Are People Inherently Evil?

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I finished getting my book ready for publication and it’s been uploaded to Amazon. I tried to upload it to Lulu, but there were problems with the process and I had to kick back to Amazon, I’m sorry to say. One of the listeners had requested that I go with the small independent publisher Lulu, and I did try, but there were problems. So it seems to be God’s will, we could say, that I publish on Amazon, getting the worldwide distribution. I’m expecting the proof copy about a week from today, and if it looks as good as it appears that it’s going to look, then I’ll be ready to release the book.

A couple of listeners have taken me up on the offer and pledge that if you were to donate $50 towards the effort of getting the book published and distributed, I would mail you personally, from my house to your house, a signed copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and I’d be happy to do that for any of you. Just send me a comment through the contact card or through my email address if you have it, and you can have a book from me to you, and I would very much appreciate that, and God bless the people that have volunteered, so thank you very much. Having a bit of a pledge drive here, see? So the things that I had thought were going to be taken care of by the professional publishing company that I decided not to go with, now I’m going to have to be taking care of all of that—the promotion and that sort of thing, social media, all of that. Perhaps one of you listeners is good at those sorts of things and would like to volunteer to help spread the word. That would be terrific. Otherwise, go ahead and leave an extra $20, $25 if you can. I’m going to put the donation form at the end of the transcript to this episode here at GnosticInsights.com.

I was listening to a radio preacher this morning, and he was talking, as they often do, about the inherent sin nature of man, or humanity as I would like to say, being a woman. He was saying that we are born into sin because of the original fall of Adam and Eve, and we have a sin nature. They’re always talking about the sin nature, and that that is why we need to turn to Christ and repent and ask for Christ to come into our hearts in order to redeem us because of our inherent sin nature. But you see, in Gnosticism, we don’t think of our psyche in exactly the same way. I wouldn’t say that we do have an inherent sin nature.

What I would say, focusing on the good, is that we have an inherent godly nature because, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate and in other Gnostic Gospels, and as it says in the New Testament of the Bible, we are filled with the Fullness of God. And I am taking that literally, that we actually are filled with the Fullness of God, that we have our complete Self, that’s that big S self that is at the core of our being. Our inherent nature, in other words, is a full reflection of the Son of God or the Fullness of God.

¹⁴ “For this reason I bow my knees to the Father ^[f]of our Lord Jesus Christ, ¹⁵ from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, ¹⁶ that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, ¹⁷ that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, ¹⁸ may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— ¹⁹ to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. “(Ephesians 3:14-19)

So, we do not have an inherent sin nature. We are children of the Aeons of God. We are children of the Fullness, and it’s actually an insult to the Fullness and to the Son of God to say that their children—for are we not the children of God? Are we not brothers and sisters of Jesus?—it’s a big insult to the Aeons and the angels and the Son of God that made us to say that we’re inherently evil. And it’s not because we fell. The Fall was instigated long before the humans came along. The Fall is the nature of our material universe, that’s all. It’s basically metaphorical language for moving from a different realm, a different home—from the ethereal non-material space of heaven, we might call it, or the Fullness of God. And the Fall was the accidental overreaching of that top Aeon, Logos, which has come down into our Christian tradition as the overreaching of the top angel, Lucifer. It’s the same story. It’s the same fractal. And it was that Fall that created our material space, leading to ignorance and forgetfulness of the Father and of all that came before. And all that did come before was the ethereal realm.

One of my regular listeners and readers wrote a very good inquiry to me this week. And she had an insight. She had a satori, I believe, because I think it’s in my book, and she’s read my book, and I’m pretty sure that I had already written it. But here it is, because sometimes you hear something or read it, and then months later, it comes back percolating down into you or up out of you, depending on which way you want to think about it. And that’s what your satoris are. Those are your little bits of enlightenment. It’s things that you already know, but now they’re remembered and you can articulate them. And it’s as if you just thought of it for the first time.

And here’s what it is. You know the way I picture the Fullness of God as that golden pyramid, right? Those stacking golden cannonballs. And each one of those cannonballs is an Aeon or a facet of the Fullness of God. The Fullness of God is infinite in ability and scope, because it is the Son of God. And the Son wears the Aeons like a cloak, and the Aeons wear the Son like a cloak—they are co-existent. The difference is that the Fullness of God, the Aeons, are broken out and articulated, whereas the Son is one perfectly integrated One. Oneness. That big giant stack of cannonballs is pretty much infinitely large. And it has every concept, every possible thing that will ever be, every relationship, every up, down, in, out, math, physics, chemistry, and every personality that will ever be. All of the animals, all of the forms, the prototypes, the archetypes are in the Fullness of God. So all of the animals, all of the species, pre-exist in the Fullness of God. It’s all there.

