The Gnosis of Virtue

Gnosis means knowing, and to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. The gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate, out of the Nag Hammadi codices, but even more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above.

As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible, because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council around 360 A.D. under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope, and none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which scriptures are holy, and this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirit’s leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray, and there is a lot of information out there on the internet that can lead you astray.

For over 10 years now I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.  The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In A Simple Explanation there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along, because they help to illuminate this Gnostic Gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ.

We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings because, in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression, “As above, so below.” The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called roots.

The same is true with us humans and all other Second Order Powers; we share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform, each lives their own life, and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ. Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional.

Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father and the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if instead I turn inward, I am as near to God as the center of all of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering. When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man, I look at that shared zero point field that is at the center of our fractal units of consciousness.

Fractals are defined as fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which, at least approximately, is a reduced-size copy of the whole. That’s a property called self-similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. What this means is that fractal iterations can extend infinitely. The simplest way to think about it in my mind is with broccoli. And if you go to my Simple Explanation blog, December 11^th, 2018, there is an article called “A Simple Explanation of Fractals, the Broccoli Fractal Video Demonstration.” In that video, which is posted on my blog and YouTube channel, I demonstrate fractals using an ordinary head of broccoli.

Like a head of broccoli, a fractal is a larger thing that can be reduced repeatedly, and each of those reductions looks just like the piece you started out with, only smaller. And you can just keep splitting it off, smaller and smaller and smaller. Now, if this were a purely mathematical fractal rather than a physical one, you could go down or up through those fractal splits infinitely.

Looking at the tree again as a metaphor, we can see how the branches of trees repeat their fractal branching pattern over and over again as the branches or roots proceed further out from the originating tree trunk.

I am suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son, and that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self-aware and turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness sorted themselves into a hierarchy, giving themselves names, positions, places, powers, and duties, and we call this sorted Fullness the Hierarchy of the Fullness or the Pleroma of God. The Aeons are fractals of the Son of God, and the Son is a singular expression that completely encapsulates the Father.

The Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness. The Father is illimitable—without limits, not confined to a shape or a place. The Father is not walking around in robes with a long white beard. That is not the Father of the ALL. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One; if you know Me, you know my Father,” he is not referring to the personified God known as Yaweh or Jehovah that walked through the Old Testament. That fellow’s name in Gnosticism is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen Ego of the Aeon named Logos. It was this egoic part of Logos that overreached and fell, resulting in this material plane. It is the Demiurge who created the heavens and the earth; he is the chief Archon of the cosmos. But, he is most assuredly not the Father of the ALL, the Aeons, and the Christ.

In Simple Explanation terms, the enclosure of our material universe is a very large toroidal pattern at the outside edge of creation. I have identified that with the border that is spoken of in the Tripartite Tractate.  It is said that after Logos fell, he remembered the Aeons and the Father and his “better part” quickly returned back to the Fullness. The Father drew a boundary around what was left behind of the broken Logos down below, and that boundary encloses our material universe. We humans are a particular fractal emanation of the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos; we are Second Order Powers fruited down here to work within the material boundary. Yet we are patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma.

Because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of Aeonic life apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of “as above, so below.” So when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons such as the fall and redemption of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well.

Logos fell because he forgot his place and proper function in the Fullness. When Logos fled home to the ethereal Pleroma, Logos left behind darkness and shadows.  The deficiency he left behind arose from his Ego’s presumptuous thought and overreaching, because that’s what Logos was doing as he fell.  When Logos fell, he left the Fullness; he was no longer in perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. Logos went out there on his own with his own project, and that was the first example of Ego. And it was the Ego that caused the fall. And because of his presumptuous thought and his overreaching, now every one of the fractals that he gave rise to down below are the shadows and phantoms of the fall. They all overreach. They are all built on Ego. Therefore, the imitation is characterized by this presumptuous thought and overreaching, combined with the inverted traits of Logos.

Previously, on the Gnostic Insights podcast, we have discussed the values on the left or the material values of the imitation, and these are in direct opposition to the traits of the Fullness. They are the other side of a dialectic to the values of the Father, those values on the right, which are the spiritual emanations of the ethereal plane. Those are the dialectics of vice and virtue.

Here is what I call the ledger of vice and virtue:

We Second Order Powers bear the likeness of the First Order of Powers, which are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are also called “those of the remembrance,” because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the Hierarchy and their dream of Paradise. We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the Pleroma, whereas the phantoms of the deficiency are shadows of the fractals of the broken Pleroma of the singular Logos. They are smaller and of a lesser order. They are not fractals of the Aeons, they are imitations of fractals of the Aeons.

At this point in the story, we can begin to see human nature emerging because, well, this has been told as a creation story. It’s also the story of every human being. We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect Paradise, as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for Fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father, other than an expectation of feeling loved or that we should be loved, and we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way.

Those of the imitation defend and embrace the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. Those of the remembrance may or may not be religious folks, but they do all seek a higher consciousness. Religious folks call this higher consciousness “God” and the memory of the Fullness “Heaven.” Those of the remembrance who are not part of a religious body or the meme bundle of religion, are still spiritual because they do seek reunification with the One, while rejecting the man-made institutions of religion. Others, who hear the still small voice of God but can’t quite bring themselves to believe in “fairy tales,” are seekers that wind up exploring podcasts like this as they search for something to believe in. At some point during everyone’s life, each person decides for themselves whether to continue trusting their own presumptuous Ego or whether to heed the call from above.

