Gnostic Insights

Gnostic Insights


Evolution and Conscious Design

October 28, 2023

Last week we looked at the unreasonable assumptions made by Darwinian evolutionists. This episode continues that discussion. I am going to begin this episode with a very quick review of basic Gnostic cosmology.


In this series of podcasts I’m sharing with you the insights I have gained by my study of the Nag Hammadi transcripts and, in particular, one book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate. A new podcast listener tells me that some podcast hosts, such as Spotify, do not archive podcasts far enough back in time for new listeners to be able to hear the early episodes and catch up. So, beginning next week, I am going to put out a series of Gnostic Insights episodes that will relay the basic gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate and my commentary. This will serve as a review to longtime listeners and a necessary foundation for the newcomers. Meanwhile, here’s a brief introduction to those foundational concepts before we go on to today’s topic.


This cosmology begins with the ground state of consciousness that is called the Father. Then the Father has a particular thought and creates the Son. And the Son is a portion of the Father that contains all of the knowledge of the Father, but in a location, rather than being infinitely spread out. Then the Son immediately broke into its constituent parts, and these are called the ALL, and each one of the ALL is a fractal of the Son, just as the Son is a fractal of the Father.


And we’ve spent time discussing what fractals are, which are a mathematical concept. So please go back and listen to the podcasts in order so that you understand this material and catch up to where we are.


Gnosis means knowledge and the purpose of this gnosis is so that we might reason. Reasoning, logic, is a basic facet of the Father of consciousness.


The other basic factor of the Father is love. And love is not only this feeling of love that we have, but love is the containing force—the holding on to one another, to work together in harmony. We’ve also discussed the Simple Golden Rule, which is reaching out to others, holding hands metaphorically or in reality, working together on a single project with love, assistance, and information in order to build the next level up of complication or of sophistication.


Then the ALL of the Son, which is his differentiated parts, became self aware and each one of the ALL became a conscious entity on its own. I refer to these conscious entities as units of consciousness because they embody the consciousness of the Son and of the Father. These units of consciousness of the ALL constitute what is called the Pleroma or the Fullness of God. And the Fullness of God sits there in a unified body. There are many cells to it, each of them self aware units of consciousness, but all of the cells work in absolute harmony. They share one thought. They sing one song. They dream of a paradise. These units of consciousness in the Gnostic Gospels are called the Fullness or the Fullnesses of God. They’re also called the Aeons.


One of the Aeons named Logos had his own thought that deviated from the rest of the Fullness, and because of this thought, he overreached in his ambition and he Fell. And this is the first act of Ego. It is the first act of striking out on one’s own for what one thinks is the best thing to do, without being in harmony with the rest of one’s fellows. It’s the first deviation from the Golden Rule of working together.


When Logos fell, his parts broke apart and became what we call the Deficiency. The Deficiency is this universe in which we live. The Father immediately put a boundary around the Deficiency, and this space is literally our space and time that constitutes this universe in which we live.


We discussed how the deficiencies are small knockoffs of the Aeons of the original. They’re called the Imitation. They are not nearly as grand and glorious as the Aeons of the Fullness, arising as they did out of egoic thought.


When the Aeon who fell, Logos, saw what he had created out of his egoic thought, he was horrified and he immediately returned to the Fullnesses and prayed to the Father and to the Fullness to help him rectify the situation of having brought the Deficiency into creation. And of course, this is one of the heresies—considered a heresy by the church—is  is the idea that our universe that creation—is a Deficiency rather than a glory of God. But that’s actually a misunderstanding of the Deficiency.


The origination of the Deficiency may have been a Fall away from the Fullness and of the Father, but it didn’t stay that way because the Fullnesses and Logos sent back units of consciousness into the Deficiency in order to fix it; in order to make it better. Because the Deficiency when it first was created was unable to work together, arising as it did out of Ego rather than out of cooperation. It did not arise from the Golden Rule. And so, what originally came into being in our universe was what I believe to be the quantum foam level of instantiation. And quantum foam is non-cooperative; it just keeps bubbling in and out of existence. A constant boiling type of surface that never rises up to build atoms and molecules and this universe around us.


So the true Deficiency is the substrate of our material universe. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about the diversity of consciousness and life in this universe that occurred as the 2nd Order Powers entered. In other words, we’re going to talk about evolution. Today I will be reading out of a couple of my articles, one on the Simple Explanation blog, and one on the new Gnostic Gospel blog. I’ve had a long running science and math blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can find at https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/ .  


On November 11th of 2018, I wrote an article called A Simple Explanation of Tuskless Elephants’ Super Quick Evolution, and I’d like to share that with you right now.


