Gnostic Insights
The Universal Hierarchy
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights.
I signed up the Kindle e-book version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for a free five-day giveaway. So, on September 20th, running through midnight of the 24th, I’m going to share with you A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for absolutely free if you have a Kindle.
Now, on to this week’s episode.
I have removed an early version of the Gnostic Gospel website that was called The New Gnostic Gospel. I’ve taken it down in order to focus more on the websites that I’m active on. So, I was going through all of the old articles yesterday before I removed that website, and I pulled out one here from 2019, which is a very early version of my combination of The Simple Explanation and the Gnostic Gospel. So, I thought I would share that with you today. The original article was named Our Universal Hierarchy, Diagrammed and Simply Explained in Gnostic terms, which is a bit of a laugh because if you go to the website GnosticInsights.com and actually look at the diagram, it is rather complicated.
It does appear in the book A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, so you can find it there, but today I’m going to explain this diagram in both Gnostic terms and in Simple Explanation terms. And when I refer to The Simple Explanation—that was my theory of everything that I came up with many years ago, and it still holds true. I have a blog that’s been up for many, many years called A Simple Explanation, and you can go there to read about that gnosis. There’s well over 300 articles on this theory of everything, and it’s science-based, perhaps strange science to be sure, however it is science-based, and many of the predictions I have made over the years based upon my Simple Explanation hypothesis, my theory of everything—they’ve all been coming true. It’s a wonderful thing for me to be able to witness scientific proofs that have come about since I made these hypothetical predictions. So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can go to A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.
It’s often said that there is no single Gnostic text or philosophy. While it is true that there is much diversity in the texts of the Nag Hammadi over details, there is a certain set of core beliefs that various Gnostics should be able to agree upon, and the diagram that is taken from my Simple Explanation blog and book applies just as well to our Gnostic beliefs as it did to my original hypothesis. This diagram is triangular-shaped, and at the very bottom of the diagram, if you’re only listening to this as a podcast and you’re not reading the article, the very bottom of this triangular shape at the base of the pyramid, these are organized knots of information streaming in from the universal unit of consciousness, and then just above those knots are subatomic particles and waves, and then, you know, they reach out and hold hands and level up to atoms, molecules, minerals, and mineral aggregations, and those are the Demiurge’s reign of control. He’s the creator of the material forms, so organized forces working together to manifest our material universe.
That’s what the Demiurge is in charge of as the creator of this universe. But then there’s a big jump once the Logos and the Fullness begin sending down us second-order powers into that otherwise dead universe, and that big jump is life, and these are living units of consciousness that are streaming in from the universal unit of consciousness, and the very bottom level is proteins and your cellular precursors, the inside bits of cells. The soft and squishy parts is what I like to call it.
Down below is the mud, and up above, that’s the meat, and then those proteins and cellular precursors hold hands with each other and level up, and the next level is the organelles and the cells, and these hold hands and level up to become organs, and the organs are groups of units of consciousness working together as similar cells in a common purpose. So, heart cells hold hands with each other to create the heart, and all together they beat and drive our blood, etc. The organs hold hands and level up to organ systems. You know, there’s way more cells in our body than there are organs, and there are far more organs than there are organ systems. So, the organ systems, that’s like your circulatory system or your lymphatic system. They are combinations of particular organs that are distributed throughout the body, and they work to support the organism.
So, the organ systems are organ units of consciousness supporting an individual organism, and that individual organism, that’s the egoic level of ourselves. Remember, our One Self is all identical to one another, and that is the fractal of the Fullness of God, but our material organism, that middle squishy part, the cells, organs, and organ systems, at the organism level, they are all different, right? I’m different than you. I look different than you, and my body works slightly different than yours does, and so that is associated with our ego, because it’s particular to us. Our spiritual Self is all identical, but our egoic level, where the emotions reside and most of our bodily functions, that’s at the egoic level, and that is taking care of this body that we walk around in.
The organism is the leveled-up version of the organ system. See, these organ systems are all working together. The brain communicates with the heart, and the heart communicates with the skin. At the same level of organization, they communicate with one another, and so at the organism level, that’s our governing unit of consciousness. It’s the raja sitting on top of the elephant, if our elephant is the body, and the raja sitting on top directs the elephant to go this way or that. That’s called discriminating intelligence in yogic philosophy, and that’s our governing unit of consciousness. That’s what we identify with as ourselves at the egoic level. My governing unit of consciousness is the one that makes all the decisions, and decides when to go to the store, and when to take a nap, and when to play with the dog. That’s my governing discriminating intelligence.
Then our organisms also hold hands and level up to a societal level of functioning. Our most basic societal level is the family unit, and then the family units create the village level or the neighborhood level, small enough that they can be thought of as one unit leveled up.
