A Gnostic Perspective On Consciousness and Christianity

I just wrote and posted this as a comment on consciousness and Christianity over at the Skeptiko forum, but it seems too juicy to keep it from here. 

Is it possible for the Christian mythos to be in any way truthful and factual? Sure. But I'd say the Christian mythos that most closely resembles reality as we know it would be the Gnostic mythos, and it was weeded out of the canonical Bible and thrown away in 300 AD. I used to think the Pope and Emperor weeded it out for the good of the faithful, but now I realize they weeded it out for their own power to reign supreme. Yes, they left a lot of good in, but they weeded out the logos that makes the religion reasonable. So no wonder it looks superstitious and shallow. Thank God the Gnostic truths were buried out in the Nag Hammadi desert and resurrected intact during WW2. They have literally been protected from hundreds of years of theological misinterpretation.

I've been chewing this particular Gnosis over for about 50 years. See if this intrinsically coherent Gnostic Christian narrative is more satisfying to the Skeptik than the Orthodox view. I think it is, but it is no less Theistic, so if that's your quibble, I can't help you there. I think in order to understand Gnosis, one must start with a willing heart. If you hate God, then it is very difficult to appreciate Gnosis. Here goes:

According to the Tripartite Tractate Nag Hammadi book, we start with an underlying matrix of consciousness. (So, right off the bat, this ancient book acknowledges transcendent, undifferentiated consciousness.) This illimitable consciousness thought of a particularity, which became a fractal representation of the illimitable. This first fractal is called The Son. The Son immediately fanned out like rays from a light into an infinite number of particularities. The moment the particularities became conscious, because they, too, were fractals of the illimitable consciousness, they named themselves in order to know themselves. This naming had the effect of sorting themselves into a hierarchy of names, stations, ranks, positions, and powers. These are the Aeons, also known as the Pre-existent Church and the Elect, also called the First Order of Powers. The Aeons live in a place called the Pleroma, or the ALL, or the Fullness. Altogether, the Aeons of the Fullness represent the infinity of potentialities. They are of one accord, being simply the names of the qualities of their Father, who is called the Son of the originating One. This is the entire sum of the hidden knowledge of Gnosis that so frightened the Emperor and the Pope. We can catch glimpses of this cosmology, the Father, the Son, and the Aeons, in the canonical Bible, but not enough was left intact to make sense of it. Now we know.

The Aeons of the Fullness dream one dream that they ALL share. This is the dream of Paradise, which was the original Thought that set the whole ball rolling. The Aeons dream exactly as we dream, except they all share the same dream. This is a place we are also familiar with, we humans in our dreams. It is the foretaste of Heaven. It is the fragrance of Utopia. It is the place where we can fly. We all know it, according to the Tripartite Tractate. 

Then various things happen, an Aeon overreaches and wisdom becomes presumptuous thought. The Aeon Falls from the perfection of the Fullness. The Aeon breaks apart and little pieces of it become the seed of our material universe. The Aeons above in the Fullness dream up a Second Order of Powers that carry their Aeonic traits into this material plane. All archaea of our planet are Second Order Powers. It was decided that all of the Aeons would come to earth to clean up the mess and restore perfection to this creation that occurred because of the Fall. Every thing on earth contains innumerable Aeons instantiating consciousness into the mud. Our fables and Bible stories tell fractal stories of all lives; the same stories over and over and over again. They are real and they are metaphors. We are the children of angels; we are angels. We are all Fallen and need redemption.

The Christ Consciousness, according to the Tripartite Tractate, is the Third Order of Powers. The Christ Consciousness was designed to be the correcting algorithm for the Second Order Powers who'd been ensnared in the deception of the material delusion, also called the Imitation. Imitation of what? Imitation of the Paradise dreamed by the Aeons of the Fullness. The Christ is like a computer clean-up code that must be inserted in order to do its work of Redemption. Every soul needs to remember their eternal heritage in order to shake off this material plane and return to the Fullness. 

Here's where Jesus of Nazareth comes in--this was a human who carried the perfected Third Order Power of Christ into our material plane, and co-existed with the human genome donated from the mother. Fully God. Fully Human. First Adam perfectly incarnated. In this manner, all of the infinity of the ALL was at last incarnated, completing the cycle of coming one-by-one to our material plane. It wasn't so much Christ's sacrifice on the cross that took away the sins of the world, but his incarnation as a human and his personal Aeonic experience of separation, despair, and death. I think the emphasis is on the cross as a shape of top-to-bottom/spirit-to-mud and side-to-side/ALL inclusive.And what it means to be Redeemed by Christ as a pre-requisite to going to Heaven, well, yes, the Christ incarnated for the salvation of the ALL, and that includes us, but also the dogs and cats, and the trees and grasses. You name it. Jesus saves. Obviously the mission is larger than our belief in it or our capacity of comprehend the fullness.

You can read a much more detailed and coherent account (fully illustrated) in my own book called "The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated". It's all there.

Gnostic Gospel, Pt 1: The Father, The Son, and the Birth of The ALL

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

The following article is what kicked off The New Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book and blog.

*******************

This story begins before the beginning; before space and time and our material universe.

