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Gnostic Insights

Gnostic Insights

By: Cyd Ropp Ph.D.
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Episodes
  • What Is Gnosis?

    What Is Gnosis?
    Aug 17 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Well, the final proof copy of the book is in the mail and on its way to me. I’ll have one more look at it and then I’ll put it up on Amazon for sale. I’d like to personally thank Hathaway, Gabriella, John, Barbara, and Jenny for their very generous support. If anybody else would like to contribute $50 towards this publication cost, actually it’s not the cost of publication as much as it is the cost that will go into promotion, into advertising, because we want this book to go big, don’t we? So thank you so much. If anybody else would still like to have a personally signed copy from me of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, contact me and send me that $50 and I’ll give you a signed copy of the book as well. Also, I’d like to personally thank some people that have written to me to say they can’t afford $50 but they really support the book and really do support this Gnostic Gospel effort that we’re putting out here, and I appreciate you every bit as much. Your prayers, considerations, and good wishes for me are every bit as valuable. So God bless you and thank you so much. And now on to this week’s episode. When I meet people and I start to talk to them about what I write about and what the podcast is about, it’s almost a hopeless task. And I bet you’ve discovered this as well when you try to explain Gnosticism to someone. First off, what does Gnostic mean? Gnostic means to know. It means knowledge, knowing. It’s the opposite of agnostic. Agnostic means I don’t know. An atheist is a person who says no, there’s no such thing as God. They’re an atheist. Theist means godly. A means not. Agnostic means I don’t know, maybe there is a God. Maybe there’s not a God. Whereas a believer is yes, I know there is a God and I believe in God. Now, how is it that we can believe in God? There’s different ways to believe in God. I think that most people that say they believe in God, believe in God theoretically, may even trust that God is looking out for them, but they don’t know God. They are not friends with God. They do not speak to and listen to God, because that would just be weird, right? You know, that’s the believing in something that’s not there, which is how atheists generally regard people who speak to God, that we are simply delusional, that we’re making it up, that it’s fairytale stuff. Gnosis means that you know God and that you believe it is possible to know God. And how can you know God? How do you know that you know God? That’s why Gnosticism is such a difficult and labyrinthian… labyrinthian means, you know, like in a maze. You have to work your way through the maze, picking up a little bit there and trying this way, and then trying that way, and then trying this way. Gnosticism is usually like stumbling around blindly in a maze. And this is why so many young Gnostics or people who seek gnosis dabble in this, and then they dabble in that, and they dabble in something else. They’re just picking up little bits along the way, but it doesn’t necessarily add up to anything. Or you may have a whole bunch of memes that you’ve collected along the way, all these various esoteric religious memes from various Gnostic websites or Gnostic books or Gnostic podcasts, but they’re all just a jumble of memes and you don’t know how to put them together. So the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is a framework upon which you can hang these various things you have learned. It’s no longer going to be just a big bag, a jumble of tidbits, but it is going to fit into a framework, a worldview, an ideological worldview, that is a meme bundle of Gnostic thought. This is not easy to convey to people. So this is why my Simple Explanation model is very useful. And this thing I call the Simple Explanation, this was a thought that came to me many years ago by now, 15 or 20 years ago, and I call it a Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That’s the name of my first blog, and it’s still posted, and I still post to it now and then. It’s a non-religious blog, it’s a mathy-sciencey kind of theory. However, it does talk about world religions, and it gives this framework that I have now applied to the Gnostic Gospel. And once you apply the Simple Explanation to this amorphous, labyrinthian thing that is called Gnosticism, now you have a framework upon which to view and to evaluate and to place all of those memes you have collected that are just bumping around in a big sack on your back at the moment. So when people ask me, well, what do you talk about? What do you teach? It’s very difficult standing out there on the lawn just chatting with someone or at the dog park about what I teach or what is Gnosticism. That’s why we’ve got this podcast and the books. My first book on Gnosticism, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is very short, and heavily illustrated. That’s when I came up with all of these diagrams that are ...
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    26 mins
  • Pascal’s Wager

