Welcome back to Gnostic Insights, and Happy Easter! Last week, we spoke about the characteristics of the Son of God and whether the Son of the Gnostic faith is the same as the Son of the Christian faith. And my answer was, Yes, definitely it is, and Well, there are some differences. You may wish to back up to last week’s episode to listen to that in-depth discussion of the Gnostic Son compared to the Christian Son. Today, we’re going to look at some of those differences. And then, stay tuned until the end of this episode for an Easter message from me to you.

Now, when the scriptures say that the Son is “the only begotten Son of the Father,” this means that the Son is the only consciousness to have emerged directly from the Father. All other units of consciousness emanate from the Son. The Tripartite Tractate says,

“Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no one else and the one apart from whom there is no other unbegotten one, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no other and after whom no other Son exists. Therefore, he is a first born and an only one. First born because no one exists before him, and only Son because no one is after him.” That’s from verse 57 of the Tripartite Tractate.

And, because he carries all of the characteristics of the Father, as soon as the Son emanated from within the Father, the Son began to generate offspring of his own. And so the Son became a Father. And the immediate generation of the Son is called the Totalities of the ALL, which are coexistent with the Son. And then the Totalities gave glory to the Father and the Son, and in their giving of glory they generated their own emanations. And those are called the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And these Aeons of the Fullness became self aware, and they sorted themselves into a hierarchy based upon position, rank, duties, or jobs. They all had names, so therefore they had an ego. Each Aeons has an ego, whereas the Totalities have no ego—their consciousness is entirely subsumed to the Son.

And the Aeons continue to generate more emanations of the Spirit of God when the Aeons look upon each other with love and devotion, and the Father and the glory reflected through them. Their union produces another Aeon, and that’s how Aeons procreate—have babies, so to speak. The Third Glory that is the offspring of the Aeons, “was produced in accordance with the free will and the power they had been born with, enabling them to give glory in unison, while at the same time independently of one another according to the will of each.” That’s verse 69 of the Tripartite. So the Fullness of God is not just a one and done thing. They continue to emanate units of consciousness called the Third Glory.

Now, in the cosmogeny or cosmology of Gnostic Christianity, the original Christianity, the Aeons continued to produce their own generation of offspring until all combinations, all possible, infinite combinations, of Aeons were produced. The final Aeon was named Logos, and he carried fractal images of all the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. He was a package, a fractal package, of the entire Fullness. And here is when we have the Fall. When Logos tried to reunite with the Father and produce the world—produce the Paradise that they had all been dreaming of—all by himself, without the Fullness because he could do it. He had all of the characteristics. But instead, he fell because it was unauthorized. The other Fullnesses were not joined in giving glory with him, and so the Fall produces our material existence here, down below.

And then, once he fell, Logos split into two and what’s called the best part of Logos—that would be his one true Self that reflects the Fullness—fled back up into the Fullness and his ego stayed behind. The ego of the fallen Aeon did not remember the Fullness, did not remember the Father, or the Son. Didn’t remember anything that came before. That’s why the Demiurge is called the amnesiac God. He did, however, still contain all of the patterns and blueprints for Paradise, but without the life and love flowing down through the Son, through the Father, into him. That is why the material is dense and heavy. It’s not ethereal anymore. It has heft and weight to it, and we can’t pass through objects because we are no longer ethereal.

I say we, but we haven’t been created yet. We are called the Second Order of Powers. The Fullness is the First Order of Powers. The Aeons and Logos together prayed for a solution for this dense and heavy Paradise down below that was being formed and run by the Demiurge without any life or love. And so, we were created. All live creatures and all of our soft, squishy, meaty parts were created in order to be carriers of the consciousness of the Father, because the Demiurge had forgotten about it. The ultimate aim at that point was to bring love and life to the Demiurge, so he would remember the Fullness above.

And so, all of the Second Order Powers, “from the smallest to the largest,” the Tripartite Tractate says, were sent down into this world. And we’re in that process right now. We’re still in that stage of creation. We’re supposed to be carrying love and life and harmony and the Golden Rule of cooperation down here. But, instead, we get all jammed up with the material, and then we begin fighting with each other and we begin fighting with the Demiurge rather than showing love, and forgiveness, and compassion. And so that’s what’s called the never-ending war. We can’t seem to get out of fighting and start to loving instead.

So another solution was required. And that next solution is not called the Son. In most of Christianity, it is the Christ. The Christ is not exactly the same as the Son of God. In conventional Christianity, they have conflated the Son of God with the Christ and then with Jesus. They’ve put all three of these separate individuals into one unit. But we would say that the Son is the original monad out of the Father, from whence all consciousness emanates. But the Christ—he’s something else.