It’s what the Aeons sit and dream about. The Paradise that pre-exists before the Fall, the Paradise, which in our lexicon of thinking has basically come down to us as the Garden of Eden, but it even exists above. It’s Paradise, and it’s the Aeons who sit as One in the Fullness of God, like a big giant slime mold, not going anywhere, but dreaming and creating. They’re the great storytellers. They’re the inventors. They’re sitting there, and they’re dreaming of Paradise.

And Paradise is very much like where we live. Paradise is very much like Earth, except that it’s pre-Fall. And so there’s no death or destruction, no sadness, no ignorance. All the angels mingle and mix. All the Aeons mingle and mix. The lions lie down with the lambs. It’s very much like what we expect the third economy that will be coming after this one will be like, after this world passes away—the final economy. And after the redemption, that becomes our eternal home, the good place, right?

So each person is—and here’s the point I’m trying to get to—each of us humans, or each creature, each of any kind of creature, dog, cat, cow, rosebush, fish, bacteria, every single creature on the planet, everything, everything that’s alive, which I think of as soft and squishy, as opposed to the mineral elements, which are hard and rocky; all the soft, squishy guys that carry the life, the consciousness, the love of the Aeons above, down into this otherwise dead material world that was created from the Fall—we’re all unique. We’re all completely unique.

And when in the Bible it says the Father knew you before you were even conceived in the womb, the Father knew everything about you, that’s because we pre-exist in the Fullness of God. We are the children, like spores, we are the spores or children of the Fullness of God. And we are sent down from them into this material plane, carrying in our little chariots of life, carrying the consciousness of God, carrying the plans and blueprints, the memories, the knowledge, the true knowledge of the ethereal realm, and everything that was ever conceived up there.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)

Now, each of us is unique. And that is because, get this, this is pretty interesting. If you picture that golden pyramid, and think of all those Aeons as lighted golden balls, here’s how Aeons procreate. It says that they look upon each other with adoration and love, and together, they look upon the Father and worship Him with adoration and love together. And this is done in combinations of various Aeons. You know, the lower Aeons are the structures and blueprints of the material world, so to speak. It’s how chemistry works. It’s how physics works. Those are the lower Aeons, and we’re made up of those, aren’t we? But on top of that, we have the living parts, the soft, squishy parts that are brought down from conception onward. Those are what carry the memory and the consciousness of God, because the physical elemental material is not self-aware. The demiurge is aware. He controls them through strings of power, chemical bonds, physical valences and rules, laws.

The demiurge strictly controls the material creation, but we, we have that pesky free will. We are a different sort of being. The Self that comes in during conception, when the egg is fertilized, the Self that comes in is the parental aeonic units. We’ve got our earthly parents, we’ve got our genetic inheritance, but we also have aeonic parents. And that, my aeonic parents, I don’t know how many there are, there’s tons of them. They gave glory to each other, and then they gave glory together to the Father. But my particular combination, it’s like a stencil. It’s like a spray paint stencil that you hide part of the Fullness, and it’s only the gold balls that show through in the pattern of the stencil, that’s you. And I’m practically identical to you. I’m practically identical to all of my human neighbors. We just have certain, you know, I’ve got certain covered up aeons, but I’ve got other aeons exposed. So I’m musical. Maybe you’re not musical. Maybe I have an aeon of music, a muse, and you don’t have an aeon of music, but maybe you have an aeon of mathematics or language ability or dance that I don’t have. So we’re all made up of unique combinations of talents. And each talent is given to us by one of our aeonic parents. And so that is how you have an infinite number of combinations of aeons that keep spitting out these spores of life and consciousness that come down during conception and become we creatures. Does that make sense? Do you follow what I’m saying?

So are we inherently evil? Well, no. We are the children of the aeons. Now what makes us then, what does make us evil? Why is it then that the preachers think we’re evil? Well, that is because of the never-ending war. That is because of the ignorance, forgetfulness, and delusion that putting these ethereal infinite aeonic creatures that we are into these material forms down here during conception, we are bound to the material world at that point. And our bodies begin to grow and unfold using molecules. That’s the mud up level. But each one of those molecules that’s part of the living cells is also part of the top-down aeonic inheritance because every cell carries a fractal of the Fullness of God in it. And that’s how we build up.

