My Correspondence with an Educated Atheist

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’ve been having some good correspondence with a relatively recent listener who actually responded to my request for an illustrator of the children’s book. She had only just come across the podcast and had no knowledge of this Gnostic Gospel approach. She and I exchanged a series of correspondences during the month of November, and she’s been asking good questions, so I thought, why not share them with everybody? The conversations began by talking about the artistic concepts for the children’s book. I sent her the text of the book and my descriptions of the characters and the scenes. And she said,

I’m not surprised your last artist had trouble. It’s quite a sophisticated and tricky project. One of the things that immediately came to mind when I saw the sample image of the Demiurge was the fact that he was coated in mud.

Now I thought your allusion of mud up, spirit down was really clever, having a typically elegant and simple style. However, because this is a kid’s book, something you can give to a clever six to eight year old, I was wondering if the mud is the right way to go visually. For children, mud can carry the connotation of being dirty, unclean, and shameful.

Whilst I guess there is an element of shameful dirty to the mud up illusion, would you say that the primary takeaway for kids is that the copy that Logos created is imperfect, not as amazing as the original, rather than being shameful, dirty, sinful? But maybe the mud is a key takeaway from the gospel and you feel you can’t take liberties with the ancient text.

So first off, I want to mention, and I didn’t mention this in my reply to her, is that the mud up, spirit down metaphor is mine. It’s not out of the Tripartite Tractate. It is only my simple way of characterizing how the molecules bind to the spirit of life. Mud up, spirit down. That predates my reading of the Gnostic Gospels. That’s out of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I’ve taken that metaphor and applied it to the Tripartite Tractate.

She told me she had encountered Gnostic Insights during a 6-hour drive and that it was great to experience a dive into the world of Gnosticism.

I dimly remember encountering it via my medieval history A-levels. It was a joy to hear your elegant and nuanced take on what is, let’s face it, a rather involved topic. I found it extremely insightful.

I’m one of those people, you mentioned in an episode, who is not coming at it from a Christian background. Ever since the vicar told me I’d burn in hell when I was eight, I set my head against all things Christian and was a smug materialist for most of my life. Even as recently as 2019, I was a hardcore atheist along the lines of Sam Harris, et al.

However, the pandemic and the frightening response to it from governments ripped holes in what a Gnostic might call my meme cloud. Worryingly, even superbrains like Mr. Harris seem to have lost their reason during COVID. During those dark days of compulsory jabs and masking, et al., I sensed a malevolent presence at work in the world.

I can remember thinking that if this force I sensed, ruining small businesses, turning families against each other, ramping up fear, let alone the actual disease itself, was indeed something approaching genuine evil. But by rights there should be a parallel entity working for good out there. I’m yet to experience that directly, but who knows? At the time I considered the idea that there might be two gods, one good and one bad, and wondered if anyone had thought of that since the Manicheans.

So I’ve been on a spare-time quest dipping into Buddhism, Hermeticism, and to some extent Christianity. In terms of the latter, I’ve never been able to get past the typical issues of how to explain the evil in the world, and the whole thing about the mentally ill being damned, or tiny children being damned, pets not going to heaven, and many other issues which you’ve addressed. As you rightly point out, the Old Testament God seems like a curlish type, ordering parents to sacrifice their kids to prove their faith, and sending down plagues and floods, etc., etc.

From listening to your podcasts, Gnosticism seems to have a lot of answers. I also like the way you sidestepped the delicate Sophia issue. Woke Feminism may have overshot the mark, however. Eve, Sophia, Pandora, Medea, etc., have been unfairly treated. I look forward to learning more as I go through your amazing smorgasbord of recordings.

And I wrote back and said, I was also struck hard by the pandemic fear-mongering. It seems as though society has divided itself into freethinkers who believe in personal liberty, and those who prefer to shelter under the wing of oppressive government coercion. My orientation has always been toward personal liberty, and I think this helped me to see through the lies from the get-go.

Go ahead and buy A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel if you haven’t already, or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is extremely simple and non-theological. That way you will have all of the gnosis in your hands, and you can re-read parts of it that catch your attention. I’m so glad you stumbled across my podcast and had such a good long time to listen in.

