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Gnostic Insights

Gnostic Insights

By: Cyd Ropp Ph.D.
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Summary

 Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained Personal Development Personal Success Spirituality
Episodes
  • We Are the Children of the Aeons and other musings

    We Are the Children of the Aeons and other musings
    Jun 22 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is going to be a little different. First, I want to share with you an update about my upcoming book, and then I’m going to play for you a couple of snippets of recording that I did off of my iPhone while cleaning house, one of them, and the other was while taking a dog walk. So those would be like Gnostic musings or Gnostic Stream of Consciousness. Now, about my book. A very strange thing happened on the way to having my latest book published. You know, the one that I’ve been talking about for almost two years now, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. I had found a publisher, a Christian publisher, and I thought, oh, this will be great. They’ll get it into Christian bookstores and it will be somehow made more acceptable because of that association with a Christian publishing house. However, it has not gone well. We’re 14 months into that process and I fired the publisher two weeks ago. We struggled through the editing phase, transcribing my ready-to-print book. So then I had to painstakingly, it took me months, go back through their editing and restore it to the way I wanted it to read and sound. So after we got through the whole editing, then it moved into actually printing proof copies of the book. And I have received and rejected three sets of proof copies of this book.I explained to them that, no, it’s all too light. So then they went back, reprinted another proof copy. And this time it was like looking at the pages without the light turned on and it was all very dark. And I said, well, that’s not going to work. That’s all wrong. And then they gave me a third version of the printout that looked like someone had spilled ink on the pages and you couldn’t even make out what the images were. So we went back and forth about it, whose fault it was, this and that, and try this and try that. And now 14 months into this process of having A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate printed by this publisher, I pulled the plug. I fired them. And now I am in the process of publishing the book myself, which apparently I should have done in the first place or could have done in the first place. You know, God’s will works in this somehow. What is the stumbling block here? Is it the Demiurge throwing roadblocks in the way of getting this extremely important book out and published? I imagine that the Christian publishing house thinks it’s me and this God Above All Gods that’s throwing the stumbling blocks in the way because this is a heretical work and it shouldn’t get published anyway. You could really go either way on how to interpret this. So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been laying out the book again from scratch. I’m almost two years ago now in the process, if I had published this book myself. So I’m getting it ready to publish myself for one reason, in order to prove that the images, there’s nothing wrong with them and they’ll print just fine, thank you very much. So that’s what my next step is. But I can’t just reformat all of the images because I can’t take their manuscript that they edited and laid out in case there’s legal complications that I don’t know about. So I’m starting from scratch again on the manuscript of this book and relaying it out. I’m about a third of the way through reformatting the book in order to upload it to Amazon and publish it myself. And we’ll see how the colors come out. We’ll see how the book looks when I do it. But I wanted to explain to you why this book I keep saying, oh, this is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, why it hasn’t come out now. It’s been 14 months in someone else’s hands and I just should have done it myself, I guess. Although there’s no shoulds. Everything works according to God’s plan. I know one thing—I’m a third of the way through the book now, formatting it, reading every page very carefully as I go through again. And I want to tell you, this is a beautiful book. You really are going to want to buy and read this book that I’m going to publish with nice bright pictures. So that’s where we are. And this cuts into our podcast time. So what I’m playing for you this week is a couple of recordings I have made just as I’m doing other things. They’re not me sitting down at my nice studio setup here. They are me doing housekeeping and speaking out loud while I do it. And then also me taking a walk with the dog in public. So it’s a different kind of very human episode. And let me know what you think. Because these are the way most of my ideas come to me in the first place. It is during these dog walks and housekeeping. So without any further ado, here’s this week’s episode. So I listen to a Christian radio station called The Dove. And it’s interesting how many hymns, particularly the newer praise songs, a lot of old hymns are actually very Gnostic,...
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    18 mins
  • I am not Me–Your Self (2024 edition)

