoming what we have need for it to become. If it could not do this, it would not be Tao.

There is an old saying: The clear way seems clouded. The straight way seems crooked. The sure way seems unsteady. The greatest power seems weak. The purest white seems tainted. The abundant seems empty. The stable seems shaky. The certain seems false. The great square has no corners. The great vessel is never filled.

A beginner may be clumsy, but after practice, what talent! A large drum may sit silently, but when banged, what noise!

Tao lies hidden, yet it alone is the glorious light of this world.

So that’s verse 41 by Jonathan Star. Now, for comparison’s sake, let’s look at another translation of the Tao Te Ching, this one by David Bentley Hart from his new book, Tao Te Ching, A New Translation. And thank you very much, Gabriella, one of our followers, who recommended it.

The very best scholar listens to the Way and lives diligently in accord with it. The scholar of middling gifts listens to the Way, at one moment believing, at another losing faith. The poorest scholar listens to the Way and finds it risible. Then again, if he did not laugh at it, it would not really be the Way.

These then be our maxims: The way of enlightenment seems dim and obscure. Every advance along the Way seems like a retreat. The easy level path seems arduous and uneven. The most exalted power seems like a plunging chasm. The purest clarity seems tarnished and dark. The most abundant power seems impoverished. The most formidable power seems like frailty. What is most substantial seems fluid and inconstant. The ideal square has no corners. The finest vessel takes till evening to perfect. The sweetest melody is hushed and tenuous.
The perfect form has no shape.

The way is hidden and nameless. Yet, for just this reason, the Way knows how to nourish and fulfill.

So that’s verse 41, interpreted by David Bentley Hart.

Now I’m going to share with you my interpretation of verse 41. And remember, all of these interpretations come from a myriad of choices, because we’re dealing with pictograms. And you can interpret the pictogram in many, many ways. I’m going to go through verse 41 line by line, pictogram by pictogram, and interpret it in a more obviously Gnostic type of way.

The best, wisest, highest, student or type of person, hears Tao earnestly, attentively, with devotion, and lives in accordance with it, practices with diligence. The average, middle type of person hears about Tao and sometimes follows, sometimes believes, and sometimes doubts, sometimes loses it. The lesser, lowest, inferior type of person hears about Tao and ridicules it, laughs out loud. If they did not laugh, it would not be thusly the Tao.

Now, before going on, let me explain that Tao means the Way, the path, and it is the Way of the Father. It is the path of glory.

The Tao is the emanation of what we call the Father in Gnosticism. So whenever the Tao Te Ching speaks of Tao, think of it as the word of God, or the Way of the Father. And these first three stanzas described the three types of human, and interestingly enough, these exact three types of humans appear throughout Gnosticism.

The Tripartite Tractate describes these three types of humans in verses 98 through 100.

The best, wisest, highest type of person is called the pneumatic, P-N-E-U-M-A-T-I-C, also interpreted as the right ones. The pneumatic, those of God, are on the right. Those of the good thought, workers and servants of the Father, of the Father’s beauty and rest.

The average middle type of person, as it says in the Tao, maps to what in Gnosticism we call the psychic, the fiery ones, the middle ones. They are characterized by a lust for power and ambition, and that is most humans. That’s from verse 100.

And the lesser, the lowest, the inferior type of person, who laughs at Tao and ridicules it, they are referred to as the hylic, the left, the dark ones, the last. And they are brought forth by envy and jealousy. That’s verse 100.

So, in other words, those who ridicule the path, who ridicule the Father—it’s their envy and jealousy that pulls them down.

The middle type, the psychic, the fiery ones, the middle ones, they are characterized by emotion. They’re emotional. And this emotion brings them to a lust for power and ambition, because the emotions are resonating to the fallen ego, or the ruler of this world, the demiurge. And all of the emotions that get stirred up down here in the cosmos by the demiurge and the archons, they are meant to engage the majority of humans in fighting each other in the never-ending war for power and control, because of their ambition, and just being stirred up and upset all the time.

The fewest type is the pneumatic, and those are the teachers of the Word of God, the saints, the prophets, the children of God in the truest sense, in that they have the heart of God, the heart of the Father. They’re not doing this ritualistically or rule-bound. They’re not hypocritically pretending to be good moral people. They are good moral people, and that’s how they view the world, through the eyes of the Father. Carrying on now in verse 41,

Therefore, constructive sayings, proverbs, and maxims, such as the following: The enlightened Tao is the path to illumination, seems obscure, dark, and dull. Advancement toward Tao seems like, or resembles, retreat, falling backwards.

