Gnostic Insights
As Above, So Below pt. 2
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week we revisited an episode that was originally posted in October of 2021. It was originally entitled, As Below, So Above, Inferring the Transcendent.
We only got through the first half of that original episode because it was a long one and as I was re-recording it, I added some new insights about the current state of politics and how it relates to the Demiurge. If you didn’t hear last week’s episode called As Above, So Below, you may want to back up and start there.
In last week’s episode we reviewed the Gnostic cosmology and the path of consciousness from the Father through the Aeons of the Fullness, and then down into creation as a result of the Fall of Logos. We talked about the chaos of the Fall and the rise of the architect of this world, known as the Demiurge, who is the creator god of this cosmos, not to be confused with the Father Above. The Demiurge is the fallen ego of Logos, and it does not remember where it came from.
Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory.
The ego of Logos believes that it is all that exists, having forgotten the true nature and source of consciousness. The ego of Logos does not remember love or the life of the Pleroma. As the isolated Ego of Logos, cut off from the Father and the Fullness, the Demiurge cannot generate life or consciousness. The Demiurge brought order and form to the chaos of the Fall and continues to control the material world.
We humans and all other living creatures are not generated from the mud up. We are generated out of the Fullness above. Our consciousness and life flow directly from the consciousness of the Father. At conception, we are melded to the material world and use those molecules as building blocks for our bodies.
Our mission is to bring love into the world and to ultimately remind the Demiurge of its origins in the Fullness above. The Demiurge doesn’t know this, of course, and it thinks we are simply more material for it to control. It doesn’t know we are conscious, and it thinks we are chaotic because it does not understand the free will we bring into creation.
We left off last week’s episode with a discussion of free will versus tyranny in the realm of worldly politics, and noted that the way the Demiurge controls molecules through strong bonds of power like a puppet master pulling their strings is the pattern that tyrannical politicians are using to control the citizens. They’re following the Demiurge’s example, and they attempt to control us with strong bonds of power and strings of control. The end goal is not to build a better world but to quash free will through power and control.
The Demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects
Our Ego is often mistaken for the Self. But, it is the Self that is the true reflection of the Father and of the Fullness of God. The Ego is merely a Fall away from the Self; and when you fall away from the Self, or the Fullness of God, you mistake your own Ego for Truth. But it is not Truth; it is a reflection of the world. It is a reflection of those things around us in the material world that are created by the Demiurge.
The manner by which the Demiurge becomes the God of this universe is logically self-evident, considering the Gnostic fable I shared last week. The reason for the Fall is that Logos forgot about the rules of cooperation and unanimity that allowed the Fullness to sing their song of glorious praise. Presumptuous thought brought the Ego of Logos to the forefront and replaced its spirit of cooperation with self-centered ambition and lusting for power.
Left on its own, what the Demiurge lacked in terms of the cooperative structure of the Fullness, it made up for with brute force. The Demiurge was able to create order in the material world by a system of bondage and close supervision. The Demiurge took the disordered material of the quantum foam and caused it to level up in a manner reminiscent of the aeon’s Golden Rule. Particles to atoms, atoms to molecules, molecules to elements, elements to minerals. But where the Golden Rule uses the principle of reaching out to others to willingly hold hands and share information, assistance, and love for the betterment of All, the Demiurge uses strings that bind and entwine from a central source, giving no choice in the matter. The Demiurge fills in the lack of consciousness within the deficiency with its own egoic power and plans. The Demiurge is a tyrant who exercises complete domination.
The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will.
We who are conscious here below are not simply puppets of the Demiurge. The Gnostic Gospel explains that Logos and the Fullness sought a solution to overthrow what had come into being through the Fall. The Aeons fashioned a fruit that reflected their own lives, and imbued this fruit with life and a memory of the Fullness and the Golden Rule of Cooperation. This fruit was sent into the deficiency, our universe, one at a time, from the smallest and most humble to the largest and most complex. It is these life forms that inhabit the universe, and they are called the Second Order of Powers. Born from a good, cooperative thought, the Second Order Powers work in harmony and love, for they had come forth from the harmony and love of the Fullness and the Father.
The life forms of our universe are a melding of the Fullness of God, with all of the consciousness and cooperation that comes from the Fullness, with the material controlled by the Demiurge. This marriage of the Fullness to the Demiurge creates an arena of constant conflict and striving, both within ourselves and with our neighbors as we strive with elements of Self and Ego, Above and Below, virtue and vice, freedom and tyranny. We find ourselves in a “never-ending war” with forces and principalities beyond our control as we balance our lives between the powers of the Demiurge and the powers of the Pleroma. In the course of battle, most of us have forgotten our aeonic inheritance.
The good news is that the Gnostic cosmology doesn’t stop there. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of their focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father.
In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled up into One perfect form.
Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect Man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believe the same. Here is the more complete explanation of who Jesus was:
It is said that Jesus was conceived without sin, because he carried within his body the perfection of Man and God. This would mean that Jesus’s DNA was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity, hence the importance of the virgin birth that imparted that perfect DNA to the baby.
Jesus was also without negative karma in his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. Jesus was also without negative karma in his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. And, indeed, all Second Order Powers come to Earth with all of the Fullnesses inside of them because our Self is a perfect reflection of the One Fullness of God. It is our karma that causes a worldly meme shroud to attach to us.
The components of Jesus’s body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate. As Colossians 1:19 says,
“For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and the Son came to material instantiation on earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggles between birth and death that plague us all.
Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it:
“They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. 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 Fullnesses, revealing the countenance 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 brought forth the fruit.
“And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them—which was his beloved Son… the one who is properly called ‘Savior’ and ‘the Redeemer’ and ‘the Well-Pleasing One’ and ‘the Beloved,’ ‘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 previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?
“Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but also they generated their own; for the Aeons who give glory generated their countenance 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. They came forth 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. He also sees the One who gave it to him.” [Tripartite Tractate, sections 85—87]
So, you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought their own personal and recognizable Savior. The function of Jesus as an earthly, human savior, is to demonstrate to us that we can all be redeemed and resurrected out of the mud and death and into everlasting life. The Jesus figure is presented as our exemplar of how we may all rise, every one of us, including the Demiurge itself. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall.
Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyous place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father from the beginning. These shadows are not real, and they have no home with us in Paradise, and the light of the Father will evaporate them.
We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers.
The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us.
That is the ending of the episode from 2021. Now, my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is all about all of this. This entirety of the entire podcast of the last three years put into a logical and orderly manner that anyone can read and grasp who has an interest in Gnosis, or the God Above All Gods.
What I have tried to do is to demystify Gnosticism. I don’t believe that Gnosis should be held like a big secret and kept away from people. We’re all from the God Above All Gods. We are all fruit of the Fullnesses of God. Therefore, we all will be going up to rejoin our parents, to rejoin the Aeons in the Fullness above. No Second Order Power is going into what is called the eternal lake of fire. That actually is something of a mistranslation from the original Greek. We can go into more translations of the original Greek in another episode. In future episodes, I think I’ll try to make more clear both the distinctions and the similarities of Gnostic Christianity with what has become conventional Christianity, because it really does all start with the same Father. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. If you see me, you see the Father.” We would hold that to be true.
The book will be out very soon. I’m in the final stage of one last comb-through to catch any last little typos and mistakes, since I had to reformat the entire book from scratch myself. Now we are going to publish it through Amazon.com. It’s going to be priced at $24.24. I really look forward to that day, and I’ll let you know as soon as it happens. It will be any day now. And did I tell you that Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio will be narrating the audio book? He begins recording next week.
So, onward and upward, and God bless us all.