Visit My New Gnostic Insights Website and Listen to the Gnostic Podcast!

Oh, happy day! It was not easy, but I have managed to launch a podcast! Gnostic Insights is the name of the program, and you should soon be able to find it on all of your regular podcast hosting apps. Or better yet, click on this link to go straight to my Gnostic Insights website.

Here you will find podcasts that explain gnosis, as simply as humanly possible. What is gnosis? Gnosis is knowing. Gnosis is not faith, or studying, or imagining. Gnosis is remembering. Remembering who you are, why you are here, what your mission on earth is, and where you will go when you die. Gnosis involves remembering the origin of consciousness and creation. The who, what, when, where, and why of everything.

If you are a regular reader of A Simple Explanation, you will be interested in seeing how I have woven the Simple Golden Rule and Units of Consciousness into this ancient Gnostic gospel. 

Check it out!

Yearning for the Pleroma

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here.

Other words for the Gnostic word "pleroma" include the "Fullness," the "All," the "Totalities," and "the circle of divine attributes," which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism. 

Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma--a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as "the fullness."

"For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Col. 2:9).

The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ... This contradicts the Gnostic idea of  the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).

While I do agree with the opening premise that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of ... beings," there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.

First, the idea that the fullness can't be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, "In contrast," since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let's imagine how that would work.

Did you know that you can click on any blog picture to see it larger on your computer screen?
Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I've represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son's cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid at the lower right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son's will into hierarchies of traits and powers.

We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One who never changes and without whom nothing would exist. The indisputable buck-stops-here God. This being is pure consciousness, without form or distinctions, all quiet, eternally undivided. This is the One Who Is; the Great I Am. In my drawings, the Father is represented as the paper that makes up the poster--all other manifestations arise as images upon the paper and are fully contained by the paper.

The Son is represented by the starburst cloud at the upper left, although the starburst is not really light energy, since this is before the creation of Light. This entity is also called the First Aeon, the Root, the Single Name, and The Form of the Formless. The Son contains all of the qualities of the Father, but in a circumscribed form. In today's lingo we would call the Son a holographic representation of the Father, where a small fragment perfectly emulates the larger image. You could think of the Father as the ocean, and the Son as a big bucket of ocean water. It's the same fluid. And if the bucket remains immersed in the ocean, then not only is the water within and without the bucket identical, the ocean continues to fully contain the bucket of water.

The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Son is part of the Father, and then goes on in the same verse to declare the Son as the cause of the Pleroma:

"He exists by the Father having him as a thought--that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and of his eternal being... He possesses power, which is his will. For the moment, however, he holds himself back in silence, he who is the greatest, being the cause of the generation of the members of the All into eternal existence" (56).

By this one verse we can see that the Son is within the Father and he also contains the Fullness, in full agreement with Colossians 2:9.

My second problem with the Nelson notes is their description of aeons. Aeons are not the same as angels--they're more like features or capabilities. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as "the properties and qualities in which the Father and the Son exist" and equates them with the pre-existent Church (58). 

"His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father... The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist... Therefore it subsists in the procreations of innumerable aeons" (59).

While some Aeons are beings with their own self-aware personalities, other aeons are best described as traits and capabilities of the Father and Son.

"...they were unable to know the depth in which they were; nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father; they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed... like a fetus... not yet come into being" (60, 20-35).

Third, the Nelson Study Bible footnote confuses Jesus, the physical incarnation of Christ on Earth, with the eternal spirit of Christ, the first Son of the Father, whose image and dwelling predates the Earthly appearance of Jesus. 

"Now the Savior in fact was a bodily image of something unitary, namely the Fullness" (116).

The Gnostic gospel I've been studying has no quibble with naming the physical person of Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of the entire Creation. Lest the wary Christian doubt the Gnostic's gospel, the Tripartite Tractate ends with this eulogy for Jesus Christ:

"...the praise, the power, and the glory, through Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer of all those who are embraced by the mercy of love, and through his Holy Spirit, from now throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen" (138).

And finally, the Nelson editor contends "the fullness of God [that] exists in Christ" ... "contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies." The editor apparently reasons that if Gnostics claim physical bodies are evil, and Jesus incarnated as a physical body, then Gnosticism would imply that Jesus Christ was evil.

There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, my reading of Gnostic writing reveals that while material reality may have started out as "evil," the situation was quickly rectified when the Son and the Pleroma intervened to establish an "economy" that regulated good and evil inclinations through "repentance." Here's a brief description of that process:

"After conversion followed the remembrance of those who exist and the prayer on behalf of the one who had returned to himself by means of what is good" (81).... "This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the Fullness, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the preexistent ones, and this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back" (82).

"To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought ... with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness" (98, 99).

"The first human, then, is a mixed molding and a mixed creation, and a depository of those on the left and those on the right, as well as of a spiritual Word, and his sentiments are divided between each of the two substances to which he owes his existence" (106).

"What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die... For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul" (114, 115).

Secondly, the very fact that Jesus did incarnate as a mortal man is what made salvation through Christ possible, for it was by the Savior's perfect "error correcting algorithm," superimposed upon an otherwise error-filled humanity, that salvation entered the world. 

I'll end this article with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be saved, in case you're curious. 

"... there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining in an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith" (127, 128).

That seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed; no gnosis other than believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Fullness) existed before you. Other ancient gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached. 

Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945. The cat is definitely out of the bag now.

Okay, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven't guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, most everyone's souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma will have returned home to the fold, to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives inside the Father.