We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons. We are representations of the living images above. We’ve not been abandoned down here below, for, a new agreement among the Son, the Fullness, and Logos gave rise to a Third Order of Powers. 

The First Order of Powers were the Aeons of the Fullness. We’re the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ.

And the Christ was created by the Son, the Fullnesses, and Logos altogether, in order to come and rescue us. The Third Order Powers are the Pleroma of the Christ that comes from the ethereal plane to rescue us, and along with us, the Demiurge, since we Second Order Powers are not able to pull it off.

So, the Totalities of the ALL and the Aeons of the Fullness of God—those are two different entities. They both constitute the Pleroma of the Son-who-has-become-a-Father, the original Son. And Aeon stepped up joyously and willingly, it says, with the thought of being helpful to the deficient ones by bringing awareness of the Father’s glory and love to us. The Tripartite Tractate says,

“Then, from the harmony in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father,” (that is, the face of the Father), “of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother, with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.” That’s verse 86.

And, this new fruit is the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers, endowed with more capabilities than the First and Second Orders, because the Christ embodies the entirety of the ALL and the particularity of the consciousness of each of the individual Aeons of the Fullness, along with the full power of the Holy Spirit and the Son’s entire knowledge and remembrance of the ethereal plane.

“Through this agreement,” (it’s called the agreement), the Third Order of Powers is fully equipped to bring remembrance and redemption to the Second Order Powers living in this fallen world, as well as to the Demiurge. And, this is cool—listen to this from verse 87.

“Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father,” (and by the way, countenance means face and the originating consciousness, what we call the Father, has no face. He’s that illimitable, invisible entity that has no face. But the Son has a face. So when they say that—the Father’s countenance—that is always speaking of the Son, because the Father does not have a countenance, he is invisible. But the Son does have a face, a countenance.) So, it says, “Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which is the Son which was written previously, but they also generated their own; for the Aeons who give Glory generated their countenances and their face. They were produced as an army for him, As for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony.”

I take this to mean that there is a Third Order Power for each and every Second Order Power. And there’s a Second Order Power for each and every shadow of the original Fall. Each Third Order Power has the face of the Aeons as well as the face of the Son—the Father to whom they gave praise. “They came in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help.”

And this is why Christians have such a personal relationship with Jesus, because they see the face of Jesus—the countenance of Jesus—in the Christ, but they also see their own face. That’s why they always say they recognize Jesus. They recognize the countenance of Jesus, because it is their own personalized Christ. So, the Christ is personalized for each and every person down below and each and every creature. It’s not just a guy hanging on a cross carved out of wood in a building. That is not what the Christ is. And, it’s not remembering that Christ suffered and died for us on a cross 2,000 years ago. That isn’t what the  Christ is.

The Christ is alive and living now—that’s what the resurrection means. So, Christians believe that Jesus resurrected out of the grave and that he showed himself to the disciples and showed himself to all of them on Pentecost. And then the Holy Spirit came and Jesus left, and went back to Heaven. The Holy Spirit came down and moved among the disciples, and everyone who believes in Christ. But everyone has a living visage or a living countenance that is the living face of a Third Order Power that was made specifically for them, for their second-orderness. I’m a Second Order Power. You’re a Second Order Power. The dogs are Second Order Powers. All creatures are Second Order Powers. And there is a Third Order Power created to cover and redeem or bring home, redeem just means, you know, like redeeming something from a pawn shop. So redemption is simply the ability to go home again. And where’s our home? It’s up above in the Fullness of God with the First Order of Powers—the Aeons. Our Redeemer comes to us with a recognizable face that is the image of the Son, the Father, as well as the amalgamation of Aeons from which we were each fruited. We are created in their image. All that we Second Order creatures need to do is allow the Third Order Powers to take up residence within our individual Pleroma us by inviting them in to our individual Pleroma that is the unique combination of various Aeons that make us up. Because we are all amalgamations of many, many different Aeons. We have Aeons for each of our selves, so we are a constellation, a galaxy of units of consciousness, and each one of those is a fractal of an Aeon, and so we’re all different in that way, but we all reflect one of those infinite Aeons up above. You see?

So, in this manner, the gnosis and love of the Christ will displace the shadows of the Fall and bring redemption to us and through us. And I believe that this is the true mission of Christianity. The Christ was brought forth to: “Those who came into being according to the thought,” (and we are those of the thought) “of the Father.” We are the thought of the Son and the Fullness. We are their manifestations, you see? And from the Tripartite Tractate, verses 86 and 87, “the Father made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son, the one who is properly called Savior, and the Redeemer, and the well pleasing one, and the beloved, and the one to whom prayers have been offered, and the Christ, and the light of those appointed in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except the Son, as we have previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know.”