And in a Gnostic way, we would say that what the seeker is retreating from, the retreat, the falling backward, is from worldly concerns and patterns. Because in order to follow the Way, you need to disengage from the world. The Bible says we are in the world, but not of the world.

So, it’s like water and oil—they can be in the same bucket, but they do not mix. The next verse says,

The straight and smooth Tao, path or Way, seems like, resembles, roughness—uneven, and difficult.

I interpret this to mean that the actual path of Tao, the Way of God, the Way of the Father, the Way of glory, the glory beam, is straight, but it seems difficult, uneven. The path of glory coming down from above is true and straight and perfect, but our attempts to walk it are difficult. The next line is,

The highest, exalted, superior Te—that’s power or virtue.

It’s in the title of the book, the Tao Te Ching.

The Way of Virtue resembles an empty chasm.

So, the virtue around us in the world is like a vacuum. It’s an emptiness, it’s a chasm. And I would say from a Gnostic point of view that that is because the world is full of the Demiurge. We second-order powers were sent here to bring the love, consciousness, and life of the Father into this chasm. So, the Way of Te is the Way that we are to behave as second-order powers, spreading love and consciousness.

Also concerning this idea that the highest Te seems empty, in the Tripartite Tractate, verses 59-65, it says, describing the Father’s relationship to the Totalities, that have been emanated from the Son–so, this is way upstream, this is before any humans, before any second-order powers, even at the very inception of the flowering of the Father into the fullness of consciousness that comes down to us—the Father doesn’t reveal Himself to the Totalities, yet they yearn for Him. What they know of the Father is but a trace of Him, revealed as a pleasant odor. So, the Father does not reveal Himself to the Totalities, which are the Totalities of the variables of the Son, all of the properties of the Son, but yet they seek the Father, like they’re pulled into a vacuum. The Father doesn’t reveal Himself, but, like a beautiful aroma, they long to reunite with the Source. It’s another way of looking at that verse. Carrying on with verse 41.

Most perfect and pure clarity, innocence, looks like, or appears, sullied, tarnished, disgraceful.

That is puzzling, isn’t it? I think it’s because those who actually express the path of Tao, or the Way of the Father, righteousness, they can be painted by others as disgraceful, tarnished, sullied. Their motives are denigrated. They’re made fun of, in the manner that the Hylics make fun of righteousness itself. So, even if you are passing through this world in a perfect and pure and innocent manner, you will look to others tarnished, disgraceful. The next verse says,

The most abundant, overflowing, far-reaching Te, which is power and virtue, appears insufficient, defective, lacking.

So, this is saying that the most abundant, glorious, righteous path that you may be on seems like it’s not enough, and it seems like it’s lacking something. I mean, after all, where’s your ambition to succeed? Where’s your ambition to acquire a big house and a lot of material goods? What are you lacking that you don’t have that drive? The next verse says,

Firmly established and vigorous Te, power, virtue, goodness, appears unsteady, flimsy, forced—like a stuck door.

Now, we could also interpret that to mean that we are not faithful in our righteousness. We act righteously, or are in the glory beam and doing God’s work, but then we fall out, and then we have to force our way back into that glory beam, not because it is rejecting us, but because we have stumbled and fallen away. So, we have to come back to it, and the pictogram is forcing a stuck door open. The next verse says,

Genuine, solid, substantial, reality, truth, and virtue, seems fluid, unsubstantial, uncertain, faded.

This is because we’re living in the world, and it has different values, demiurgic values, than the Father and the pleroma of the Fullness of God. The virtues are the solid and substantial reality. The Father, Son, and Fullness hold and dispense truth and virtue to us freely. But to us, it’s insubstantial. You can’t grab it. You can’t hold on to it. You can’t prove it to an unbeliever. It seems like it’s faded. The next verse is,

The supreme—that is, greatest, perfect—region has no corners, boundaries, or angles. It cannot be limited or contained.

And that is the Father’s kingdom. That’s the ethereal plane. The Father itself, the Source, is illimitable. It’s formless. It has no corners, no boundaries. It cannot be limited or contained. The next verse says,

The supreme—that is, the greatest, the most perfect—vessel, implement, talent, or tool, is slow to mature.

