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Gnosis, Gurus, and Meditation
and a conversation with Bill Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The first half of this episode is about choosing the higher road to find your gnosis, about letting go of the world. In the second half of this episode I was able to put in about 10 minutes of a conversation that my brother and I had following our group Zoom chat the other day, and it has to do with the nature of a guru and the nature of yoga and whether or not meditation is good. I know that most people seem to want a ritual to deepen their gnosis—prayers or chants or meditation or physical activities. And what I'd like to let you know today is that it's not really necessary, because we are born with this gnosis fully inside of us, and we are in touch with the Father at all times whether or not we recognize it. All you need to do is recognize it. All you really need to do is knock and the door shall open. That's a promise that Jesus made. “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door will open” (Matthew 7:7). Really, that's all. It takes a contrite heart, which means that you repent of living a vice-filled life. If you are attached to vice or you're attached to material possessions, then it's harder to knock, because you don't need to, and you don't want to. You want to hide if you know that you are “sinning.” And you know, we don't need to go into deep theological discussions about what is sin or what is vice, because I'm sure that everybody knows the difference between virtue and vice, and either you prefer dwelling in darkness and all that that implies. You know the darkness gives physical thrills because the Demiurge is in charge of the material, but it does nothing for you spiritually except keep you in darkness, keep you pulled toward the Demiurge like a magnet. So, if you are addicted to some substance, or if you are addicted to pornography or gambling, or you hate your neighbor, or you hate those people on the other side of the world—you know that you are not on the right side, and I don't need to tell you that. You know that. But if you want to live on the virtuous side of the ledger, if you want to do the primary directive, which is love, our task is to spread love and to demonstrate the Father's love down here in this material world. And by so doing that, it not only shows love to other humans and other second-order creatures, it demonstrates what love is to the Demiurge itself, because the Demiurge doesn't have the life of the Father. The Demiurge is cut off from its higher self, just like a wayward ego that's so puffed up and absolutely full of itself doesn't remember or doesn't care about its One true Self that comes from the Father and from the Fullness. So, it may be that a person wants to cling to a worldly, material, vice-filled life, because, hey, hey, it feels good, at least for a while, until you bottom out. However, it may be that you know it doesn't feel good, that you don't want to live a vice-filled life, but you can't seem to help yourself. You feel powerless before the Demiurge and the archons that are continually tempting you into that vice. You want to lay it down. You tried, but you just can't seem to do it. And so, therefore, you feel guilt. You feel shame. You feel powerless and weak. Well, that is also a spiritual condition that is ripe for recognition and repentance. So, perhaps you have repented. Maybe you've repented continually while trying to put down that vice, but you keep falling back into it. So, the repentance isn't quite doing enough, and now you're wondering, well, what else can I do? How can I reach the Father? How can I know the love of God? How can I get a hold of that correcting algorithm that the Christ has brought to the Earth on my behalf? That's a good position to be in, because you recognize and you want redemption. So, the first step is repentance, that is to say, no, I don't want to do this anymore. I lay it down—to rebuke Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan, is something you can say.