African elephants are rapidly evolving to lose their most precious physical trait, their ivory tusks. In a stunningly rapid instance of observable evolution, African elephant females are refusing to grow the ivory that poachers kill for. In an excerpt from the National Geographic, which says, “Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks. In Mozambique, researchers are racing to understand the genetics of elephants born without tusks and the consequences of the trait.”



I won’t read to you out of the National Geographic article, but you can try to find it on your own or you can go to this blog article that I’m reading out of right now on A Simple Explanation’s blogspot. But the point of the article is that decades ago, some 4000 elephants lived in Mozambique, Gorongosa National Park, and they have dwindled down to triple digits following the civil war. New research indicates that 200 known adult females, or 51% of those that survived the war, are tuskless and then 32% of the female elephants born since the war are tuskless.


Now, coming back to what I write, scientists are calling this evolution, but tell me, have you ever heard of evolution occurring in only one or two generations? When I was taught evolutionary theory, they said it took thousands of generations of minute changes to populate a beneficial mutation to the stage where you could say it had evolved. For instance, in 2012, Michigan State University researchers were very happy to demonstrate the evolution of citrate eating E coli bacteria after only 56,000 generations. 56,000 generations!


I remember the day I first learned about evolution in elementary school. There was an illustration in the textbook mocking the concept of Lamarckian evolution. Lamarck had promoted the idea that giraffes who stretched their necks to reach the leaves on higher branches, gave birth to calves with longer necks. No, no, Darwinians said. Natural selection is the way it happens as only long necked giraffes survived the lean years to give birth to more long necked calves like themselves, and that logic was supposed to have settled the argument concerning Darwinian evolution. The reason Darwinian evolutionary theory won out over Lamarck’s theory of epigenetic trait inheritance was that Lamarck’s type of evolution requires learning and volitional repetition, whereas Darwin’s creatures were either born lucky to have long necks or were doomed to be short necked losers. Even as a child of 10 or so, I recall wondering why, if long necks were so valuable as to have evolved into our familiar high nibbling giraffes, then why don’t all large grazing animals have long necks?


I happen to prefer the Simple Explanation’s theory of evolution. My theory of evolution reinserts learning and choice into the equation and removes the element of dumb luck. Seriously, who would ever look around themselves at the varieties of natural adaptation and believe that dumb luck at the material level accidentally brought it all about? It just doesn’t even make sense. It defies the basic rule of 52 pickup. And you’ve heard of that—52 pickup is: if you throw a deck of cards in the air, it never comes down stacked and in order. It never does.


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


All this time I’ve been thinking that the Simple Explanation is somehow essentially divergent from Darwin. In the Simple Explanation there is an ontological pull upward toward more complex aggregations of consciousness. Darwin’s model is, on the other hand, a case of the blind simply bumbling by happenstance, by lucky accident, by dumb luck, to be a superior adaptation from the norm. Where I find it unlikely is that there would be a billion such bumblings in the same direction, that by dumb luck keeps heading in the upward and onward direction.


The Simple Explanation would say the patterns of superiority are few and they are fractal, so the wheel does not need to be reinvented over and over. The Golden Rule and the hierarchical distribution of increasing complexity and responsibility cover much of it. And, due to the transpersonal nature of universal knowledge, basic mechanisms like hands and eyes only need to be invented once and then deployed or copied as needed. Consciousness is not a byproduct of the human brain, or even of complex systems of any sort. Consciousness is the ground state.


Think of consciousness as the medium upon which is written the formulae of our universe. The Simple Explanation refers to this ground state as the Metaverse, and, by the way, the Gnostic gospel (jumping ahead) refers to this consciousness as the Father. And it contains every law of the universe as potential expression that manifests when and where appropriate. Smaller derivative units of consciousness are fractals of the originating units of consciousness that express themselves in every single material expression of our universe. And again, jumping ahead, in the Gnostic Gospel we call those the 2nd Order Powers, of which we are a part.


The most ambitious units of consciousness, or we would say, Second Order Powers, continue to find themselves occupying larger and more complex physical forms. Some of the units of consciousness that started in Earth’s primordial soup have remained in the soup, never attaching themselves to anything more complex than a single-celled organism.  