I read a scientific study a few years ago that said we are really only able to keep track of about 250 other people at our level. In other words, the ideal size of our societal level is about 250 other people, because then we can actually communicate and know each one of them. When it gets larger than that, we really can’t keep track of everybody.
So at the societal level, those are organisms working together for the common good. With humans, we make these towns, and they’ve got rules, and they protect us, and we have police, and fire departments, and all of that. That’s our leveling up. If we were ants, the leveling up would be the job of all those worker ants that go out to pick up the little pieces and bring them back to the queen.
The societal levels also can hold hands and level up, and that is our global system. That is our transpersonal system that wraps around this earth. That’s Gaia. That’s all of the units of consciousness that live on the planet. And Gaia is the governing unit of consciousness for the global system. Or in Gnostic terms, we’d be jumping back up to the demiurgic level. We left the demiurges controlled down behind at the mud level, but the demiurge is also in charge of the large earthly level as well, controlling the weather, for example.
And then above the global level, well, we’re part of an astronomical unit. We’re part of this solar system, and the solar system is part of this galaxy, and this galaxy is part of this galactic portion of our universe. And see, those are the galactic forces at the cosmic scale. So people that are studying astrology are generally working with the galactic forces.
And then above the galactic forces, what’s larger than the galaxies? Well, that’s the universe itself. That’s the universal unit of consciousness. That’s what the Demiurge is in charge of as the creator of this universe. If we think of our universe as a gigantic torus, it’s shaped like a womb, and it holds the living forms, the second order of powers that come down into the universe.
And then above the universal unit of consciousness, now we’re getting out of our universe. We’re above and preceding the formation of the universe, or leveling up again all the way to outside of this universe. That is the originating consciousness, the Father, the Son, the One. So this is an example as we’ve leveled up, leveled up, leveled up from the organized knots and the subatomic particles all the way up through all the meat, and up through the societies, and up through the galactic forces. We’ve leveled all the way up to One.
So we started out with practically an infinite number of individual units, and they keep decreasing as they level up, because the higher, the fewer. More particles than atoms, more atoms than molecules, more cells than organs, more organs than organisms, you see, more people than societies. So it keeps leveling up, and every time you go up. And it levels up through, by the way, it levels up according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out, holding hands with other units of consciousness that are at your same level of differentiation.
In other words, the people hold hands with the people, the ants hold hands with the ants, the cells hold hands with other cells. Every time you hold hands and level up to create that next thing that only all of us together can do. One person can’t make a city. He has to join with the other people and level up to make the city. So every time you level up, it reduces the number of units of consciousness, of that governing unit of consciousness, of the next thing, until we actually even escape the universe and become one again, because there’s tons of things at the bottom, and fewer and fewer as you go up, until you reach one. That is a profound concept.
The higher, the fewer.
Now, that diagram that I just described to you was designed when I made the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. However, it works equally well as a Gnostic diagram that explains how our universe is put together.
So if you were previously familiar with the Simple Explanation, and lots of people were, it’s been up for like 15 or 20 years by now, and the book’s been out that long. So if you like what I’m saying to you today, you should get that original book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. On the other hand, if you’re a reader of the Nag Hammadi texts, you might find that the Simple Explanation is useful for sorting out our Gnostic cosmogony. And in my book, The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, that’s what I did for us. It took about 300 pages, but I wove them all together, and I explained Gnosticism in terms of the Simple Explanation, because it works.
And just to remind you, to simplify something does not mean to dumb it down. There is a principle in science called elegance. Even Sherlock Holmes worked on this principle. The simplest explanation that explains everything is the correct explanation. When you start getting lost or in the weeds, and you have to pull in this and pull in that and run down all these different rabbit trails to explain something, it is not elegant. Simplicity and elegance are the simplest way to explain something. The most profound things are the simplest.
And one way I like to think of that in Gnostic terms is that all of the living creatures on Earth are second-order powers. The flowers come from heaven. The squirrels come from heaven. So gnosis can’t be so complex that they can’t figure it out. They do figure it all out at the most simple terms. They do understand that they come from above, and that they will return to above. And that is the core concept. That’s the simplest thing. That is gnosis.
And all of our other talk, and all of our other diagrams, and all the various books of—is it the Sethian system or the Valentinian system of Gnosticism? Is it Christianity? Is it Buddhism? Is it Hinduism? These are all attempts to explain it to people in ways that people can understand. But they are not necessary, because all we need to know is the Gnosis that underlies them, and that is that we are the children of God. We are the children of the God Above All Gods. And there is only one ultimate creator of consciousness, and that creator is called the Father. And it predates this creator God of this universe that we live in. We are returning to the Father.
