What is gnosis? There’s a lot of Gnosticism out there on the Internet, isn’t there? And this gnosis that I am sharing with you is quite different from most of that Gnosticism that’s out there. Before 1945 and 1947, when the Nag Hammadi and the Qumran scriptures were discovered and dug up out of the deserts or pulled out of caves where they were hidden, the only Gnosticism they were familiar with was that which had survived the Great Purge brought about by the early Catholic Church and the Nicene Council. They were purposely stripping the Gnostic out of what has become our New Testament of the Bible, and we can wonder why.

I think it’s because actual gnosis puts people in contact with the Christ personally, with the Son and the Fullness personally, with the Father on a personal basis, the way that the Protestant Reformation brought a similar change to Catholicism. Because before and currently in the Catholic teachings, you’re only basically allowed to access knowledge of God through the interpretations of the church, and you accept their interpretations. The Pope is supposedly the infallible word of God, and your priests are the representatives of that official line of theology. So when Martin Luther reformed that way of thinking to say no, we can read the New Testament ourselves and come up with our own interpretation—well, that really opens up a can of worms, doesn’t it? Because if we’re each allowed to have our own personal interpretation of holy books, then our interpretations might be as varied as there are people, because all of us have our own opinions.

I mean, just look at our own opinions on something as innocuous as the foods we decide to eat. Have you ever looked around you and noticed how everybody you know now has a different diet? Some people are protein only, and some people are vegetables only, and some people are fruit only. Some people believe in all things in moderation and eat just a little. Some people are organic only, and some people are junk food only. When I had a bed and breakfast for a number of years, I learned this lesson very quickly because it’s funny when you lay out a table, a meal, for 10 or 12 people on a daily basis, year in and year out, you see how those 10 or 12 people all have particular and peculiar personal diets. I once had a table where one person let me know they only ate egg whites. They only wanted egg whites in their omelets and another person actually at the same table only ate yolks and wouldn’t eat the egg whites. And that was funny too, because who only eats yolks? But it was compatible when they were both sitting at the table. Right. It’s like that old saying: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean. And so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean. So it’s like that with food. And it’s like that with our interpretation of scripture.

What is a mystic? Mysticism is the thought that we can directly perceive and commune with supernatural or ethereal forces–that it takes mysticism to get past our ordinary way of seeing things and get into that ethereal realm. When Martin Luther ripped the New Testament back out of the clutches of the Catholic Church and put it back into the hands of every person, he opened up this idea that we can read the Scripture and understand what it means to us.

Now the Protestant churches, and I’ve been to many Protestant churches–I didn’t grow up in the church because my parents weren’t exactly religious people, but I had my own personal relationship with Jesus ever since I was about four or five years old. And so I came up under the tutelage of Jesus personally, as opposed to what the church was teaching me. You know, some Bibles have what are called Red Letter editions? They have the words of Jesus written in red. So for many years I only read the red letters because I wanted to know what Jesus had to say about it.

Anyway, getting back to the original topic, before the Nag Hammadi and the Qumran scripts were dug out of the desert in the 1940s and then translated for us out of the original Coptic Greek, all that we knew of Gnostic belief was written by the people that hated the Gnostics, and those people are called heresiologists. Those who study (ology) means the study of heresies. And heresies mean unorthodox belief. So a heresiologist is one who studies unorthodox beliefs. And the Catholic heresiologists were the only ones who had ever seen the scriptures and then translated them for the ordinary believer, saying, that is wrong, and now the church teaches this, but that said that and so it was wrong. So everything they ever said about the Gnostic scriptures was about how bad and terrible they were.