Interesting that you do not have a Christian background. The same was the case with Ant Critchley, who interviewed me last week on his Stellify podcast. And, which, by the way, you can look up that interview on YouTube, everyone. Go to Stellify Podcast, Ant Critchley, because there’s more than one Stellify, and then type in Cyd Ropp, and you ought to be able to find my interview. My followers appear to be largely either fallen-away Catholics or Evangelicals, or non-religious people like you and Ant. Although you and Ant both had early church exposure that scared you away from the faith.

I like to explain things as simply as humanly possible, unlike scholastics who like to write in such a high-minded fashion that no one can understand them. It appears as though most of the young Turks who call themselves Gnostic are actually Hermeticists who reject the very idea of the Christ, or redemption. I think the other Gnostic podcasts have much larger followings than mine, precisely because they hold no position of redemption and salvation, whereas I’m pretty clear about it.

She wrote back and said, “Cool, I will read your book. But basically, in the kid’s version, does Logos fall and shatter and the broken part of him creates the Demiurge and our material realm, or is our dimension created separately?”

And I answer, Logos falls and breaks open. His ego is the Demiurge, and it does not remember or recognize his own higher Self, which is the Aeon Logos. Logos flees back to the Fullness and abandons his errant ego down below. Hence the god of this material universe doesn’t realize that he came from above and that he is only the ego of Logos.

It’s all fractal—as above, so below type of stuff. We are the same. We all have a higher Self patterned after the Aeons of the Fullness, and we also have our individual ego that relates to the world around us. Most people mistakenly believe they are their ego, but their ego is only a part of our consciousness. Our higher Self is a fractal of the Fullness of God, and we all share that higher Self. It is our ego that represents our individuality. The ego, the Demiurge, is all about me, me, me, totally narcissistic and consumed by power and control.

And then I explain in the next email, the way I explain ego in Gnostic terms is this, when the Aeons came to Self-realization and recognize their individualities, they sorted themselves in a hierarchy called the Fullness of God. Their identities were comprised of their ranks, stations, duties, location, and names. They weren’t assigned those things, they realized them themselves and self-sorted. Those individual identities are their egos, and they are what makes them each different from each other. Everyone has a Self that is identical to the Son, so that doesn’t distinguish one from another. It is the ego that describes everyone’s individual identities and duties.

We are fractals of the Aeons. We also have identical Selves and individual egos. Our egos are our unique personalities and talents. Our egos take care of us and our bodies and make sure our own needs are met. Our egos interact with our neighbors socially. Ego is not a bad thing, it is part of us. Ego only becomes fallen in people when they forget about their higher Self and its relation to the Fullness. It works the same for us humans as it did for the fallen ego of Logos, which operates on its own as the Demiurge. Our own human egos are called narcissistic when the ego runs the show outside of the Self and God.

A few days later, she replied, Hi Cyd, I’ve just been listening to your amazing May 5th podcast, The Nature of the Gnostic God, which was packed with enlightening ideas. In the episode, you say that the Father is called the Father, not Mother, because it has masculine impulse, expansive and not a receptive impulse.

But you later say that for this immutable first being, there is no direction, no up or down, no before or after, and presumably no in and out? Not wanting to nitpick too much here, and this is a genuine question, to be expansive, doesn’t one necessarily need to be able to go in a direction? I don’t quite have the words to express it, but isn’t this a contradiction, and is it t consistent philosophically for one to argue that the Father is called the Father because of a direction, and simultaneously assert that he is beyond all physical directions? As I have a feeling that you are painfully aware, many of us coming from the atheist camp are rather hung up on the whole Father-Son naming convention thing. You address this by arguing that it is about masculine expansiveness and female receptiveness. I found this concept intriguing, and after pondering for quite a bit, a couple of questions came up.

One, in the act of conception, the female is receptive, but during the act of giving birth, the female is expansive, the act of birth itself being an outward impulse. Thus, it may be argued that the female can be receptive during conception and expansive giving birth, whereas the Father can just be expansive without a receptive aspect. If the Mother has two aspects, but the Father has one, the Father is less than the Mother. Wouldn’t a complete female with two aspects point to a feminine first mover rather than a male one?

She goes on to ask, are the concepts of expansive and receptive in the same sense we are using them here intrinsically rooted in human anatomy? I know you are not saying that the flesh is evil, but is there a problem taking something human and imperfect sexual reproduction and using it as the basis for naming conventions? Sure, we have to use some names, but why not go with something non-gendered, like the source or the universal or something along those lines? Wouldn’t that be an easier message to communicate to modern humanity?