    Pascal’s Wager
    Aug 24 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The big day has finally arrived! The book is ready. It’s in publication. It will be posted on Amazon for sale. The soonest they’ll get it up for me is on the 28th of August. That’s Wednesday, the 28th of August. You’ll be able to buy the paperback version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for only $24. That’s the least I’m allowed to sell it for by Amazon. So, meanwhile, as a bonus, I did format the book as an e-book, and it is already posted. So if you were to go to Amazon now, you would be able to buy the e-book of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for only $9. It’s available today for $9, or you can wait until Wednesday and get it for $24. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel (A Simple Gnostic Gospel) – Kindle edition by Ropp, Cyd , Ropp, Cyd, Puett, Bill. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. And later this week, I will also format the book as a glorious, very expensive hardback, and I will release the hardback for the least amount of money that Amazon makes me release it for. I don’t know what that will be just yet until it’s formatted. But the hardback will differ from the paperback in that the hardback will be on the top quality high-gloss paper with the top quality ink and a hardback binding. Probably twice as much as the paperback sells for. I don’t know how these things work. We’ll see. I’ve already ordered the copies that I will sign and mail to the people who have contributed the $50 donation that I appreciate so much. And those are in the mail to me already as author preview copies. So you’ll be able to get those very soon as well. This week, I’m going to talk about some philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, and their faith in the Father. Because so often people accuse us believers of being irrational, of being ignorant and foolish. And I want to tell you that that isn’t true. Indeed, you know, we follow the Father above. And remember, His emissary is Logos, which means logic and reason. So it is not unreasonable to believe in the eternal life and to believe in the Father and the ethereal plane. It’s based upon reason. The Father is love, but Logos is logic and reasonableness. And we need both in our lives—love and reason. Reason without love is a modern and postmodern condition. It privileges supposedly reasonable logical assumptions and actions, but without believing in the Father and without the love of God to guide your heart in truth and faith, caring and compassion. We have to meld reason with love. Otherwise, it very easily turns into dictatorships and totalitarian rule. This week, an essay posted on Noema magazine online by Nathan Gardels had a quote from Erwin Schrodinger. Erwin Schrodinger, the pioneering quantum physicist, postulated that “consciousness is a fundamental feature, the fabric of the universe, parceled out through the individuated experience of awareness.” Schrodinger was no lightweight when it comes to thinking. Now, to counterpose that, the opposite of that is materialism—is not believing that consciousness is the ground state of the universe. Gerald Edelman, a Nobel neurobiologist considered the most prominent materialist in the field, believed consciousness is “entirely a function of embodiment.” In other words, that consciousness is a byproduct of the gray portion of our brains. This is generally what neurobiologists think. That’s why they can treat animals with such cruelty and have such disregard to any living things, because they don’t believe they are conscious. They usually think consciousness arises from the more complex neurobiology of the human condition. But Schrodinger wrote in his essay that “the total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms, for consciousness is absolutely fundamental.” That was a quote from this NOEMA magazine that is posted online, and the name of the article is Who Knows What Consciousness Is? I’ve been feeling for some time that I should share with you Blaise Pascal and his idea that’s called Pascal’s Wager. Have you ever heard of Pascal’s Wager? Now, I have a true believer attitude towards the Father. However, I must admit that Pascal’s Wager has often come to mind during my lifetime over the course of 70 years. I often think of Pascal’s Wager, and so to me it’s pretty important to share it with you. I’ve hesitated sharing it with you because, well, it kind of seems like a fallback position rather than just going straight for believing in the Father and the gnosis that comes from the Father, because this is a like a fail-safe fallback. Pascal’s Wager basically says that you have nothing to lose by believing in God, and you have everything to gain. So let me explain some of this to you. By the way, I’m sometimes kind of shy about sharing the ...
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    25 mins
  • A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel Is Here