The most ambitious little life forms found themselves returning to slightly more sophisticated organisms with each incarnation. Lessons learned are carried forward, always incarnating more and more complex structures, and occasionally jumping to a more complex hierarchical level, driving the evolution of planetary life via memes accrued through Karma. Was Cyd’s Self unit of consciousness, ever a single celled organism? Probably so, beginning about four and a half billion years ago. Was Cyd’s Self unit of consciousness ever a jellyfish? Good chance it was, as the toroidal-shaped jellyfish is the oldest multi-organ animal on Earth, swimming our seas for the last 700 million years. Was Cyd’s Self unit of consciousness ever a dinosaur? Well, maybe, maybe not. I’d imagine the dinosaur memes and karma informed the development of reptiles and birds, not Cyd’s lineage. The first mammals apparently descended from a different lizard, therapsids. Was Cyd’s governing unit of consciousness ever a lemur or a chimpanzee or a Bonobo, or perhaps an Australopithecus or a Neanderthal? Probably, since their protohuman memes and karma would have informed human development and the Self unit of consciousness is attracted to familiar patterns.


In the Simple Explanation’s evolutionary model, no war is needed between natural selection and creationism, between science and religion. The Simple Explanation proposes that everything in the cosmos is created through metaversal principles embodied in all units of consciousness, and that each governing unit of consciousness evolves according to personal inclination and ability, through established patterns of meme acquisition and adaptation, and the utterly fair and impartial mechanism of karma. In the Simple Explanation’s evolutionary schema, Cyd is currently a human and probably has been for a very long time.


Am I therefore more evolved than my dogs? Not really. The family dogs are at the same level of hierarchical sophistication as the humans. The dogs’ billions of aggregate units of consciousness and their Self units of consciousness have all made decisions every step along the way that steered them into this life as these dogs.


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


Now back to the elephants. The Simple Explanation of this ridiculously rapid loss of tusks is that the elephants who were killed for their tusks carried that information into the transpersonal pool of universal consciousness upon their deaths, and made that data available to subsequent generations of African elephants. That meme probably reads, Hey, watch out! Those effers are gonna kill you to try to get their hands on your beautiful ivory tusks. Don’t grow ‘em!


Thus ends that article from the Simple Explanation blog from November 11, 2018. As I say, you can visit that blog and read that article if you would like to review what I just said. Also, the links to the original studies that were cited are contained in that article. That article that I just read you about the elephants and their tusks that was written in terms of the Simple Explanation’s, vocabulary, and so there were words in there that you’re not that familiar with, although you do know some of them by now, such as units of consciousness and fractals.


Five months later I wrote another article on the new Gnostic Gospel blog, and if you want to read the original of that, you can find it under April 23rd, 2019, and it’s called A Gnostic Perspective of Evolution: Refuting Darwin. I re-released an updated edition of that podcast last week.


The 2nd Order Powers are also called those of the remembrance, and I suggest that what was sown in the 2nd order of powers that lifted them above the imitation was the remembrance and for life forms that remembrance is contained in our double Helix DNA. As it turned out, the 2nd Order of Powers became infected with the same lust for dominion that had infected those of the imitation due to the law of mutual combat. And the two orders began a never-ending war over resources in the limited ecology of early Earth. The likenesses resemble the original Aeons of the Fullness, but they lost themselves in the confusion of Earth.


Now let me interrupt this here for a moment and say that we have not yet discussed Archons. Archons are other entities of the Fall that we haven’t talked about yet, since we’ve only been talking about the physical universe and Archons are immaterial. They are not physical—they are influences. So when we talk about the never-ending war with the living forms, it’s the Archons doing battle with the living forms.


Back to the article and quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, Verses 84 and 85, “The powers of the remembrance were adorned with the names of the Pre-existents whose likenesses they were—and that’s the Aeons of the Fullness. The order of those of this kind was in harmony with itself, and with each other. It fought, however, the order of those of the Imitation” (and that is the forces of the Archons which include, for example, entropy and death.


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


I’m going to end this podcast with a quick review of the Simple Golden Rule because that is what evolution on Earth is all about. It could be considered the central takeaway message of the Simple Explanation. Your job is to reach out to others with love, aid, and information for the betterment of all. This goes for all units of consciousness. All 2nd Order Powers from the cells and organs to organisms and beyond.


The Simple Golden Rule

Every physical manifestation links up with others of its kind in this universe. Atoms linked together to make molecules, molecules linked together to make cells. Cells linked together to make organs, organs linked together to make organisms, organisms linked together to create societies, and so on. And these are the building blocks of the next level of hierarchical aggregation.


This is re-instantiating the Hierarchy of the Fullness in this bounded material universe. And this is what is called the new ecology. It was a way to put the consciousnesses of the Fullness, the Aeons, into a physical form, and manifest them on this earth, and then this will go forward and become the next ecology.


So the first Ecology was the Hierarchy of the Fullness. The second Ecology is this material universe of ours. And then, once this universe is fully redeemed by the Christ, it will become the next hierarchical organization. And the way this happens is to reach out to others with love, assistance, and information for the betterment of all.


We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other

This has been the Gnostic Insights podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. I’ll see you next time. Onward and upward and God bless.