    I am not Me–Your Self (2024 edition)
    Jun 29 2024
    This week’s episode was first broadcast in May of 2021 So far, here at Gnostic Insights, we have discussed the basic cosmology of Gnosticism as explained by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices, and those are outlined in the first eight episodes of this Gnostic Insights podcast. I recommend that you listen to those first eight episodes, and you can find them on the GnosticInsights.com website, under the tab, The Gnostic Gospel Primer. We’ve also begun to discuss the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was my previous format, you might say, for understanding our world. You see, we all build these models in our minds of how things work, and this is there, and that’s there, and this is who I am, and that’s who you are, and this is why things happen, and it’s all so confusing. So over the many years, I have developed a philosophy called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can find on my blog of the same name, and it is not specifically what you would call Gnostic. However, it is Gnosis in the sense of knowledge, and I am always happy to share that. I have also incorporated a few of the basic memes from the Simple Explanation into my Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and that is why sometimes we hear words in my podcasts that you don’t find written in the Nag Hammadi, words like memes, and words like fractals, and units of consciousness. And so it’s helpful to listen to these podcasts basically in the order that they have been recorded so that you can understand the memes I am using, and this will assist in your own remembering of the Gnosis that is within you. Today’s episode of Gnostic Insights is about who we are. Who am I? is the question we always ask ourselves. Am I my ego? Am I my Self? Am I God Consciousness? Who am I? My ego is not really me, even though that’s who I usually think I am. We think of the mind and ego as ourselves, but this is the delusion. Yes, the me package reflects our personalities, but I am much more than the meme bundles and karma of this personality. Nor am I my mind. My mind is like a tuning device that scans for and locks onto my meme bundle. The ego feeds on the memes tuned in by my mind. My mind is directed toward its preferred memes by my karmic record. Ego is not a conscious entity. Ego is only a construction. Ego is like a garment that we wear. It’s a garment that is cast over ourselves. It is like a vessel that contains or a shadow that outlines my Self’s unit of consciousness. Underneath this garment of me resides a perfect fractal of the originating units of consciousness, and that is known as my Self, Self with a capital S. I am a unit of consciousness that is identical to the universal unit of consciousness, which in Gnosticism we would call the Father, the Son, the Fulness. These are the archetypal patterns held by the mind of God, so to speak. And I hold one of these fractals of that perfect originating consciousness within myself. So in terms of the model that I’ve constructed in the first eight episodes of the Gnostic Insights podcast, the Fullness of God in the illustrations that I’ve drawn looks like a pyramid of stacked golden cannonballs. It just looks that way, because it’s a hierarchy, and a hierarchy means that the higher the fewer. A hierarchy looks like a pyramid. There are more objects at the bottom, and there are fewer and fewer as you climb up toward the top. And at the very tip top, just above this hierarchy of the Fullness, is the Son of God, or the Son of the Father. And the Son is a perfect fractal of the Father. So if I think of my own Self, I have one of these golden pyramids within my mental construct, and that is myself. And it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So within myself, I have access to the entire Fullness of God, or you could say, I have access to all of the Aeons of the hierarchy. In the Simple Explanation model, instead of this being a golden pyramid, the Self-unit of consciousness is described as looking like a donut, a torus. And I’ve been trying not to bring the torus into the Gnostic Insights. However, it is such a good model that it’s difficult not to bring it in. So we can also think of the Self as this energetic bubble that’s shaped like a donut that has a very, very tiny center, and it’s kind of wrapped all around me, and there’s a little donut associated with every unit of consciousness in my body, from the particles on up. When you’re looking at the illustrations, it makes a lot more sense. So I would also encourage you to visit a Simple Explanation blog and read about the toruses, or look at how it is that we might consider this donut shape to be a representation of the shape of our unit of consciousness. My body is a veritable galaxy of units of consciousness working to instantiate me. The simpler the unit of consciousness, the more of them there are. So while there is only one of me, my body is comprised of 11 organ systems ...
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    25 mins
  • Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding

    Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding
    Jul 6 2024
    Father, Son, ALL 2024 edition Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share, well, what the title of this podcast is—Gnostic Insights—with you. Hey, I have some exciting news for you. I’m nearing completion of reformatting The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate for publication. I anticipate uploading it in the next few days, and then I’ll need to examine the proof copy before releasing it for distribution. The Gnostic Reformation could really use your help in the form of contributions for the cause, for advertising and promotion. Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the audiobook, and that will also be available by the end of summer, and I need funds for paying for his narration as well. So now is the time to contribute what you can to this effort. If you need a bribe, I’d be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book in exchange for your generous contribution of at least $50 to cover the cost. If that’s the case, please contact me privately with your home address for mailing. You can use the contact form at GnosticInsights.com and let me know. However, if you can’t afford the $50, that’s fine—any contribution would help. I appreciate whatever you can contribute. Thank you so much. Onward and upward! It’s summertime, and I’m distracted with working on the new book and with all of the events surrounding summer activities, so I’m going to rerun one of the foundational episodes from 2021, and this is about the nature of the Father, the Son, and then the Fullness. Enjoy! The Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the great purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that package, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the Bible out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books called the Nag Hammadi, which were buried in the desert to keep them from the purge, and then they were rediscovered and dug up in 1945, so they have been kept away from almost 2,000 years of formal study and formal theology. What you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts. So what I have done is study one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. I like to begin with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then what happens in our lives and why are we here. And then the final roll-up is the very, very end of time as predicted by the scriptures. So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. And so if you think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history—it is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind, something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the consciousness of the Father, and we only say the Father—there’s no gender, obviously. The Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. Obviously there’s no gender, it’s a singular consciousness, okay? So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am translating for you, it is referred to as the Father. And this Father, its basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there. Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son, S-O-N. So now we have the Father and a Son. So in the silence of the ...
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    21 mins
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