Imagine, if you can, nothing exists but pure consciousness. Consider this consciousness to be without thought. No thought, no images, no structure or form. No thing at all. Only love.

This consciousness simply is. Without time, without any prior existence.  Unchangeable. Unmovable. Without beginning; without end. Utterly quiet. Utterly still. Utterly alone.

All knowing—what is there to know? All seeing—what is there to see? All loving—what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom and will—to what end?

Imagine this consciousness giving birth to an emanation of itself—now a Father, and a Son.

In the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of Itself. The Son exists as the Father having a thought. As the Father knowing Itself. As the Father having a sensation of Its own eternal Self.

This Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. This Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father expressed as the singularity of the Son. [The Tripartite Tractate, v.56]

And yet, although it was the singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone. For not only the Son, but the ALL arose at once. The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not stop itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father.

This ALL is known as the pre-existent Church, “For not only the Son but also the Church exists from the beginning.” [The Tripartite Tractate, v.58]

Before the ALL arose from the Father’s thought, He knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else. For they were within the Father as an embryo or an unsprouted seed. [The Tripartite Tractate, v.61]

Because they were newly formed, the Father concealed the ALL’s perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge. This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so the ALL would be able to relate to him and see the Father’s Glory according to the ability of each one to receive him. [The Tripartite Tractate, v.63]

The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL, and they understood who he is, and he is covered by the ALL. [The Tripartite Tractate, v.66]

***********

Here is a Simple Explanation of the above, using the Simple Explanation terms for those readers who prefer them.

The "before the beginning" parts are right out of the Simple Explanation cosmology, blog, and book. Anyone who likes the Simple Explanation cosmology should recognize it.

The Simple Explanation refers to the Father as the Metaverse, that which is above our Universe.

The Simple Explanation calls the Son the Universal Unit of Consciousness, because while identical to the Father, or Metaverse, this all-knowing consciousness is now also a singular Unit. In fractal terms, the Son is the first iteration of the pattern. The first Torus wireframe potential if you want to go that way.

The ALL is every thing that will ever be, in potential. Plato's forms, every photon, particle, and proton, every personality, imagined and formulated and imprinted upon the Universal Unit of Consciousness. They are not manifest, nor even self-aware. They are unrealized fractal iterations of the pattern of the Son.

_______________________________

Thus begins my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospels, primarily taken from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. The verse numbers refer to the verse of the Tripartite Tractate cited. The Simple Explanation began this work in 2015 and set it aside for further contemplation until now. 

I will hopefully continue to write these complete and Simple Explanation of Gnostic Cosmology as quickly as I can, so stay tuned. My goal is to help both believers and non-believers understand this ancient Gospel that predates our modern Bible. 

This Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospels takes us all the way from before the beginning to the end of time. In these Gospels you will learn the fuller, original meanings of many Christian terminologies that no longer appear in our modern Bible. This article has explained The Father, The Son, the ALL, and the pre-existent Church. And we haven't even gotten to Creation yet!

********************

Continue on to The Simple Gnostic Gospel, Part Two: 

Qualities of the Father, the Son, and the ALL

Gnostic Cosmology Artwork

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

A Simple Gnostic Cosmology by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.,

according to the Tripartite Tractate

Meanwhile, can you tell what is happening in the story above?

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).

Could Dark Matter Be the Gnostic "Imitation"?

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

Last week it occurred to me that the way scientists describe dark matter and what the Tripartite Tractate calls "The Deficiency" sound very much alike. It looks as though a case can be made that an ancient religious document is describing a process that has only recently been scientifically hypothesized. 

Let me try to explain: 

Dark Matter is invisible, but we can see a projection of its assumed location in this false-color representation of light-blue clouds at the center of Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689. 
Image credit: NASA, ESA, D. Coe (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and Space Telescope Science Institute), N. Benitez (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain), T. Broadhurst (University of the Basque Country, Spain), and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)
More about this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image here. 

Scientists now believe that our universe is filled with an invisible type of matter that far outweighs ordinary matter by a ratio of over five to one. According to the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft census of the composition of the universe, ordinary matter only makes up 4.9 percent of the total, while dark matter makes up 26.8 percent. (The other 68.3 percent is made up of formless energy.) As explained in the Simple Explanation's Dark Matter blog article, dark matter was first hypothesized in the 1930s, but it wasn't until the 1990s that astronomers were able to observe what they take to be dark matter.

Not much is actually known about dark matter, since its presence can only be inferred by its gravitational effect on the light travelling from distant stars and galaxies. Recently, some astronomers have proposed that dark matter may be the source of mysterious gamma rays emanating from a ring around our galactic center. 

According to a 2013 article in Discover Magazine, here is what scientists generally believe about dark matter: it is "the glue that holds together the universe and all its rich diversity," and most dark matter tends to "gather in giant, diffuse clouds." Dark Matter particles could also be lurking in a gigantic, invisible disk near the center of our galaxy, "smashing into each other" creating a "strange type of [gamma] radiation" that is "60 billion times as potent as ordinary yellow light." 

NASA continues to process data that maps dark matter's distribution throughout the universe. The image below shows that dark matter is randomly distributed thoughout the cosmos.