At this point, I think I should explain a little better what a meme is as I use the term, so I’m going to read a couple of pages out of my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.

The importance of memes is that a huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we collect and hold onto. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the memes we hold dear, as well as the memes we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of and we are repelled by memes we disapprove of.

The Sanskrit word for these provocative memes is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in Yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the Ego that interfere with soul consciousness. The memes each of us cling to, both those that we like and those that we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now when we unthinkingly lock onto a meme or set of memes. It is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular bundle. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters.

We like people who share the same memes as we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with each other and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme cords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes, Democrats share liberal memes, Republicans share conservative memes, and Progressives share socialist memes. All subcultures share their subculture’s memes. Some types of memes are more important than other types, and it’s the important memes that matter the most. If we agree on the meaning of the word justice, we can probably overlook disagreement over the meme of whether the toilet paper should go over or under the roll.

We each carry our own bundle of memes. These are the things we believe in, both for good or ill and, depending on what we believe in, this limits our ability to think and arrive at gnosis. So, if your meme bundle contains many values on the left—materialistic values like live fast and die young and leave a beautiful corpse–that’s a meme bundle from the deficiency that encourages fast and reckless living and leads to misery. Contrast this with living a life that is on the Aeonic, virtuous side that embraces the memes of the Fullness of God. These virtues and these vices are each important spiritual memes. When we speak of the never-ending war within our personalities and against the imitations of the deficiency, these are wars embracing the values of the Fullness as opposed to the values of popular culture.

We cannot fake the meme bundles we hold because they affect our lives and every choice we make. Pretending may fool others but it does not fool the Father. Our hearts need to be in authentic alignment with the Father and the Fullness in order for the love and gnosis of the Father to flow through us, and that’s why true repentance is necessary. We need to embrace the values of virtue—the meme bundle that flows from the Fullness of God. Embracing the meme bundle of popular culture gets us into trouble and holds us away from instantiating our true Self. Fortunately, the Christ imbues us with more power than the deficiency can wield against us, and it gives us the ability to overcome the imitation’s memes.

So goes the never-ending war. Repentance involves pushing away the deficiency’s memes. Repentance means you no longer try to get away with whatever you can get away with. Repentance means I don’t want to do that anymore. Redemption means dwelling on the right side of the virtue and vice ledger and, again, this isn’t to take away our fun. It’s because joy is only found on the virtuous side of the ledger. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. Therefore, in order to be truly happy, joyful, we shed the Demiurgic memes. This turning gives the Spirit of the Christ permission to redeem us. Then we are able to embrace the Father and the Fullness.

The gnostic call for redemption goes like this: because the Second Order  Powers have gotten all gummed up chasing after the archons and each other in endless war, another fruit was required to bring peace to this universe. The Fullness and Logos prayed to the Father, individually and collectively, for a champion to end the war, and this champion is called the Christ. Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate puts it:

“The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the Hierarchy of the Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help, as well as the one who brought it to him.”

In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is the correcting algorithm for Second Order fractals that no longer ring true. The Christ replicates all of the qualities of the ALL, that is, the full attributes of the originating consciousness in their pure form that existed prior to the Fall, with all of the confounding memes stripped away. We recognize the Christ when we encounter it, because it “went forth in many forms” that look just like us, so that, when we pray for help, we recognize the One to whom we pray. When we accept the gift of the Christ, we invite a correction to our Ego’s deluded meme bundle, so that the best functioning of the universal unit of consciousness may be re-established within us. The Christ also provides a homing beacon to the Son via a rooted love connection that flows into us from the ethereal plane.

Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from above and that our Father is in Heaven and to Heaven we shall return. That’s all. Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of Ego and the meme shroud of the imitation that we cling to and are trapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines from within. That’s all.

You cannot be taught gnosis. You must discover it for yourself. What we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights is opening your mind so that you remember the gnosis that already lies within your One Self. You do not need to memorize this gnostic cosmology or the names of various characters we discuss here. You don’t need to punish yourself with sacrificial acts to achieve righteousness. You need only to remember and acknowledge the inherent, immortal consciousness that flows from the Father.

The ancient Chinese book called the Tao Te Ching describes it this way in verse 27:

The Sage is always on the side of virtue

            So everyone around him prospers

He is always on the side of truth

            So everything around him is fulfilled

The path of the Sage is called

            “The Path of Illumination”

He who gives himself to this path

            Is like a block of wood

            That gives itself to the chisel—

Cut by cut it is honed to perfection

Only a student who gives himself

            Can receive the master’s gift

If you think otherwise,

            Despite your knowledge, you have blundered

Giving and receiving are one

            This is called

            “The great wonder”

            “The essential mystery”

            “The very heart of all that is true”

                                                [Jonathan Star translation; 2001]

Here at the Gnostic Insights Podcast, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis, I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within myself. You have this gnosis within yourself, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already within your Self, along with a remembrance of who you are and where you come from. Embrace virtue.    Onward and upward. I’ll see you next time, God bless.

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