"Once the redemption had been proclaimed, the perfect human [the Savior] immediately  received knowledge so as to return swiftly to his unity, to the place from which he came. Joyfully he returned back to the place from which he had originated, the place from which he had flowed forth. His limbs, however, needed a school... until all the limbs of the body of the Church would be united in one place and would attain the restoration together... so that the Fullness obtains its redemption" (123, 124).

A Simple Explanation of Gnostic Cosmology

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here. This was the original mapping of the new Gnostic Gospel. These concepts have been more colorfully illustrated, although the original mapping still holds up. You may find all of this in its most simple form in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated.

Since people are still landing on and reading this post, let me tell you that this has been laid out and beautifully illustrated in "The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated" book. 

I also have a podcast now dedicated to fully explaining all of these Gnostic concepts in Simple Explanation form. click here to go to Gnostic Insights

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Here's a first look at what I've been working on lately [back in 2015]. I'll be writing an article about the Gnostic gospels soon. Meanwhile, I thought you might enjoy these first fruits. 

Gnostic Cosmology according to the Tripartite Tractate, by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.

These diagrams are my visual representations of the "Tripartite Tractate." The Tripartite Tractate is one book of the collection known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures that were discovered buried in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The Nag Hammadi texts were buried sometime in the 3rd century by monks who sought to preserve and protect them from those who wanted to weed them out as heresies as they designed the official shape of the Christian religion. 

After studying the Tripartite Tractate, I can see why the early Pope did not want this to make it into the Bible.  For one thing, the Christ figure, the "Son of God," is not all perfect and all powerful, as portrayed in the Christian Bible; matter of fact, Logos is directly implicated in the Fall. For another thing, salvation is a personal, mystical affair conferred directly by the Father through Logos, not something conferred by preaching or baptism. Thirdly, the cosmology presented here makes clear that those who, shall we say, struggle for righteousness against a sinful world are not necessarily doing God's work, but are caught in an endless war against the "evil doers," and have themselves fallen into some sort of earthly death trap. 

As I said, the complete article is underway. Meanwhile, for those of you who want to get started, here it is in picture form. On the big poster above, start at the upper left corner and read clockwise. Our earthly situation is portrayed in the middle of the diagram. Salvation and the end of the world comes in the form of the pyramid at the lower left. Below are various sections of the diagram presented on their own. If you have already been studying Gnostic cosmology, these diagrams will clarify various terms and activities. If you haven't already been studying this, then these diagrams will be super confusing so don't worry about it. All will be revealed in good time. 

In terms of A Simple Explanation, this cosmology begins prior to "in the beginning..." and proceeds through the formation of Units of Consciousness and the appearance of our physical universe, and concludes with the final collapse of the universe.  It also takes place during the life cycle of each and every Unit of Consciousness, as it is a Fractal Pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Those of you who have read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything will recognize the role of the hierarchical distribution and the role of toroidal flow in the final reorganization of creation.  

The First Glory, The Son of the Father. First differentiation after the Undifferentiated Unity of the Metaversal Father.

The Second Glory. The Son has realized it is comprised of many traits of the Father. These traits are called "aeons" in Gnostic terminology. When they're all grouped together they are called the Fullness, or the All. Many differentiations but total harmony. Once these traits are named, they fall out of undifferentiated harmony and rearrange themselves into the pyramidal hierarchy depicted below.

The Fruit of the Third Glory is the offspring of the All in perfect arrangement of hierarchy. This stage in creation is known as the First Order of Powers. Everyone and everything knows its place and is happy.  The final Aeon to arrive at the top of the pyramid, known in the Tripartite Tractate as "Presumptuous Thought," looks down at the hierarchy and sees them all arranged underneath him. This gives that Aeon the idea that he is in charge of the pyramid. He reaches upward to reinsert the pyramid into the Metaverse. This is done without authorization or position. This results in The Fall.

The Fall tumbles the pyramid of Aeons out of arrangement. They Fall into confusion, Chaos. They are dispersed and alone for the first time, cut off from each other and the All. This is now called the Deficiency, and the Imitation. Logos panics and abandons the Imitation and retreats back to the All. God the Father also retreats in horror from the Deficiency, which throws up a Boundary containing the Imitation. Logos and the All try to rescue their abandoned children by praying for them and thus giving them the Remembrance of Who and What they used to be, before the Fall.

The prayers of Logos and the All results in the Second Order of Powers. There are now two types of creatures: those of the Deficiency who have no belief in who or what came before, and those of the Remembrance, who have come to themselves through "Repentance" and "Conversion" and recall their fellow Aeons and their place with the Father in the Fullness. Rather than rejoining Logos and the All, those of the Remembrance choose to do battle with those of the Imitation. They are locked in an endless righteous War where no one can win.

 Release from the Endless War comes by intervention of the Father and the Fullness working together. They produce the Living Image of the All and the Father--the Christ. The Christ places himself upon the Lost like a garment that restores perfection and fills the Lost with inexpressible Joy, giving them the Logos that enables them to detach and dispel delusion. This results in the Third Order of Powers--the Aeons of the Images--that now carry within themselves the Seed of the Word.

The final Order of Creation is called The Economy and The Consolidation. All three types of creatures are represented: those of the imitation, those of the remembrance, and those who have been redeemed by Christ. This drawing is a pyramidal shaped "core sample" of creation. The small figure at the lower right is a cutaway view of creation, with the center of the donut mapping to the top of the pyramid.