This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. The ancient light, called the cosmic microwave background, was imprinted on the sky when the universe was 370,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today. By analyzing the light patterns in this map, scientists are fine-tuning what we know about the universe, including its origins, fate and basic components. Image courtesy of ESA and the Planck Collaboration.

Lastly, from wikipedia: "The most widely accepted explanation for these phenomena is that dark matter exists and that it is most probably composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) that interact only through gravity and the weak force. Alternative explanations have been proposed, and there is not yet sufficient experimental evidence to determine whether any of them are correct."

That's all that is known about dark matter. Now let's switch hats from cosmologist to philosopher to consider The Imitation.

Last month's Gnostic Cosmology blog article explained that our universe was created as the result of a Fall from a state of non-physical spirituality to an initially dark, material state. Below are three illustrations out of the Simple Explanation of Gnostic Cosmology relevant to this discussion. The first poster presents the overall Gnostic Cosmology. The second and third illustrations pertain to the events leading up to the Fall and its consequences:

Gnostic Cosmology according to the Tripartite Tractate, by Cyd Ropp.  Beginning with the Originating Consciousness known as The Father, this diagram starts at the upper left and proceeds clockwise to The Son, then The All, then to the hierarchical arrangement of The All, then to The Fall of the Presumptuous Thought down into the Dark Chaos known as The Imitation. (The remainder of the poster is dealt with in the Gnostic Cosmology article.)

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 mistaken idea that he is in charge of the pyramid. He reaches upward to reinsert the pyramid into the Metaverse. This is done without authorization, resulting in The Fall.

The Fall tumbles the harmonious arrangement of Aeons into Chaos. They Fall into confusion. 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. 

Prior to The Fall, there was no material, only mind. Beginning with undifferentiated consciousness (The Father), mind first became aware (The Son). The Son then differentiated its thoughts and qualities into ALL potential thoughts and ALL potential qualities (The ALL, aka The Fullness, aka The Pleroma). The Fullnesses then named themselves, which automatically sorted them into hierarchical relationships. From this hierarchy of The ALL came the final expression of the Fullness--the final cherry on top of the stack--known in the Tripartite Tractate as "Presumptuous Thought." Presumptuous Thought was a singular entity that combined all the other Fullnesses' qualities into one mind. It was Presumptuous Thought that initiated the Fall from the immaterial plane when it mistook itself for The ALL and acted unilaterally rather than harmoniously.

Now, listen to these descriptions out of the Tripartite Tractate concerning the consequences of "The Fall" of Presumptuous Thought that led to the Creation of our Universe:

"Those who belong to the arrogant thought and those of the likeness are called ... "the Dark Ones"... (98, 15).

"The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations, for he could not bear to look at the light but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away" (77, 11).

"Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody's offspring" (78, 28).

"The Word, then, was the cause of these things coming into being, and he became increasingly desperate. He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection he saw deficiency; instead of unity he saw division; instead of stability he saw disturbance; instead of rest, upheaval" (80, 11).

"Those who had come into being did not know themselves, nor did they know the Fullness from which they had originated, nor did they know him who had become the cause of their existence. For since the Word was in such an unstable condition, he no longer attempted to bring forth offspring in the form of emissions...of glory.... Instead, what he brought forth were feeble and small creatures, infected with the same sicknesses with which he himself had been infected" (80, 15) .

"The imitation that had taken place solitarily in this state was what had been the cause of the things that do not exist of their own from the beginning. In this state he continued to produce such deficient beings, until he began to condemn the irrational things he had produced" (81,2).

Perhaps the production of the "Dark Ones" of the Imitation was the initial cosmological event that kicked off the Big Bang. These Dark Ones, these "shadows," had "no reason," no "light." Instead of the perfection of the hierarchical arrangements, these Dark Ones came "into being" in a state of "chaos." Rather than acting in unity, these Dark Ones manifest "division," "disturbance," "upheaval." These Dark Ones did not resemble the "glory" of the Fullness, but were feeble and small. 

This is the initial state of Creation according to Gnostic cosmology. No light, chaotic, no life, no rules. Filled with feeble, small things, isolated from one another and alone. You could easily call them WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles). These Dark Ones/WIMPS did not lack the information inherent in ordinary matter, but they were unable to organize themselves the way normal matter does, because they did not possess the spirit of cooperation, coming into being as they did out of a solitary act. 

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to describe how this was only step one in creation, with a quick adjustment that halted production of the Dark Ones until a more "reasonable" form of matter could be produced that combined light with matter, leading to the eventual redemption of matter by mind and spirit...  But that's another article for another day....

Lastly, by borrowing information from the unlikely source of an ancient wisdom book that lay buried under Egyptian sand for almost 2,000 years, we can generate a scientific prediction that will prove or disprove a measureable hypothesis. This Gnostic creation story claims that the first material objects in our universe were dark matter. Light and ordinary matter followed some time later and began a never-ending dance with dark matter. The Simple Explanation predicts that scientists will be able to prove that dark matter was the initial material product of the early universe. You heard it here first.

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

**********************

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.