Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to share with you the PowerPoint lecture that I gave yesterday at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University, and the topic is Christ and the Third Order of Powers. We began with a review using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart, and this is just a very… this is too difficult of a chart to describe to you.

You’ll have to see it, so I recommend that you go to GnosticInsights.com and find this episode, or the Gnostic Reformation. This is the current episode here on Substack, but I begin every class with a full review of what we have done before using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart that I have designed, and I was very heartened to see that yesterday the class was able to name all of the parts. I think that is extraordinary, and so good for you, class! Now after the chart, here we begin the lecture.

Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate,

The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance, and it is also called Synagogue of Salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought.

Now what does that mean? “The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability.” That is Logos after the Fall, and now he has returned back up to the Fullness of God, pulled up there by the prayers of the Fullnesses, his brothers.

He has returned to his stability. He’s sitting at the top of the pile again like he used to be before he fell. Now his shadow remains below, his shadow being the Demiurge and all of those broken imitations of his original Pleroma.

You know the Logos is a fractal of the entire Fullness of God formed by when the Fullnesses gave glory to God all together in unison, and what they produced out of that unity was the Logos, and he contains a fractal representation of every one of the Aeons within him. However, it is a fractal level down, and it was that Logos that fell, and so the shadows of the fractals of Logos are what remain behind and become our material universe.

Now back to this quote, “the thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him.”

Those who had come into being because of him is all of us second-order powers, not the shadows, because they are not really beings. They do not really exist, but we second-order powers are the fruit of Logos and the Fullness together praying for help to come into the deficiency to rescue his abandoned ego that we called the Demiurge. So this sentence is saying that the thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him, that’s us, “was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance.”

You see, we second-order powers, which is every living thing in the cosmos, we were brought forward in accord with the ordinance, which I believe to be something along the lines of the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to the other Fullnesses, and they held hands and prayed together, and we were brought forth as fruit. So that was the ordinance. And it says that Logos is called the Synagogue of Salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, and that dispersal was after the Fall when his Pleroma rolled out and became the material universe, which he abandoned down here.

And it says that “the dispersal was the multifarious thought, and he returned to the single thought.” So that multifarious thought, which means a whole lot of different thoughts, multifarious, that’s all of those independent little tiny egos that are the shadows of the ego of Logos that fell, the shadows of the Demiurge, the parts of the deficiency, those are the multifarious thoughts. They don’t come from the single good thought of the Father, but they come from an infinite number of egoic, selfish thoughts. It says that he healed himself from that dispersal, and that’s when he abandoned it down below and went back up to the Fullness, and he returned to the single thought.

The single thought is the good thought of the Father, the good thought of the Son. God is one giant good thought, the God Above All Gods. The true Self, with a capital S, that we all carry inside of all of our living parts, is the single thought of the Father. And we’re born with that. That’s all that we need to remember. That’s all that we forget. But when we’re in ego, we’re part of the multifarious thought. We’re thinking anything but the Father.

There is one of the second order powers for every one of the likenesses of the Fall. Whereas the likenesses are shadows of the Aeons, we second order powers are the true fractal fruit of Logos, and we bring life, consciousness, and the Holy Spirit of love into this fallen cosmos.

Because we second order representations are fitted into the boundary that forms our cosmic ecology. We find ourselves bound in a relationship to the material of the deficiency. Since we are true fractal representations of the pleroma of Logos, we are a perfect match for every likeness of the shadow pleroma of Logos. We have a one-to-one relationship with the matter that forms our earthly bodies. And the illustrations on the slide depict the second order powers as green cells in a petri dish. So it’s a round space full of green cells, and I use that to represent all of us living second order powers.

And then also on this slide is my picture of the shadows of the deficiency, and they’re little blue balls, very dark. It’s an almost black picture, very dark because they’re shadows. And it’s a circular space, the same size as the circular space of second order powers there on the left, the greens. They all have a boundary around them. That is the boundary that the Father threw up around the deficiency to keep it contained and to keep it in relationship to each other. Because when they fell, the shadows, the deficiency is not hierarchical. It’s everything for itself. It’s all egoic. And so in order for them to even have a semblance of working together, they have to be bound together in a boundary. So that’s what the boundary is.

And then the third picture on this slide is the second order powers and the shadows of the deficiency together, smushed into one ecology, which happens to us when we are born into this material world. We are bonded temporarily to the shadows of the deficiency. And so it’s kind of a yin-yang symbol. I’ve got the greens rising and the shadows falling in a yin-yang circle. And that represents the never-ending war between material and ethereal, between virtue and vice, between life and death, between knowledge and ignorance.

The stumbling, which happened to the Aeons of the Father of the Totalities who did not suffer, was brought to them as if it were their own in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Totalities so they may be instructed about the defect by the single one, from whom alone they all receive strength to eliminate the defects.

So the stumbling is the Fall of the Aeon logos. The Aeons of the Fullness were made aware of the situation in a careful, non-malicious, and immensely sweet way. Don’t you love those words? Which implies that there was no condemnation or wrath involved. You see, the God Above All Gods is not a wrathful God, the way Jehovah, for example, is in the Old Testament. The God Above All Gods does not torture people and send them to hell for eternity. The God Above All Gods is nothing but love. It’s all good. It’s all love.

And so the knowledge of the Fall was brought to the Fullnesses. The Fullnesses, the Totalities, were informed of the Fall in this non-malicious and immensely non-judgmental sweet way. The passage says “the Aeons were made aware of the deficiency by the single one,” which is the Son, “who also gave them the strength needed to eliminate the defects.”

All power comes from above. None of us can approach the Father. The Father is too great. The power is too great. We’d be fried in a second. So the Son is our intermediary. The Son is the only direct emanation from the Father, and he remains plugged into the Father. He’s swimming in that great sea. He is the bucket dipped into the sea of the Father. The Father is illimitable, but the Son is a monad, a singularity that encompasses all of the characteristics of the Father in one infinitely large space, but it’s still a contained space.

And then from out of the Son came the Totalities of the All. And so I’ve got that picture directly underneath the Son. And I always picture the Son as a circular cloud of fog emerging out of the great unknown of the Father. And then as soon as it emerged, the Son immediately differentiated into all of its variabilities, into all of its component pieces. They all acted and thought as one. They were like spokes on a singular wheel. They had no self-identity, but they were the variabilities of the Son. The Son wears the All like a cloak, and the Totalities of the All wear the Son as a cloak. So they’re co-existent, you see?

And then it was the Totalities of the All that became self-aware by giving glory to the Father and the Son. And once they became self-aware, they migrated into this hierarchical shape, this pyramid that we call the Fullness of God. And now at that point, they’re known as Aeons, because they each have a self-identity. They’ve got a position, a place, a duty, a name, and they’re stacked in this gigantic pyramidal shape. And then the Logos is the topper. He’s the crown on top.

The one who ran on high, [Logos], became for the one who was defective, an intercessor with the emanation of the Aeons which had come into being, [that’s us, the second order], in accord with the things which exist.

And the things which exist are the Totalities and the Aeons. The ethereal plane is considered all that exists. The Totalities of the All, the Aeons of the Fullness, the Father and the Son are the true things which exist.

The shadows of the deficiency do not really exist. And at the end of time, they’re just simply going to evaporate. When the Demiurge returns home to the Fullness, there will be no more shadows.

So “the one who ran on high became for the one who was defective, an intercessor.” You may wonder who exactly is “the one who was defective.” Well, this phrase can refer to both the Demiurge who fell and to us second order powers. We second order powers who have forgotten our true origin by engaging in the never-ending war with the deficiency have also become defective, like the Demiurge.

Likewise, the defective one also refers to the Fallen ego of Logos, abandoned down below, whom we call the Demiurge, the agent of the Fall. By this time, in the Gnostic cosmogony, Logos would be praying for the redemption of both his fallen ego and the second order powers, fruited from his pleroma, both struggling in this material world. Indeed, the redemption of each of the second order powers will prove to be a fractal version of the redemption of the Demiurge. As above, so below. As below, so above.

And now we’ve reached the point in the Gnostic cosmogony and ethereal history where the third order of powers is created. The third order of powers are the pleroma of the Christ that comes from the ethereal plane to redeem us, and along with us, the fallen thought of the Demiurge. There is a third order power for every one of us second order powers.

And on this slide, I have illustrated the concept.

The way I illustrate the Christ is a circular shape, again, like the Son, because the Son and the Christ, their names kind of get swapped there in Christianity so that the Son and the Christ are considered to be the same. Well, they’re very similar, but we see here that the Christ is a third order of power. The Christ is the same shape and size as the Son in my circular drawing, and it’s got that starburst of the Totalities of the All filling it and filling it with light. So it’s a lighted sphere as opposed to the Son that I illustrate as a gray fogginess. This is a lighted starburst that’s really quite beautiful.

And then right next to that, I’ve got the image of the second order powers, us and all living creatures as that green petri dish of cells. And then next to that, I’ve got the shadows of the deficiency. But now I have created a brand new illustration just for this PowerPoint slide. And it is taking the Christ starburst type of image, and I have overlaid it on top of the second order powers in a transparency kind of way. So you can see the Christ sitting on top of and infusing the second order powers with the third order of powers.

There’s a third order power for every one of the second order powers. It’s a one-to-one relationship. And it has to be, because the Christ redeems every second order power, redeems every part of us second order powers.

In the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I used to refer to the Christ as the correcting algorithm. That’s the secular way of speaking of the Christ. The Christ brings perfection and correction to our broken code and our broken DNA strands. It’s all perfect again, as it was originally designed.

When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement and with harmonious consent to aid the defective one. 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.

The All and the Hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. And in the Tripartite Tractate, you know, you have the originating Father, which is the God Above All Gods, but when the Son emerges as the Son, but then he differentiates into the Totalities and the Aeons of the Fullness, he is called the Father of the Aeons and the Father of the Totalities. So the Son is sometimes referred to as the Father and sometimes referred to as the Son and that can be confusing. So the All and the hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. The Aeons stepped up “joyously and willingly” with the thought of being helpful to the deficient ones by bringing awareness of the Father’s glory and love.

We know that the originating source of consciousness is the illimitable Father, the God Above All Gods. The originating Father is beyond comprehension, even for the Aeons. The only entity capable of grasping the illimitable God Above All Gods is the Son of the Father, who contains within himself all of the traits of the Father. This is the Son who has a countenance, a face, because the Father wants to be known to his emanations through the Son. This is how we know that when these passages speak of the Father, they are actually referring to the Son who has become a Father to his emanations, because the Aeons are able to behold the countenance of their Father.

By now we realize that when Aeons give glory together, they produce new emanations. This is how Aeons make new fruit. The last time this happened, all of the Aeons had emanated Logos as an image of their totality. Now they gathered together and all of them, including Logos, gave glory to the Pleroma of their Father with harmonious consent while concurrently asking the Father to help them bring aid to the defective one. The difference between this act of fruiting and the one that originally brought forth the Aeon named Logos was that Logos was fruited by the individual Fullnesses giving glory to the Father together. This time, the fruiting was the Fullnesses and the All giving glory alongside Logos while praying with specific intent for salvation to come to the deficiency.

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 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.

The Gnostic gospel calls this new fruit 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. The first order of powers is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, that hierarchy. We are the second order of powers. This third order of powers is fully equipped to bring remembrance and redemption to the second order powers living in this fallen world and to the Demiurge.

Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which was written previously, 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.

So you see, the third order powers bear the countenance of each and every one of us because we are the ones who are praying for help. And they also bear the countenance or the face of all of the Aeons that comprise the third order of powers. So we recognize that help is coming to us because it’s got our face on it. It’s a personal answer to prayer.

The emanation of the Christ brings all of the knowledge, power, and glory of the God Above All Gods through its Son and the Totalities into creation. The Christ is now in the process of bringing this gnosis to all second order powers. There is a third order power for each and every second order power, and a second order power for each and every shadow of the Fall.

All we need to do is allow the third order powers to take up residence within our individuated pleromas. In this manner, the gnosis and love of the Christ will displace the shadows and bring redemption to us and through us. This is the true mission of Christianity.

And on this slide I’ve got an illustration of the Son, the Totalities of the All, the hierarchy of the Fullness of the Aeons, the Christ, and then lastly that new image of the Christ overlaying upon the second order powers. And then the lecture moved into what does this have to do with Jesus the anointed, and we’ll cover that next week because we’re at the end of our time for today.

So what is all this talk of Christ, the Christ, which Christians don’t like Christ being called the Christ, you know. They believe that that differentiates us who believe in the Christ from those who believe in Christ, that we are worshipping a different God because we call it the Christ. I disagree with that. I think this is the nature of Christ. We’re simply describing it. And next week we’ll talk about Jesus the anointed and what Jesus has to do with the Christ.

God bless us all, and onward and upward.