When I was coming up, when I was a young Christian, I used to believe that line of thinking. I used to think, OK, the Nicene Creed is the truth and we have to believe everything that the Nicene Creed proposes. But, anyway, I believed in the veracity (that means the truth) of the Nicene Creed and the way the Protestant churches have formulated the New Testament now. So they’re no longer under the clutches of the Pope, yet each denomination has its particular emphasis, otherwise they wouldn’t be separate denominations. They’d all just be the Protestants, and there’d be a Protestant church, and it would be one church. But since every founder of these different flavors of Protestantism had their own take on what the New Testament said, they formed their own denominations. And a Protestant denomination is like, oh, the Baptists is one denomination, and the Presbyterians another, et cetera–those are denominations.

But let me get back to this idea that I began with of what is gnosis. See, the purpose of studying the scriptures, the purpose of studying the New Testament, the purpose of going to church, the purpose of reading the Nag Hammadi books, or the books of the Qumran, or of listening to so-called Gnostic podcasts, is to learn about the ethereal realm–is to learn the will of the God. Is to learn who the Father is, and what the Father’s will for us is. What is our purpose here on Earth? Why are we alive? What the heck is going on down here? And what does God have to do with it? What does the church have to do with it?

So I’ve noticed, and I think that probably most of you have noticed, there’s a worldwide push back against Christianity going on right now, and against Judaism. There is a worldwide pushback against the notion of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Christ. But these people that are pushing back against the faith, they don’t know their scriptures, they don’t know the Father. Generally they are atheists or, at best, calling themselves agnostic. And they think we’d be a lot better off just throwing it all away. Get people away from that horrible, restricting authoritative body called the church and these ridiculous moral precepts from 2000 years ago and further back that only restrict our freedom, our personal will. That’s all screwed up. I can tell you that that’s not right  thinking because it comes from ignorance.

Right thinking comes from knowledge and truth. We would even say right thinking comes from gnosis. And it is a precept all along throughout various religions and various holy books that you can only know the will of God by sitting quietly and praying and meditating and contemplating our relationship or your relationship with the ethereal. It doesn’t come—it cannot come—from looking all around us at popular culture and at politics and at social media and at television and movies and university courses. That isn’t where truth comes from. That’s where entertainment comes from. That’s where distractions come from. That’s where time killers come from. And a heck of a lot of bad thinking comes from that side. So if you are taking your opinions about the ethereal plane from popular culture, you won’t find it. You’re not gonna find gnosis in popular culture. I’ve noticed television shows, particularly on the streaming platforms, that have some kind of a religious tinge to them, some kind of a mystical overlay. If they’re about devils or they’re about angels, or they’re about priests, they aren’t coming from the ethereal plane, these written episodes that that we’re soaking in now. And so the theology from these is all screwy. The theology is all wrong. It’s amusing. It’s entertaining, perhaps, or maddening, if it makes you angry. But it’s not gnosis.

Here’s the reason: gnosis comes from above. Gnosis doesn’t come from below, and it doesn’t come laterally. I don’t think you can find the truth of the ethereal plane by looking around at other people. You may be able to find it through nature because nature is a reflection of the Fullness, but that sitting with nature as a reflection of the Fullness then takes you up—causes you to look upward. You know the trees and flowers all reach up, don’t they? They’re reaching to the Father. So if you are sitting in the forest and you are gaining inspiration, you are naturally going to be uplifted. You’re not going to sit in the forest being inspired by the Fullness and paradise that is reflected in the beautiful forest and get angry and get hateful and want to go out and kill people or conquer people. That would not be something that comes from above; that is a lateral or downward look. Is this making sense to you? Are you following what I’m saying?

So here’s the big point. The huge nugget that I started my thought out with this morning is this: If it is a given, such as it always says in the Gnostic scriptures and in the Christian and Judaic scriptures, the God Above All Gods wants to be known. That God is love. And God wants to be known. He wants us to know that he’s there. He wants us to know that we come from him. That’s the baseline of gnosis. Pardon me for using the word he. That’s generally what we say about the Father or the God Above All Gods. It shouldn’t stop you from coming to the Father. And I’ve explained this in other episodes that the only reason we use a masculine designation for the Father is because it’s an outward movement of love and knowledge. It’s a direction of the flow of the Father is outward—Yang—male, and that we come from that outward movement from the Father. If the Father is the ocean of consciousness, the ground state of consciousness itself, then it flows outward and down into these ever narrowing channels. These fractal channels down through the Son, down through the Totalities of the Son down through the Aeons of the Totalities, down from the Aeons to us, and we’re called 2nd Order powers. The ones in the ethereal plane are called 1st Order powers. We’re 2^nd Order powers down here in this material world. It’s a downward flow, always from the top down, because the Father wants to be known. We weren’t just thrown up like a cat’s hairball down here and abandoned.

If you feel lost and you have no grounding and you feel abandoned, and all is darkness and blackness and there is no hope, then you’re looking in the wrong place for it. You have to look up because up is the direction from which comes love, belonging, communion, hope, safety, home, our inheritance. It all comes from above. We’re like these special creatures that come from above and we are inhabiting this material plane and we are going to go back.

And so what do we need to know? What is the gnosis that the Father would like us to know in order to feel peace, hope, love, security? How do you get to feel those things? Well, it has to be something that’s accessible to every creature on the planet—everything who’s alive on the planet, and so this includes the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees. It includes the bacteria, our friendly bacteria that inhabit our guts and keep us alive and healthy. We’re all 2^nd Order powers from the pleroma of the Fullness of God’s self.

If God intended for you to have to read obscure 2000 year old manuscripts and memorize charts and memorize the names of Aeons and memorize all of these formulas and memorize the mathematical applications of astrology and so forth—well, how is that even possible? Does that make any sense at all? Who’s going to do that? How many people can do that? And that seems to me from what I observed to be the general state of Gnosticism that’s being promoted today in this world, when you look at Gnostic programs and read Gnostic books, they’re so labyrinthian, which means they’re a labyrinth, like a maze. You have to go here. Oh, no, that wasn’t it. Now you have to go there. Oh, no, that’s not it. Now I have to go here. Always looking, looking, looking, seeking, seeking, trying to find the truth. Well, that isn’t the way you find truth. You find the truth by sitting quietly and turning your attention upward to the God Above All Gods.

Or if that is too far away and too obscure, I recommend you turn your attention upward, to the Christ, because the Christ was conceived by the ethereal realm in order to help us 2^nd Order powers go back home. The Christ is like our passbook. The Christ is perfectly structured and conceived and formulated to save everything down here below, and it even says that in the New Testament, it’s just that the Protestants and Catholics, they don’t believe it. They think most everyone else is going to hell and it appears as though many Gnostics today think everybody’s going to hell except for those few people who have stumbled upon some kind of magic formula to take them upward. Well, if it takes them upward, what then? Are they going to go up there all by themselves along with only a handful, the remnant, the elect? Very few thousands of souls are ever going to find Paradise, or ever going to go and reunite with the Fullness that way.

I don’t think that’s the way it goes. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think everyone is going to come back home because if we don’t all go back home, the Fullness won’t be the Fullness anymore. It will be the Partial. Do you see what I mean? If we are the fruit of the Fullness and we are promised to return to the Fullness, the Fullness won’t be full until we all come back home. The God Above All Gods will have lost pieces of himself down to “hell.” Forever and ever, according to religious people. Well, if that’s going to happen to most people, then what’s going to happen to the flowers? How are they going to learn about heaven? What’s going to happen to the birds—how are they going to study the books? See, everybody’s going back up. All 2^nd Order powers are rolling back up out of the material plane  and going back up to the ethereal plane at the end of time, whenever that is going to be. And we get there by realizing our gnosis, accepting the salvation and redemption of the Aeon that was sent to save us and bring us home, that being Christ. Everybody’s going back home.

You know, it’s like we’re on a bus. It’s like we’re on a big school bus. The person waiting for us at the bus stop to help us off the bus, take our hand and walk us home—that’s Christ. That’s the job of the Christ and everyone recognizes the Christ, but not the people that are looking for him down here on Earth. And that’s why they hate the whole notion of there being a Christ or being an ethereal plane, or there being a God Above All Gods, I guess. They don’t want to look up. So are those people going to hell? No, because they’re also 2nd order powers. They’re also going to go back home, but they’re going to suffer first, and that’s of their own choosing.