We will return to the ethereal plane. However, we’re going through this earthly manifestation experiencing materialism. It’s different than the ethereal plane. It resembles the ethereal plane, but it is ”fallen.” It’s at a slower rate of vibration. It’s dense and thick and confusing. And so it’s very hard to remember Gnosis when we’re in this state. In Gnostic terms, as well as traditional Judaic and Christian terms, the Son is a piece of the Father. The Son contains the ALL. The Son contains all of the characteristics of the originating consciousness in a contained and discrete form. The Son is what we now call a perfect fractal of the entirety of the Father. The Son is like the bucket dipped into the limitless sea of consciousness, and it contains exactly the same ocean water of consciousness that the Father contains.
There’s only one bucket that dips into that limitless sea, and that is the Son. The Son is the only emanation from the originating Father. The Aeons are facets that emerge from the Son, each different from one another. The Aeons are like individual rays of the sun. Together, they form the totality of the Son. The Aeons sit together in perfect harmony in a state known as the Fullness of God, also called the Pleroma.
Now, this aspect of Judaism and Christianity was cut out of the canonical texts of the Bible by the Emperor Constantine and Pope Clement during the Nicene Council’s packaging of Christianity for the Empire of Rome. The Pleroma of the Aeons was well known to the Jews during the time of Jesus, and it survives in the New Testament as various references to Aeons, but those Aeons have been interpreted through the Latin as ages, and this has caused a long-standing misinterpretation of Aeons as units of time, rather than units of consciousness. It’s the same word, Aeon—like Judgment Day is considered the purging of the Aeons. That is always translated as the chastening of the ages, or chastening unto the age, but it really means the corrections of the Aeons—the corrections that these units of consciousness are able to transmit to our egoic souls once we pass out of this confusion of life down here.
This is an extremely important misinterpretation of the Bible, and in David Bentley Hart’s recent translation of the New Testament, which is published by Yale University Press, he doesn’t translate the New Testament from these Latin translations as all of our other popular translations are. Whether it’s the King James, New King James, New International, New Standard, any of these other popular translations of the New Testament, they all really derive still from the Latin Vulgate, so they carry forward these mistakes having been translated into Latin and now translated into English.
What David Bentley Hart did was he went back to the original Greek that the New Testament was written in, and he translates from the Greek in what he called a pitilessly exact way. And although Hart generally continues to call Aeons Ages, at least throughout his New Testament Hart points out in the footnotes that this word Ages, or time everlasting, can be translated as until the Age to come, with a capital A, and that always means aeonian, or from the Aeons. So I choose to reinterpret those or to try on the interpretation in those instances of the Aeons as units of consciousness rather than the age to come.
It is a capitalized word, it’s a special word, so it’s not just time everlasting. So it points out to you whenever the word Aeon was translated, and then at the back of his Bible there’s a big section in the postscript about Aeons. So they were in the New Testament, they were just taken out by the Latin translation during the time of the Nicene Council.
Another common misunderstanding in the Bible is the Fullness of God. Now that Fullness of God is a vague reference in the Bible to the size or capacity of the Father, which is basically true, but it’s stripped of its actual meaning as the aggregation of the Aeons. The Fullness of God is where the Aeons live.
All the Aeons are sitting together as the Son of God, because they’re His variations, that is the Fullness of God, the Aeons. And the word pleroma is often kicked around in Gnostic circles. Pleroma is another word for fullness or everything that exists. It is the place of the elect and the spiritual ones that are referenced in the New Testament, the pre-existent church. That’s the pleroma.
Well, I think I’ll pick this up again next week, because we’ve taken up a lot of time already here, because I’ve been adding extra notes. This was supposed to be covered in one episode, but it rarely works out that way, does it? So next week we’re going to pick it up from here. Now this is out of my original 2019 article called Our Universal Hierarchy. I saved it out of the website that I just took down. So this is the way we’re bringing it forward into Gnostic Insights. We’ll pick it up right here next week.
Meanwhile, it’s my birthday on the 21st of September, and that’s why I’m running that free Kindle promotion for five days, from September 20th to September 24th. So everybody gets a present. I hope you go and check it out. Even though I won’t make any royalties because it’s been given away for free, it does count as hits or sales, so it will help raise the Gnostic Gospel in the eyes of Kindle, and it will help promote it. So that would be useful for you to go and download it.
I have some other good news. I discovered yesterday that the narration by Miguel Conner of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel has been completed. It’s been sitting there in my OneDrive folder, and I didn’t know that. He sent me two emails telling me that the narration was complete, and here’s the link, but those emails never did arrive. To me, I interpret that as an indication that this narration, and indeed this entire book, is very important work that the demiurge doesn’t want to get out. I’m going to listen to that narration today and tomorrow, and then I will upload it to Amazon to make it available to everyone. Then we’ll have all forms of the book completed.
Thank you very much. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward!