by Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; all rights reserved

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. My goal here at this podcast is to share with you information from the Nag Hammadi, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate, concerning the gnosis of our existence. The reason that it’s important to discover this gnosis is because gnosis is your personal reassurance that you are loved and not alone.

I know I promised you in the last episode that I would reveal this week how the Gnostic Gospel can help you rise above the mire you are currently stuck in. It is now time to look at the cravings that have taken you over and how to rid yourself of them, whether those cravings are for sex, drugs, social media, or whatever. To do this, we need to look at the meme shroud that is stuck to your Ego and how to rid yourself of those negative memes. Naturally, we will begin by talking about the Fullness of God.

Our conscious spirit comes from the God Above All Gods, passed down through the Son and on through the Aeons and the Fullness of God. This consciousness is a continuously flowing stream. We are embedded within the First Consciousness of the Father. We are not separated from that consciousness. We are a part of this great Being that precedes our material universe. The Tripartite Tractate says that we are not cut off from the Father, but rather the Father extends itself outward in an unbroken flow throughout the entirety of creation. This consciousness is the background matrix of not only our universe, but even before our universe began.

We are fractals of that loving consciousness and so our lives truly resonate to the Fullness of God. All else is delusion and distraction. All else leads to feelings of loss and abandonment. All of the stories and events that happen to us in our lives are fractal versions of things that have happened before, over and over again, at different levels and at different times in history. If you think about it, there are only so many stories and there really aren’t that many different things that can happen to you in your life. Sure, the characters, places, and details may be unique, but the patterns are the same. Stories of love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, safety and danger, delusion and gnosis. These stories and events all boil down to various versions of the large archetypes.

Jung’s psychology talked about how we all share the same mythical-level stories and characters. He got those archetypes, as it turns out, from the original Gnostics. So the archetypes that Jung speaks of, which I learned as simply Jung’s theory of transpersonal psychology, are not Jung’s ideas. These are eternal concepts that were preserved for us by the Nag Hammadi codices and other ancient Gnostic texts.

We are the fruit, or emanation, of the Fullness of God, and we share consciousness with the Aeons of the Fullness. All lifeforms are plugged into the Fullness of God, and we all remember the Fullness subconsciously. Gnosis is the remembered thoughts of the Fullness. The Aeonic patterns come to us and not only inform our psyches, they also give physical form to living creatures. Lifeforms don’t arise from the mud; they don’t aggregate upward from the molecular level on up, the way evolution suggests it does. That is an error. That is a materialist, demiurgic worldview. Life comes from above, along with consciousness. Matter comes from the bottom up, and it’s dead. Matter is a product of the Fall. Matter doesn’t come from the Pleroma of God, but rather from the Pleroma of the Demiurge.

Our personalities and our basic spiritual composition is precisely patterned upon the Aeons of the Pleroma in the Fullness of God. We come pre-loaded with virtuous memes of the Fullness. But, once we are instantiated here on this material plane, we acquire memes from each other. Everything you learn, everything you experience, everything you hate, everything you love, colors your interpretation of the world around you. So, our life is a combination of the pure knowledge that comes from Above, and that’s gnosis, as well as these loves and hates and knowledge that we acquire down here below. And those are the memes.

Another aspect that colors our interpretation of the world is our own personal karma. Karma is your record of the consequences of your actions. Your karma may or may not allow you to hear what someone else is saying because, as a consequence of prior actions, you are either open or closed to what they have to say. Your karma and your meme bundles pretty much determine how much gnosis you’re able to tap into. In our earthly realm we have generated a lot of memes, and the Demiurge has generated vices to counteract every Aeonic virtue. Vices are always demiurgic and are designed to entrap you and lead you away from gnosis. Vices are always built upon lies. And the problem with human-generated memes is that some of them are true and some of them aren’t true. Some of them are lies and some of them are hurtful, whereas the information that comes down to us directly from the Fullness of God, the gnosis, is all true. It’s all helpful, it’s all loving, it’s all good.

So, rather than spending all of our time delving into our earthly generated meme-cloud which has a lot of garbage in it, it’s a good idea to focus upward and tap directly into the gnosis that you can trust.