I reply, excellent question. Here are my thoughts. Yes, the Father could be called the Source. In my first theory of everything, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, this original force was called the metaverse. I also refer to it as the originating consciousness. In the Gnostic gospel, I call it the Father because of the religious precedent. I want the people who already know the Father to realize that this is what I am talking about. For them, metaverse or originating consciousness or the Source would carry too many New Age overtones and would cause them to reject the message too quickly.

Now, on to the directions: When the Source is sitting there, just sitting there in its unlimited potential, there is no in or out, up or down, etc., because the Source is an ocean without shores, depth, or surface. It simply is. It was not birthed. It did not come in from another place, so it does not have a mother. This is textual; take my word for it.

When the Source realized itself, it gave birth to a Son, the monad that expresses all of the Father but in a discrete package rather than the unlimitable space. So in that sense, I suppose we could call it the Mother, only that it goes against Western tradition to do so.

The source’s birth process is not like ours in that the Son remains attached to the Source. It is an extrusion. Let me add an afterthought. In my original answer to her, I said that the Son was an extrusion like a penis, but actually, I think it could actually be more properly thought of as a baby still attached by the umbilical cord. The point being, it’s an extrusion from the source and it remains attached. And as I was just taking a shower, I was looking at my belly button and I thought, well, you know, we’re all connected to our mother through this umbilicus until it is severed. And in the case of what we call the Son, it has not been severed. So she does have a point there. I don’t think I can argue that the Father is a father because it remains connected to the Son because it could be a mother remaining connected to the Son by the umbilicus. However, when Jesus referred to the Source, he called it the Father. And so I’m going along with that.

It is the Son who then goes on to produce all of the other beings of the celestial plane, they being fractals of the Son. So the Son is rightly a male character and therefore a Father to all of its fractal iterations. It is not a female character because it is the extrusion of the Source.

It then produces its fractals like a slime mold throwing off spores. Those first spores are called the Fullness of God because they altogether equal the completion of the Son. The Son wears the Fullness like a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son. They are coexistent. The Fullness of God, that is the Aeons of the Fullness, send down their spores into an otherwise lifeless universe. The spores are fractals of the Aeons sent down to bring consciousness, life and love into a barren landscape.

Mother Earth receives and nurtures the aeonic spores. All living creatures are second-order powers, children of the Aeons. We second-order powers are welded to the dead molecular universe at conception. The spark of life that occurs during conception is what animates the molecules to life from the egg and stem cells up through all living creatures. There’s a good long answer for you. I’m an old-school feminist, so I understand your reluctance to take on sexist language.

I’m straddling my teaching between two quite different target audiences, New Agers and atheists on the one hand and fallen-away Christians and Jews on the other. You may appreciate my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which is not based upon Gnostic scriptures but rather science and math concepts, but still winds up in a remarkably similar location.

And, as an aside, this was not in my correspondence, but it occurs to me to explain that even in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything which predates my reading of any of the Gnostic scriptures, the most basic direction or movement, it seems to me, is expansive versus contraction. Expansive is explosion outward; it’s Ananda-joy is how I think of it in the Yogic literature. It starts with a spark and it goes outward. That’s the direction. That’s the first direction—expansion.

Contraction is the opposite of expansion. So, in our universe, once it’s been expanded, we also have the opposing force, which is contraction. So, those are the two basic forces because I like to think, well, what can we think of as direction without having it based upon coordinates? What is the basic movement? And that, to me, must be expansion and then, after that, contraction. And that’s what sets up waveforms and quantum foam leaking in and out of existence and whatnot. So, expansion is counteracted by contraction and that carries through to us. It’s a fractal concept because when you are open and receptive, you are expansive. And when you are fearful and cringing, you are contracting. So, that’s the basic non-relativistic directions.

Now, my next letter to her was on Thanksgiving. It says, Happy Thanksgiving. In my opinion, you have wandered into the perfect theological backwater by finding Gnostic insights. There are many reasons for me to say this.