Now, the “evil” comes about through ignorance. The Tripartite Tractate says that evil is ignorance. That’s what it is. What are we ignorant of? Well, we forgot who we are and where we came from. That’s what the essential ignorance is. We, like Logos, think we woke up out of nothingness and here we are. I’m a baby and I’m crying now.

Well, it’s not that at all. It’s I am a child of the Fullness of God and I’ve been stuffed into this material body and had to develop upward from a single cell on up in the womb until I was born. And I do, when I’m first born, have a memory of Paradise, have a memory of my aeonic parents. Up there things are a lot different. Down here things aren’t as easy. Things are very disappointing. Even learning to walk and falling down because you’re just a baby and you’re trying to stand up and walk like you used to. You can’t do that anymore. So every time you fall down you cry out of frustration. I think that’s why babies cry, because they sense the separation from God now. They know they’re no longer up in Paradise.

But the good news is this is temporary. This is not our home, as the hymn books all say. We’re just a-passing on through between one heavenly existence, our pre-life, through this material world of sorrow and woe, pain and disappointment, aging and death, and then on to the glorious final resting place, which is a post-material world.

So we are not meaning to be evil. Children are not born evil. We just forget. The Tripartite Tractate says we forget about the Father in the Fullness and the fact that we come from above. And that is the essential core sadness and disappointment of our lives.

And of course then that sadness turns around into ways to trying to stop being sad. And then that’s what turns into vices instead of virtues. And all of the trying to stuff down the emptiness of material existence with even more material things. Let’s buy this. Let’s eat that. But that can’t bring you happiness. That can’t bring fullness either. It is not ultimately fulfilling. Jesus talked about the springs of living water you can drink from and never thirst again.

“for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to living fountains of waters. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation 7:17)

That’s what we remember, and that’s what we’re going back to. And that’s the gnosis that we have to remember. That’s all. Because we don’t have to memorize or learn any sort of occult or esoteric rituals or practices. Because you have to think, if the Father wants us all to remember him, he wants us all to remember him. And that includes the squirrels and the bunny rabbits and the birds. They’re not going to be memorizing astrological charts or alchemy. It’s what do they know. Imagine–what does a blade of grass know? What does the dog know? What does the newborn baby know that you don’t know? You’ve got to be able to conceive of that mentally to realize that there’s nothing to learn. It’s only the knowledge that we are loved. The knowledge that we come from above. And until we remember that, then we will be prone to egoic behavior, and we will be prone to acting out of vice rather than virtue. But once we remember that we come from above, then we are not afraid of God anymore, because we run to God. We know that we are loved. And we know that we love God.

And I’m talking about the God Above All Gods, the Father in Heaven, not the Old Testament God that walks around on the Earth. That’s a different cat.

Well, okay, I think that’s all I need to go through. I was going to read some scripture, etc., etc. But I don’t think we need to do that. We’ll keep it fairly short today.

I hope you’ve gotten something out of this episode. And of course, I always treasure your correspondence because this entire talk today was based upon an email that one of the listeners sent. Just a kind of a little comment that she made about wondering if the Aeons are the archetypes and are we all made of different combinations of Aeons. Yes, yes, praise God. That’s it. So you write me your comments or questions, and I’d be very happy to talk about it on the air.

One more thing that has occurred to me recently, and I don’t know, maybe it’s a directive for me, from God. You know, I have a counseling degree as well. And my specialty in counseling was always dream interpretation. And I’m a very good interpreter of nighttime dreams. And that is what I used to mainly do for people as my counseling modality. Because our dream is our unit of consciousness speaking to us during the night when the ego barriers are lowered down, and you don’t have your ego putting this cage around what you can think or imagine. When you are asleep and you are dreaming, it’s your unconscious that rises up and is able to deliver messages to you. And I’m pretty good at picking out those messages.

So I’m thinking of somehow offering a service of dream interpretation to my followers and listeners. And I’m not sure how that would go, or how I would charge for that. If you have any ideas of how I should set that up, or if you’re interested, please drop me a line and let me know. And that will encourage me to go with the idea.

Okay, until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.