We’re not all affected by the same memes. We each have our own unique collection of memes. Just like in your house, you have your own unique possessions and your own unique wardrobe of clothes. We each have our own collection of beliefs, and I call those your meme bundle.  Memes pass us by largely unnoticed, because we filter out memes that we don’t resonate with. We acquire most of our memes from the culture that surrounds us. We are also born with a particular meme bundle that gives our personalities continuity from one lifetime to the next.

We come into each life with a bundle of memes carried over from previous lifetimes.  Your karma attracts the memes from your prior lifetimes. When this Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book comes out, you will find a section on reincarnation in the appendix. You bring your memes with you into this lifetime via the magnetism of your personal karma. That’s why babies are different from one another. Babies do not come in as what is called tabula rasa—a blank slate. Babies come in with their own personalities and beliefs.

Once a unit of consciousness does acquire a meme, it’s part of the unique, vibratory bundle of that unit of consciousness. If you do not wish to continue holding that meme, then you have to actually detach it through either conscious will or disuse. You can’t keep using it and expect it to go away. Some memes are easy to detach because they don’t really fit in with your bundle of meme strings and chords. For example, you might acquire a set of memes from some friends that you go to school with, or you work with, but they aren’t really your closest friends and you don’t really embrace those values. And so, when you stop hanging around with them and you move away or you get a different group of friends or you go to another school or change jobs, you drop those memes just out of disuse; you forget about them because they weren’t really part of you. You then acquire new memes from the people you surround yourself with. This is why folks who quit drinking or taking drugs usually need to disassociate themselves from their old party crowd.

While some memes fall away of their own accord, other memes must be consciously detached and laid aside. Some memes are pernicious, and addictions are the behaviors associated with those pernicious memes. In the worldly course of events, unwanted memes must be detached through an effort of will, either through conscious disuse or by acquiring a competing, more desirable meme. Therapies such as emotional freedom technique (EFT) can help with that. EFT is a simple procedure that involves tapping on your body’s meridians while thinking about the memes you wish to dislodge. Many people find EFT effective, and you can learn to do it on your own. I’ll put a link to EFT in the transcript of this episode in case you are ready to try it. Within one’s spiritual tradition, memes may be surrendered to one’s higher power through prayer and meditation. Serenity is achieved as the memes are discarded.

At any point in time you can choose to lay down an unwanted meme. If you notice yourself carrying it around again, stop and lay it down again. You can use this as a visual metaphor. If you notice yourself invoking a meme out of habit, it’s very good that you notice. Stop and lay it down again. Walk away. You may need to lay down some neighboring memes as well, because sometimes these things come in sets; they come as bundles. So if you have a neighboring meme that is causing you to remember the bad meme, then you have to lay down those neighboring memes, too. This would include, for example, if you’re an alcoholic. It’s not a good idea to hang out bars if you have just gone straight and put down some heavy drugs. It’s not a good idea to hang out with those people again only because the partying meme bundles are invoked and you don’t want to re-invoke those meme bundles.

Some memes are very difficult to detach once they are acquired, because they have such an intense pattern that they cling tightly to your soul. Cigarettes used to have a glamorous attraction. They were always pictured in television programs and movies and the glamorous people smoked their cigarettes. They don’t do that so much anymore in the movies and the television, so they have less of a glamorous appeal. Emotionally evocative negative memes such as victimhood or jealousy are very difficult to detach because they have a synergistic coupling with thoughts and emotions.

For example, we know that post-traumatic stress has such a strong hold because a disturbing incident is married to the strong emotional reaction that it caused at the time. The memes surrounding the incident and your emotional reaction to it are woven into your personality structure, and they’re very difficult to get rid of. So in the case of PTSD, some sort of therapy is usually required to detach that meme from the person. If you don’t actively strive to detach that meme, it’s possible to be victimized by PTSD for the rest of your life, and that’s an extremely unpleasant situation to be in.

Therapies that may help detach negative memes include, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a short-term talking therapy with a therapist that helps you to talk about and relive that dramatic event and the memes attached to it that have affected your life. When you talk about the incident and write about it and discuss it with the therapist, you are reframing what those thoughts are that come to you. You are pulling the fangs out of the tiger. Cognitive processing involves dislodging the memes associated with the event in your mind, and associating it with new memes. If, for example, you’re blaming yourself for something that happened, then you learn that you need not have blamed yourself. And if you can take the blame away from the thing, then that loosens the hold of that meme. So, cognitive behavioral therapy generally involves understanding and accepting that you were not responsible for the incident and it wasn’t your fault, no matter what you did or didn’t do, and this takes away its power.