So again, the united prayers of the Totalities of the ALL, the Aeons, and Logos, in unity with the Father’s will, manifested the Christ through their agreement. The Christ is the Son of the Father, made tangible on Earth, bringing full notion of the Son whom the Father wanted us to know. So it wasn’t only the singular Christ that was created, you see? He who is the one image of the Son of God. It was the face of every one who prays to the Father for help. This is the army of the Christ. These are the Third Order Powers, the Pleroma of the Christ created as images of the ALL and the Aeons of the Fullness. And they are far more powerful than we Second Order Powers and infinitely more powerful than the phantoms of the deficiency. And there is Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers, emanated for our specific redemption and liberation.

And this is why when Christians who are born again, who have a true Christian experience of accepting redemption, not just a pew warmer; not just someone who goes to church and says, Oh yeah, I’m a Christian. Those without any hypocrisy, but a true Christian who has a personal relationship with the Christ because the Christ came for them personally and they recognized him. And so people that are really hitting bottom that are really down, when they pray for help Oh dear God, please save me. That invites that Third Order Power to come in. It opens up their hardened egoic barrier against salvation and allows the Third Order Christ to enter their soul. And the Third Order Power takes up residence within their soul. That is the true nature of Gnostic Christianity and the true nature of the Christ as represented through the Tripartite Tractate.

And then Jesus was a particular manifestation of the Christ. Jesus was fully God, as we all are, because we are all fully God when we invite the Third Order Powers to take up residence within us. So, Christ was born fully realized as a Third Order Power, and though he was also fully man, he was a human being, just like any of us. So he shows us how we can all be redeemed by inviting our Third Order Powers to take up residence within us, just as Jesus allowed his Third Order Powers to walk with him at all times without sin or blemish, as the Bible says.

Jesus had a particular mission to come and represent the Third Order Powers—to come and represent the Christ—to all of his fellow Second Order Powers, since he was also human. And that is why, when we look upon Jesus or imagine Jesus, we recognize him because we also are from the Fullness. We also have the Third Order Powers within us, once we invite them in. We just don’t allow them to flower the way Jesus did.

So, the Son, the original Son, is the only begotten manifestation of the Father. The Christ is the Son with mojo empowered—it’s Logos and the Fullness and the Totalities all praying to the Son, and the Son and the Father granting that Christ all of their powers. So, the Christ is the most powerful entity that exists next to the Son and the Father. As far as the hierarchy of Heaven goes, it’s the Father that we can’t relate to because he’s invisible and all spread out. Then it’s the Son which is his emanation and is fully the Father, but in a place where we can see his face and relate to him. And then there is the Christ, which is all of the spiritual powers of the ethereal plane and their fruit, altogether praying for redemption for us down here below.

And you can take advantage of that any time you want by asking the Third Order Powers, asking the Christ or asking Jesus, OK, I give up. Help me. I’m ready for redemption. Now, even if you don’t, and here comes a heresy, it doesn’t mean you’re going to hell. It means you’re going to have a miserable, sad, and unhappy life, being cut off from the love and redemption of the Father. It’s going to mean that you are deluded as to your own egoic power and your own willpower being cut off from the willpower of God. It’s an egoic barrier that separates us from the love of God. It’s your ego that separates you from Christ, but you will not be lost. Nor will you evaporate if you let the Christ come in and take up residence. Those Third Order Powers, they’ll just sit on the same spot where the Second Order Powers are sitting. You’ll hardly know the difference, except you’ll be full of life and love.

So, Happy Easter, everybody. And here’s a little Easter card from me to you.

“And speaking out, the angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who has been crucified; He is not here; for he was raised, just as he said; come see the place where he lay.'”  (Matthew 28:5, 6)

The tomb is empty. The Christ cannot be contained in the darkness of death. The Christ is not swallowed up by the earth. Nor are we.

Resurrection is certain, for our spirits are the children of  great spirits of another realm, another dimension. Freed from the mortal coils that entwine us with this material world, our souls pass on to the Fullness from whence they came. 

There is no need to fear death. There is no need to search for salvation inside empty tombs or any other earthly vessel. Your spirit knows how to go home, as surely as your heart knows how to beat and your lungs know how to breathe. When your body fails, your spirit soars.

And there, in the Fullness above, peace and love and all you hold dear await you. There is no need to fear.

Robert McCall’s “The Prologue and the Promise”

The tomb is empty. Death cannot hold us down. The mission of the Christ was to free us all from death’s bondage to this mortal world. He accomplished this task. We are free indeed.

Happy, Happy Easter.

Cyd will be talking about these things with Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio on a live stream interview, April 1, 2024, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. Please join us for this live event by tuning in to Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio on YouTube. I would love to hear from some of you who have been following this podcast. You will have the ability to make comments during the live stream event. Onward and upward!