Gnostic Insights
Gnosis or Not Gnosis?
We Gnostic Christians are in a very funny position as far as Gnostics and Christians go, because we fall into neither camp and we fall into both camps. And this is what I mean. I realize that the last couple of episodes have been very, what people would call, Christian, except the Christians don’t call it Christian.
It’s a funny, funny position to be in. Those of us who call ourselves Gnostics believe in the Father. We believe in the Aeons of the Fullness. We believe that one of the Aeons “fell” out of the Fullness and, for most Gnostics, they call that Aeon Sophia, and Sophia is considered to be a female character. For those of us who are interested in the Tripartite Tractate we call that fallen Aeon Logos. And, Logos is neither female nor male, because in the Gnosticism according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there are no females and males. Or, there may be females and males, but their gender is not important. Gender is irrelevant.
The folks who follow what is called Sethian Gnosticism, as I understand it—who prefer to follow Sophia rather than Logos—believe in a system of male-female bonding. They’re called syzygies, and for every male Aeon there’s a female Aeon and they are like a married couple. And that between the two of them there is balance. Well, now that’s kind of a funny thing at this point in our social development, don’t you think? All of this idea that genders are unimportant or that you can change the gender you were born with—this transgenderism that’s going on in society. Now, I am a female. I was born a female. I remain a female. And yet I have always felt within myself that gender was unimportant. It’s irrelevant other than our reproductive functions. But as far as my actions on the social stage, as far as my actions on the academic stage, as far as the way I read and interpret material, gender has nothing to do with that.
I’m a Libertarian. I believe in freedom and personal responsibility and liberty to be able to make the decisions we want to make. I don’t believe in power and control. I think that power and control, particularly centralized authority, is demiurgic because that’s the way the Demiurge operates. The Demiurge is the puppet master. It has always been said, even in conventional Christianity, that every person must come to God for themselves. Every person must make their own decisions regarding whom they will follow, and I don’t think that has anything to do with gender. I think it has to do with the Demiurge versus the Father, or the Son, or the Fullness, or Logos. Bob Dylan had a song—remember back in his evangelical phase? The lyrics had to do with you have to choose somebody. “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to choose somebody.” That is a black and white decision that is a bilateral decision. You’re either going this way or you’re going that way, you’re going in or you’re going out, you’re going up or you’re going down.
The Demiurge controls through strings of power.
Now, the culture that we’re living in, it’s mostly demiurgic. It’s mostly being controlled by centralized authority. And whether that is political, corporate, media led, or religion led, it is centralized authority that takes away your freedom of choice. It says, No. You have to believe this. You have to believe the way we believe. And if you don’t, you’re an outsider. You’re bad. That isn’t the way true choice works. That’s not the way liberty works. Liberty says, Here are all the facts of all the matter, and you can choose this or choose that, or choose that. That is up to each and every person. And indeed, we all are responsible for our own karma, for our own lives. We can’t shuffle that responsibility onto another person or onto a religion or onto a corporation, or onto a political system. We have to make our own decision for ourselves, because it’s only us that’s going up or down.
So, the past couple of episodes have been very Christian. If you’re not familiar with Christ and Jesus, you’re gonna think it’s very Christian. Here, I’ll read you a letter that I got off of Substack this week from one of my paid supporters. He has unsubscribed. He is no longer paying to listen to the Gnostic Reformation. And here’s what he says:
“I’ve really enjoyed getting your take on gnosticism. What I’ve enjoyed most is just how different your perspective is from my own—mine, alas, being increasingly un-Christianized and more focused on Sophia. Of course, to paraphrase Shaw’s quote about economists, If you laid 1000 gnostics end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. Such is the nature of heretics, I think. Gnosis is, imo, different for each of us. It was my honor to help support your work for a time. Best wishes!”
So that was very kind of him. He said it in as kind a manner as he could say. And yet it points out the divide within Gnosticism of those who consider themselves followers of Sophia and those who consider themselves to be Christianized. So he’s rejecting the Gnostic Reformation because it revolves around Christ’s redemption.
Now here’s another one, also from Substack. And this listener says:
“Another inspirational podcast Cyd. Please keep them coming. It seems like such simplicity , but in your introduction the words to ” fear not, we are known and we are loved ” when taken to heart and truly believed states such a significant thing. That belief can cut through much darkness with the purest light—that we are all known , are equally loved , and all are destined for the journey home to be in the fullness. Blessings.”
Now, these are both people that are following a Gnostic path, and one accepts the notion of assistance directly from the Fullness in this our fallen state in the material world and the other one doesn’t. What I have noticed about the followers of Sophia is that they are also into things like astrology, alchemy, magic, good magic, of course—only for the good. I’m not into any of those things. Those are old systems from antiquity, and they’re very occult and very hidden. Occult means hidden.
Now, you tell me if the Father wants to be known, and was this not the purpose of the originating consciousness breaking into individual points of view that would then have their own will and their own experiences, and then feed that information back upstream to the Father? That’s the basic flowing out and flowing in of consciousness—to the Originating Source, out from the Original Source–breaking up into individual points of view having a variety of experiences and then that information coming back up to the Originating Source.
It always says in the Bible, for example, that the Father wanted to be known.** The Christians think that Jesus of Nazareth was the Father walking around on Earth—was the Son of God who fully reflected the Father, and that he wanted to be known. “If you know me, you know the Father,” he said (John 8:19). And the fractal archetype of Jesus of Nazareth walked around his region preaching and teaching about the Father and about virtue and leading a virtuous life and the importance of aligning yourself with the virtuous forces and distancing yourself from the vice. He didn’t hide himself away in a cloister and study manuscripts and write manuscripts, and then hide them deep in the darkest recesses, like the Vatican basement. He didn’t do that. He spoke openly and taught. And he said, We are to love each other and we’re to love ourselves. And we are to love God. This is the highest commandment. This is all that we need to do: Love, love, and love. And then he exemplified that love by loving people he didn’t know; by loving his enemies; by forgiving his enemies; by healing people; by feeding people.
The occultists study their gnosis in labyrinthine ways. They believe that the gnosis was meant to be hidden. They believe that you have to learn, learn, learn, and go deeper, deeper, deeper into secret societies and into secret libraries to pull out this gnosis and study it and learn it and master it. And mastery is a big deal because you need to master alchemy in order to change the base metal into gold. You need to master astrology in order to properly read someone’s chart. You need to master augury in order to properly read the entrails. It all has to do with personal mastery, and they’re confusing that or conflating that with gnosis.
I don’t think that is gnosis. I think for the most part that, at best, it’s interesting worldly knowledge. It’s a hobby, at best. But, on the darker side, it may be demiurgic rather than from the Father, because the Demiurge is all about power, control, and mastery, and the Demiurge only allows power to humans who have agreed to serve it, him or it. On the other side of the Gnostic ledger—the side that I am promoting—it’s open. It’s known. It’s personally accessible and, very importantly, it does not have anything to do with mastery or power. It has to do with letting go and letting God. It has to do with relinquishing personal control—taking your ego, your astrologer ego, your alchemist ego, your grandmaster ego off of the throne of your soul and allowing the singular One, the Self that we all share, our fractal of the Fullness of God, to control our lives.
For now I just want you to realize that this type of Gnostic Christianity that I’m sharing with you—it’s not about me. It’s about you. And it’s not about you mastering anything. It’s not about you having to learn anything. You don’t even have to learn all these steps of the Gnostic Gospel that I lay out here—the Father to the Son; the Son to the Fullness; the Fullness creates Logos; Logos Falls and creates the world; the Fullness and Logos send down us 2nd order powers to populate the world and remind the fallen Demiurge that there is a life beyond this earth; and then us getting all gummed up down here and the Christ being created to save us. Believe me, folks, that is not conventional Christianity. I have to laugh when I say that because it’s enough to get a person burned at the stake. And then this notion that we are all saved, that we are all going back home to the Fullness. That we are all going back home to the Son; that we are all eternally loved by the Father and the Son and the Fullness and our home is Above. We are their children. We’re just on a temporary sojourn down here in the material world, and that this material world is going to pass away.
Now, I don’t see that any of the more base forms of Gnosticism, I will call it, promote that. They promote personal mastery. They promote control over this material world. Well, the way we get control over this material world isn’t through our power, it’s through the power of the Son. It’s through the power of the Father. It’s through the power of the Fullness. It’s through the power of the Christ, ultimately.
Speaking of the Christ, here is another heresy for you that shows that this teaching is not conventional Christianity. The Christ is a different entity, it’s a different thing than Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is a human who fully incorporated the Fullness, the One true Self always sat on the seat or throne of his soul. His ego was not the ruler of Jesus. And that’s what Jesus means to us. Jesus is our archetypal virtuous human. Jesus of Nazareth overcame the world through love and through allowing the Christ to sit on the throne of his walking around self. I read a large article this week from a philosophical website about whether or not there was a historical Jesus. You know, the scholars like to say there’s no such thing as Jesus of Nazareth—that there’s no historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jesus Project says there’s no historicity; we can’t prove it through contemporaneous historical sources other than biblical accounts. Well, I don’t know about that because every once in a while I do run across historical sources, Roman sources, for example.
But, you know, I believe in Jesus because I know Jesus, you see, and that’s… a Christian, let’s say, who’s born again or who’s baptized in the Holy Spirit—an evangelical conservative Christian, has a personal relationship with Jesus. If they don’t, then they are being hypocritical. They may claim to be a good Christian. They may claim to be part of this denomination or that denomination, but if they don’t really have Jesus sitting in their heart and know him intimately in the sense of what would Jesus do? Remember that? What would Jesus do? Have you ever heard that statement? It helps you to figure out, in any confusing situation—you don’t know what to do… oh,should I do this or that? But then you stop a minute. You go, Well, what would Jesus do in this situation? And the answer comes. At least, it’s always come for me because I have a relationship with Jesus, so I can ask. And, of course, Jesus always makes the right decisions.
That Jesus could just as easily, in the Jungian sense, be an archetype of the Redeemed Human. I’m not sure, but it’s possible that even if Jesus of Nazareth did not walk this physical material plane, Jesus of Nazareth certainly lives in the Fullness. Jesus is certainly the archetype of the Redeemed Human. So, whether that be in the Fullness above or be on the earth below is pretty irrelevant, because as long as we can look upon that archetype of our Savior, the Anointed One who came to lead us and give us good advice, and to ultimately lead us back into the Fullness and lead us back in the direction of the Father–that’s the important part. And the Christ is larger than Jesus. The Christ exists independently and above. The Christ is one of the ascended, most powerful entities above. And the Christ’s mission is to bring us 2nd order powers back home. And he did that, in my opinion, by being born into the body of Jesus on Earth to a human mother, and then he exemplified that life and the path back to the Father.
But the Christ has always been up above. Ever since we 2nd order powers were created, the Christ was formed in order to assist us, and the Christ is the King of the 3rd order powers. We’re second order, they’re third order. And there’s a 3rd order power for every one of us—our Christ that comes to us.
The Third Order Powers constitute the pleroma of the Christ. Third Order Powers have the perfection of the Christ–one for every Second Order Power–and they carry the countenance of every Aeon and every Second Order creature.
Now, this is very confusing, very mumbo jumbo stuff. But what I wanted to get across to you today is that this fellow who had found he had to quit the Gnostic Reformation is not right about this being a conventional Christian slot because I’ll tell you what—the evangelical Christians who listen, who are still in the church, they don’t think so. They think that this is pure Satan. This is purely of the Devil—stay away from here. But that isn’t my mission. My mission here isn’t to lure Christians away from the church. The reason I share this material with you is because there are people out there who are seeking, who are looking for the truth, and this is the truth as I know it. And the truth that I am teaching will not lead these lost people, whether you’re fallen away from the church, whether you’re a lapsed Catholic, whether you were never even raised with any religious sensibilities but you know something’s missing—whether you’re lost in the throes of some vice, some addiction—this is a way out. This is, in my opinion, the way out. Gnosis you can trust ought to be on a bumper sticker.
So remember: move your ego off of the throne of your decision-making. It’s leading you astray. It’s in love with the world. Allow the Father to be at the heart of your soul. Allow the virtuous Christ to replace the ego in your soul and you will be at one in yourself with the Fullness, with the Father, with the Son, and with the Christ. Onward and upward. And God bless.
** “This is eternal life that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3). “Let him who glories glory in this – that he understands and knows Me” (Jer. 9:24). “That I may know Him” (Phil 3:10). Other key verses include Daniel 11:32, John 14:7, Phil 3:8, Col 1:10, 2 Peter3:18, and 1 John 5:20.