My brother and I believe that the best method of approaching these very negative memes that you need to jettison is through hypnotherapy. My brother, Doctor Bill Puett, is a hypnotherapist. Bill takes people into their stressful situations where they can re-write that history. They make the negative event have a different outcome, which replaces the memes that occurred at the time of the original incident with different memes that have a better outcome. These new memes are the ones you carry forward as your memories from then on. It’s highly effective.

Your meme bundle is the key to transformation. This is why, whenever I list the vices on the left and the virtues on the right, these things are pretty well-balanced. You can exchange any vice for a virtue for immediate relief. If you are a person, let’s say, who’s afraid of loss, you don’t think there’s enough love or material in this world to go around. This meme makes you needy and greedy. You want to hold on to every object and person that you have out of a sense of security. That is not a positive mental attitude. It’s best to lay down that fear, and the greediness and clinging that comes from it, and look over on the virtue side of the ledger to see what can you replace it with. If I think there’s not enough to go around and I’m going to be left out, then what can I say to myself to invoke a new meme to replace it? I might say, “God loves me. There’s plenty to go around. The Fullness provides for all of us. I am loved and I will be cared for.” Our will power is sufficient to drop the negative memes. We can do it ourselves, but therapy may help you identify which memes need dropping and may assist in the process.

In the New Testament, it is taught that when Jesus sent his disciples out into the world to preach, he told them not to take anything with them whatsoever. They weren’t to take a suit case; they weren’t to take an extra pair of sandals. They weren’t to take any money. They were to go out on faith that the Father would provide for them. They were to go from village to village with absolutely no possessions and trust that the universe would provide for their needs. This was more than simply a physical instruction. It was also part of the meme bundle Jesus passed over to his disciples as a demonstration of their faith. They were not to bring along their own extra bundles of things or thoughts. They simply went out with the power of God. This is an example of laying down your earthly memes.

We get along well with people that share the same memes that we do. And there is generally misunderstanding and even hostility amongst people who do not share the same memes. We are currently in a situation in our culture where we have been artificially pushed apart. Media and social media, under the control of the Demiurge, have completely pushed us apart, so there is very little overlap of memes. If you try to cross ideological boundaries and share with people who have little in common with your memes, then there is hostility, anger, and mistrust. But, of course, underneath all the memes, we are all the same, we are all One. We are all part of the continuous flow of love and coherence from the Originating Source of consciousness—the Father.

Right now people are holding on strongly to their memes. They have been taught revolutionary memes for a great reset and they don’t care what you think or how you feel about it. They are attempting to force their memes upon you. It’s a lot easier to go along with the meme bundle that they’re attempting to hand off, but you don’t have to do that. Look inside of yourself, center yourself, commune with the Fullness of God, look to the Father, and concentrate your attention on gnosis.

Only the Father’s love and gnosis can pull you out of the destructive meme patterns you have acquired. You cannot do this only through your own will power. You need to move your Ego off of the throne of your personality and allow your eternal Self to guide your thoughts and behavior. The first step to putting your true Self on the throne is to align yourself with the Father’s love. You need to set down the confusing and hurtful memes in order to let your Self and God’s love shine through. Remember, if it’s hurtful, then it’s not from Above. Let it go.

By the way, these detached memes don’t evaporate into nothingness. They continue to exist in the universal meme shroud we call the Akashic Record or the Transpersonal space. They will eventually evaporate at the end of time, because only that which exists from the beginning will continue into eternity. Since we are fractals of the Father’s Fullness, our consciousness is eternal.

Before I go, let me remind you of the virtues of the ALL and the vices of the Demiurge.

If you’re struggling with some memes or if you have some questions that you would like to ask me, I would very much appreciate hearing from you. You can leave a comment on my Gnostic Insights dot com website, using the Comments form on the Contact Us page. Go ahead and write to me, and I’ll write back.

God bless you. Onward and upward.