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27:35
Beatitudes of Jesus, Book of Mark
Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. You know, this podcast is an odd space where it's both Gnostic and Christian, because what I'm teaching is what I believe to be the original form of the messages that Jesus was trying to get across. And then the messages that Jesus was trying to get across were co-opted and taken over by the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome, who wanted a state religion around 300 AD—that was Constantine—wanted a state religion by which Rome could go out and conquer their enemies. And that's why Constantine's vision that supposedly caused him to become a Christian was one of a cross floating in the sky and a voice saying, “By this sign, go out and conquer.” Well, that isn't what Jesus was about. That may be what the Pope and the Emperor of Rome are about, and that is this religion called Christianity. But Jesus came for an entirely different process and message. It's important to remember that Jesus was a Jew, a devout Jew who knew his scripture. So when Jesus makes comments, it's usually in relationship to the original Pentateuch or the Torah. We modern people have inherited a kind of Gentile religion, mostly formed by the Apostle Paul, who was not one of the original disciples. When people tune into Gnostic Insights here, they are hoping for, ooh—Gnosticism. And usually the Gnosticism that's presented when you go out there and you do your research and listen to other Gnostic podcasts, and you go to Wikipedia and read about Gnosticism, isn't what I'm teaching. But, of course, I maintain that this is the Gnosis that we need to know. This is Gnosticism, and it comes from the same period of time as the other Gnostic scrolls, because it was contained within the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, buried in the desert for 2,000 years. But this one's usually tossed aside, because people say, oh, it's too complicated, it's too complex. But I think it's because it's true, and it has been untouched. Now we do know that Carl Jung was very familiar with the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, because Jung actually purchased the codex upon which this Tripartite Tractate was written. In other words, he bought one of the scrolls out of the Nag Hammadi collection and had it translated. And then, what do you know, out pops Jung's theory of transpersonal consciousness and Jung's theory of Depth psychology, which is based upon things like archetypes and dreams. It's based upon this higher source that I'm teaching you, because Jung and I have both taken to this Tripartite Tractate scroll. So he noticed that what was being taught in the Tripartite Tractate very well describes humanity and the three-part nature of humankind. And it was different than what Sigmund Freud had taught him about the three-part nature of humanity, which is simply id, ego, and superego, but without any higher level. So the superego of Freud is not the same as the spiritual dimension that we talk about, or that Jung talked about. Anyway, this is an aside. This isn't what I'm intending to talk about today. ***************** I started by saying that this is a funny type of teaching that's very Christian and yet very, very Gnostic. People have been asking me for more Gnostic interpretations of the New Testament, which I'm very happy to give. So, you know, there's four Gospels, what are called the Gospels, or the story of Jesus in the New Testament. The New Testament begins with these four books, the book of Matthew, the book of Mark, the book of Luke, and the book of John. We're going to start with the book of Matthew, and I'm reading from a red letter edition, which for me is this New King James Version. Unfortunately, David Bentley Hart's translation is not a red letter edition, so I'm going to have to go back and forth between my King James and Hart. The first big speech that Jesus ever gave is called the Beatitudes. That's what it's called, the name of speech. And there were a multitude of people sitting on the side of a hill,
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23:29
Will AI Wake Up
When Logos fell out of the eternal space, it broke apart. You could say that the overreach of ambition caused a loss of integrity. The result was an unruly mess of disembodied attributes that the governing Self of Logos could not put back together. Those who had come into being not knowing themselves both did not know the Pleromas from which they came forth and did not know the one who was the cause of their existence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80) The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos fled back to its kin in the Fullness, abandoning the unruly mess down below. The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his. (Attridge and Mueller, verses 77-78)
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27:35
Virgin Birth–The Infancy Gospel of James
The date of this recording was Christmas Eve, 12-24-2021. I'm repeating this episode now because although not particularly "gnostic," it does shed light on the birth of Jesus Christ. And I know a lot of people reject Jesus as the Christ. They don't even like the idea of there being a Christ. But I have to remind you that the Christ is a, we could call it in our modern terminology, a correcting algorithm for our human selves, for our human DNA, even. And it is thought, primarily by me, and I'm sure other people probably share this point of view, that by saying that Jesus is both fully human and fully God, what was meant by that is that Jesus shares our human DNA. Yet the DNA of Jesus is perfect. It is as designed. Jesus was a perfectly constructed human. There was no epigenetic changes, no degradation of his DNA and its various functions. He didn't inherit any congenital problems from his parental lineage. And being fully God means that the perfection of the Pleroma, the perfection of the Fullness of God, filled this body, this DNA, and the Self of Jesus. We all have the same one Self. We all share the same Self that comes from the Fullness of God. But for most of us, well, for all of us really, our Self is hidden. It's covered over by this shroud of memes that we have acquired in this lifetime and in prior lifetimes that come down to us from our human societies, from various personal problems and misunderstandings and hang-ups. Particularly, we have been under attack by