Right now you don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to reject Christ. You just have to sit and turn your eyes upward. On this point, as it says in the letter to the Colossians out of the New Testament, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him.” All things, may I point out, “all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether the things on Earth or the things in the heavens. And you, back then, had been aliens in enemies and thought, through wicked deeds, yet now he has affected reconciliation by a death, in the body of his flesh, to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” (Colossians 1:19-20; Hart’s New Testament).

Now Paul does add a little catch phrase at the end here. A little codicil. Paul is the guy who wrote this or is preaching this. He says, “If you indeed abide in the faith, established and steadfast and not moved away from hope in the good tidings that you have heard proclaimed to every creature under heaven…” (Col 1:23). Now, the Christians generally think that that last sentence, if you abide in faith and are not moved away, means that if you don’t abide in faith and you are moved away, that you will not make it into heaven. But that isn’t what it says here. It says it’s “proclaimed to every creature under heaven,” and that includes all those living 2nd order powers, as I was saying. Because it said he reconciled “all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

So he said he reconciled all things to him, not just the good guys, not just the ones who died after having first proclaimed the glory of God. No, all things to him. And we’ve covered this in previous episodes that if you don’t accept the redemption of Christ now, it just means that you’re going to suffer hopelessness and despair, and then you’re going to die in hopelessness and despair. But Christ reconciled all things to him through his death. Therefore, you will be ultimately saved.

And then in chapter two of the letter to Colossians, it says in verse 13, “And, while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh,” because they talk about a lot of these things in terms of circumcision and foreskin, which is simply a metaphor for being tied to material versus having the material stripped away so that you are ethereal. So “while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh, he gave you life along with him, forgiving all trespasses, expunging what is written by hand against us—contrary to us—in ordinances, and has removed it out of the way, nailing it to the cross; Stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession” (Hart’s New Testament). So therefore, he’s saying while you were yet dead in your sin, he forgave all of your trespasses. He forgave all of your sins. It doesn’t say after you accepted him, he forgave all your trespasses. He says, “While you were dead in your sin, he forgave all your trespasses and nailed them to the cross,” along with his own dying flesh (Colossians 2:13-14).

OK, so I just wanted you to hear that it is biblical to believe in what we’re calling universal salvation because Christ had conquest not only against sin, but against the Archons and Powers of evil. And they’re all going to be exposed. The light is shining on them now. Back in the letter to the Romans, in Chapter 5, it says, “The Anointed, indeed, while we were yet weak, died in due season on behalf of the impious” (Romans 5:6; Hart). So once again, Christ didn’t die on behalf of the elect. He died on behalf of sinners, on behalf of people that are lost—not only lost but living in sin, no matter what your sin is.

Verse eight goes on to say, “But God shows his own love to us in that while we were yet sinners, the Anointed died on our behalf.” And in verse 12 it says, “Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man,” (and I would say that isn’t really the man Adam, but is actually the Aeon, the fallen Aeon Logos. That’s how sin entered into the cosmos and death.) and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all have sinned.” Then in verse 18 it says, “So, then, just as by one transgression unto condemnation for all human beings, so also by one act of righteousness unto rectification of life for all human beings, for all human beings.”

I’ll try to explain more of these theological terms and Bible-speak in future episodes. In the footnote to this verse in Hart’s translation of the New Testament, he says that here and in the surrounding verses, “just as the first sin brought condemnation and death to absolutely every one, so Christ’s act of righteousness brings righteousness and life to absolutely everyone. Whether intentional or not, the plain meaning of the verse is that of universal condemnation, annulled by universal salvation.”

And that’s a really beautiful thing. That is a glorious thing because it is through the power of Christ that we’re all saved.