I would say that we are the vessels into which the Spirit of the Fullness of God lives, is poured, emanates. We carry it with us, and we are slow to mature. Verse 95 of the Tripartite Tractate says,

The seed of promise is guarded for an upcoming mission.

The next verse of the Tao Te Ching says,

The supreme, greatest, perfect, tone, or sound, or we could say vibratory pattern, lacks sound, is silent, is hard to hear.

The Tripartite Tractate refers to the Totalities, which were the first emanations of the Son—before they became the Aeons stacked in their hierarchy, they were called the Totalities of the ALL, and they were simply all of the properties and powers of the Son, sitting there in that starburst pattern—they all acted as one. They were coexistent with the Son. They didn’t have their own identities or egos at that point. The Tripartite Tractate describes the Totalities as the Silences. They do not have voice until they give glory and thereby become self-aware.

It was through giving glory to the Son and the Father that the Totalities noticed themselves—that they were each individual properties—and that noticing of themselves immediately caused them to migrate and arrange themselves into their proper positions, places, duties, and names. And that is what I refer to as their egos. And in the beginning there, the egos of the Aeons—it’s all good. It’s merely their designation. It’s not a striving for power or anything. That all comes from the fall. The next verse says,

The supreme, greatest, perfect form has no form, material, or substance.

Speaking of the illimitable characteristics of the Father. The next verse says,

Tao remains hidden, concealed, in the background, without name, nameless. For this exact reason, Tao knows how to, is excellent at, providing support, nourishment, fulfillment, and completion.

So this is a paradoxical type of verse, because the Tao, or the Father, the Father’s righteousness, the Fullness of God, remains hidden and concealed in the background. You can’t put a finger on it. It’s hard to name. But because of its nature, it is able to get inside and carry us forward. It is all around us. It’s imminent and eminent, meaning it’s within us and outside of us.

By the way, in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I described that shape, that basic shape of energy that is this cosmos, as toroidal, the shape of basically a donut or a bagel with a zero-point hole in the middle. So picture a donut with a tiny, tiny center. And I’ll put an illustration in the transcript here.

I hypothesize that the bubble called our cosmos is shaped like a torus with a zero point hole in the middle. We are floating in the sea of the Father’s originating consciousness and it not only surrounds us but flows down the funnel into our here and now and out into our material universe.
It floats in the sea of consciousness of the Father, both at the tremendous scale—our entire cosmos, our universe is wrapped in a torus—but each one of us, each one of our parts, our cells, our organs, all of the units of consciousness in us, our Self, is shaped like a torus, energetically or spiritually, you could say.

And the thing about the torus, when you think about it, if it’s floating in the sea of illimitable consciousness of God, think of it like a torus-shaped bubble. So that means that the center of the torus is completely available to be touched by God, because God pours down the funnel at the top of that donut into that hole, see? And the zero-point field at the middle is here and now, and then it passes down below as energy, as karma, as history.

This is Simple Explanation stuff. It’s not exactly out of the Tripartite Tractate, I admit, or out of the Tao Te Ching. This is my gnosis, having to do with toruses. And my long-running blog, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, and the book of the same name that you can still purchase at Amazon, describes everything in that torus shape and shows you all of the motions and flow of the torus.

The reason I bring it up is that if you properly picture the shape of the torus, you can see that the entire exterior is bathed in the Father’s essence. The outside is out there touching the Father. And when you come down into the funnel, which is still outside, it’s still touching the Father, it comes together at the center, at the zero-point field at the middle of the torus. And now, all of a sudden, you’re inside.

Personal history (karma) wraps continually around our unit of consciousness, along with our meme bundle (beliefs), and flows back through the funnel at the top to inform our future choices.
So this is how the outside of consciousness reaches the inside of each unit of consciousness. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what I’m saying. It’s a big, big concept.

And that was verse 41 of the Tao Te Ching. I’ll carry on with another one of these next week if you tell me that you like this.

So leave me your comments, and I’ll continue going through the Tao Te Ching in a gnostic, interpretive manner. Please, I’d like to dialogue with you, so leave your comments, questions, anything you have. These are only my gnostic interpretations of the Tao Te Ching and they are not, by any means exhaustive.

God bless us all, and Onward and Upward!

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