The Gnostic gospel that I’m sharing is uniquely centered around your relationship with the Source rather than my relationship with the Source. [and you notice I am now using Source instead of Father because that is her preferred language] That is because the nugget of truth here is your personal discovery and relationship with the Source, the Son, the Aeons of the Fullness. It’s an upward-to-them relationship and not outward-to-me or to some institution.

You notice it’s not even focused on you as it is focused upon the ethereal entities above. So many teachings today are ego-centered, always saying that you need to love yourself first and foremost. I don’t think that’s quite true. I think we need to love the God Above All Gods first, and then other humans and creatures as much or more than ourselves. The Father, the Source, is the fount of love. Without tapping into that Source, the love we offer ourselves and others is merely a narcissistic exercise in gratification.

Do acquire my books, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and the original A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The first two are religious in nature. The third is mathy-sciencey, but it reaches the same conclusions. They’re all available on Amazon for next to nothing, so don’t let cost hold you back. Alternately, all of The Simple Explanation is available for reading on the old blog that’s been there for over 15 years. The URL is asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com.

A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is a meta-philosophical approach you can apply to anything and everything. You may need to start there or you can just skip to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I only started writing about the Gnostic Gospel a few years ago and have only very recently applied the Simple Explanation to The Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This is unique theology, very explanatory and simple, very accessible. You can read all of those articles or listen to all of those podcasts at the Complete Episodes Library located at gnosticinsights.com. I’ve been pondering all of this for a lifetime, so it’s too large to share in an email.

That’s the only reason I recommend the books and blogs, so you can explore the topics that touch you personally. I wrote the books in such a way to make rational, linear sense of the far-flung material without all the noodling around on the blog. You can trust the books to be the simplest way to comprehend the Gnostic Gospel in a clear and methodical way.

She wrote to say, On a different note, I feel slightly uneasy about the fact that I appear to be shopping around for a bespoke theology that I can sign up to, one that has the right naming conventions and a God that isn’t spiteful and a rational explanation for both the good and the evil that is evident in the world.

I answer, Yes, this Gnostic gospel that I am presenting is the only theology I know of that meets your quest. It explains both good and evil without blaming us humans for everything. Evil is the absence of the good. Good, a.k.a. God. Evil is not a thing that exists from the beginning. In other words, evil did not emanate from the Source, but represents the inversions of the values of the Source. Vices are the inversions of the virtues. Their end is always suffering and death. Alignment with virtues of the Source brings peace.

She said, “This feels intuitively right.”

I said, Exactly. The Gnostic gospel asserts that all creatures come into this world fully loaded with gnosis, the knowledge of and relationship with the Source. That is precisely the source of your spiritual intuition. We forget it because of the never-ending war with the material cosmos and other forces at play. This gospel points the way to remembrance, and that’s all we need to know. We only need to remember that our origin is from the ethereal plane and we will return to the ethereal plane, not to be snuffed out into nothingness or to be swallowed up inside pre-existing consciousness with no self-identity, but to exist within the ethereal plane again, freed of material obfuscation and confusion. And I say that you’re fortunate to have discovered this path of the Gnostic gospel in the way that I teach it, because out there on the internet it’s 99% misguided theology that either accidentally or on purpose leads people astray. Most of the people who are seeking the Gnostic truth are being led down paths of confusion instead.

And I know that it may sound as if I’m full of myself, but I strive consciously to not work from ego, but from the one Self that comes from the Source. The simple truth of all the theology is this: We come from above and we all return to above. That’s really all you need to know. The rest of it is all superfluous. We come from the one source of truth, love, consciousness, life and virtue. That is our true nature and the only thing that can bring peace to us and to the world.

She said, ”However, it also feels suspiciously centered around me as if I’m the wearer and the theology is the garment.” To which I replied, it’s fascinating that you choose that metaphor because it’s a direct quote out of the Tripartite Tractate. “The Son wears the Totality like a garment and the Totality wears the Son like a garment.”  They are co-existent. Many steps down the path, we are part of that garment. You are sensing Gnosis. You are also expressing a fractal truth. This wearing the theology like a garment is indeed a fractal of how the Totality feels in relation to the Son.

We’re stopping here for this episode. Join us next week for the conclusion of this peek into my conversation with an educated atheist–agnostic?–on the path to gnosis.

I’m always happy to correspond with any of you. If you have any questions, ask away. Until then,

Onward and upward! And God bless us all!