    A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel Is Here
    Aug 31 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The big day has come. The book is now available. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is now available on Amazon. Just type in that name, or type in my name, C-Y-D, R-O-P-P, and you’ll be taken to my various books that are on Amazon. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is available for only $9 as an e-book, or free on Kindle, if you have a Kindle subscription. It’s $24 as the paperback. And keep in mind, I price all of my books at the least expensive that the publisher will allow me to sell them for because I would much rather get the information out to you than for me to make money. Book cover of the ebook and paperback edition I’m not making a living off of this podcast or off of being an author, believe me. Wish I were, but eh, not the case. Can you imagine what would happen if A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel went viral? It’s mind-blowing and very difficult to imagine selling a million or even thousands of copies, but how about you pray along with me and we make it happen? Because I think of this as a reformation. I am driven, apparently by God, to reform conventional Christianity as we have come to know it. It is my belief that what happened around 300 AD by the Catholic Church and by the Emperor of Rome was actually a diversion from the original Gospel message. Back when I was a young believer, about 50 years ago, I believed in the Nicene Council and the Nicene Creed and that they were protecting us for our own good by taking bad bits out of the Bible. But one thing that I have learned in the past few years of government censorship and collusion between the powers that be, such as mainstream media and governments of the world, is that they really want to shape our beliefs. They really want to keep a lid on things that we are allowed to consider and believe, especially about God. This is why the communist nations are officially non-religious, because you cannot have people actually believing in the power of God, working in their lives and following God’s will in things, being at odds with a corrupt government, especially a totalitarian dictatorship, because they want to control what you think. They want to control the laws and what you think and do. And so those governments tend to put a real damper on religious freedom and freedom of speech. They would like to put a damper on freedom of thought, and they do that through propaganda and collusion between the media outlets and what the government wants you to believe. That’s my opinion. What’s your opinion? You can write back. The comments are open. In any event, I used to believe that the Nicene Council and the Emperor of Rome and the Pope were doing this for our good and for our benefit, and to keep true the words of the Bible and to protect and sanctify the words of Jesus. But now, after living in these recent times, I can see much better how these things work. You know, my PhD is in rhetoric, which is defined as the power of persuasive speech. So when I have been watching for the last several years the way that people are packaged and presented, the way that various candidates are packaged and presented to us, I can see the manipulation of the rhetoric. I see it clearly, you know, the same way that, like, a physician, if you walk in with a skin problem, a rash, and you walk in to a dermatologist, and they can look at you and say, oh, well, that’s an eczema, or oh, well, that’s psoriasis. They can see right off the bat what it is. You don’t know what it is because you’re not a doctor or dermatologist. I can see the rhetoric in the same way. This causes me to doubt the intentions and the sanctification of the original Nicene Council. We’re not Roman citizens anymore, folks. Philip K. Dick, of course, says that the empire never ended, and that we are still Roman empire citizens, but we just don’t realize it. That is one way of putting it. That’s just a way of describing it. So having opened up my thinking in that regard, I cracked open that Nicene Council egg, and what came out was the Nag Hammadi. I read through the Nag Hammadi, and I would not ever have done that in my older, more strictly constrained evangelical days. Now, I’m sure that many evangelicals think I have fallen away from the faith, and yet I haven’t. I believe in Christ. I believe in the Father. I believe in heaven. I believe we’re all going to heaven. That is Christian. What I don’t believe is that most everyone’s going to hell, because remember, very simply put, we are all fractals of the Father. The Bible says we are the children of God. We are fractals off of the one consciousness of the Father. Is the Father ever going to be diminished? No. Even the Bible says, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. The Father, the eternal consciousness, cannot be lessened, cannot be thrown away, cannot be thrown into everlasting torment in a lake of fire. God would not allow that of ...
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    19 mins
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