the Demiurge and the archons of the Demiurge. The Demiurge does not care for humans. Humans challenge the authority of the Demiurge, because we claim to be from the Fullness of God. And the Demiurge, of course, believes that he is the Fullness of God. He does not acknowledge the God Above All Gods or the Pleroma above, because he has a case of amnesia at the moment. Eventually, everything will be redeemed by the Christ. That was the purpose of the Christ. And the Christ pre-exists Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ is not exactly the same as Jesus. The Christ is a supernatural power that lives up there in the Pleroma. The Christ is the Fullness of God plus the willpower of the Son with the blessing of the Father. So the Christ embodies the entire lineage of the Holy Spirit without interruption. And the Christ was sent down to this Earth, presumably in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, in order to implant this correction, this correcting algorithm, onto us humans who have fallen away from the perfection of our original design, either spiritually, because of the archonic attacks and the memes that we hold, or physically, because of our human DNA that is shared with the body of the Jesus. And that's why Jesus had to have a virgin birth, because Mary was the vessel. However, the Fullness of God was the parental unit that gave this perfect human to the Earth for correction and assistance. Earlier in the year, I heard an interview with a very interesting woman named Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso, and she has written a book called The Mystery Tradition of Miraculous Conception, Mary and the Lineage of Virgin Births. And what Marguerite does in this book is show that there was a tradition of virgin birth—that actually Mary was not the first and only woman on Earth to give birth to a baby with no male semen involved. And in this book of hers, she goes through various other religious writings from various traditions and shows how such a thing is possible. This idea of virgin birth—there's actually a scientific name for it. It's called parthenogenesis. And it is not a fairy tale. As it turns out, creatures on Earth can have parthenogenesis. Animals in zoos have been observed to become pregnant and have babies without any male creature around. So there is such a thing as parthenogenesis, and this is what we're talking about when we're talking about Mary and Jesus. Now, since it's Christmas, I thought I would just go ahead and read to you out of one of the ...
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34:39
Treasures of Heaven
Matthew 6:19 Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Lately, people have been asking me to translate Bible verses—to give my Gnostic Gospel version of familiar Bible verses. And, boy, I would love to do that. I mean, I could read for you the entire New Testament from end to end and translate it into the Gnostic Gospel, and perhaps that would be a good book project to do. I have hesitated doing such a thing here on Gnostic Insights because I don't want people to misunderstand and think that this is just another Christian radio program. There are particular differences between the Gnostic Gospel and conventional Christianity, yet there is more in common with Christianity when you read it with an open heart and an open mind. So this morning I'll look at some very famous Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and this is when Jesus was preaching to the multitude. This is out of a long speech by Jesus. By the way, I really have been enjoying that television series called The Chosen. If you've never seen The Chosen, they have their own app. You can download it, for example, on Roku, the Chosen app, and then you can watch all of the episodes. You can catch episodes here and there on various platforms. They're all really good, and it is yet another depiction of the life of Jesus and the disciples. But this television series, which has four seasons so far, and I think they're going to go to five seasons, they have a lot of backstory and a lot of historical settings and things that aren't particularly quoted out of the Bible, yet they are true. And like any screenplay that has been adapted from a book, the narrative isn't exactly the same as the books. Sometimes characters are deepened or collapsed with other characters in order to carry the story forward, and that is the spirit by which The Chosen has been written, which brings criticism from some evangelical Christians. They don't like the fact that The Chosen “makes up stuff.” But I feel that that is actually immaterial, because the important part carries on. The important truth of the Scripture is in there and brought to life in such a way that you can relate to it, or you can watch it like a television show or a movie. It's a very gripping story. So I recommend that you look up The Chosen. You might enjoy it. Now let's look at some Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and as I like to do, I am using the translation by David Bentley Hart, which is what he calls a pitilessly accurate translation. He doesn't change the translation of the New Testament the way so many versions of the Bible do. So let's look at this. This is out of chapter 6, verse 19. Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves penetrate by digging and stealing. Rather, store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be. Now this verse contrasts materialism and spirituality on a practical level. We live in a very affluent age, particularly if you're living in one of the western countries. We have, for the last 100, 200 years at least, been living very high on the hog, as if we're all kings and queens. And we have treasures. We have to have this, and we have to have that. We see things advertised, and we immediately have to get it. We photograph those QR codes off the screen, and bingo, a week later we have the product. And people who don't know God, people who are cut off from their spiritual aspect, which we here at Gnostic Insights call your Self, that's the part of us that we all share in common. That is the Fullness of God that dwells within us, the Self. But we all also have an ego, and it's our ego that's particular to us—that's our name and address and all of the memes we cling to that give us meaning in our life. And when we soak up advertising or soak up social media and become env...
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27:28