Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week’s episode was a link to an interview I had just given on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. That interview on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio was called “Gnostic Psychology and Preparing for Death,” and that was posted on January 29, 2025.
As we so often do, my brother and I chatted after the interview was posted and after he had had a chance to watch it, and we discussed some of the finer points of the Gnosis shared there in that episode. I gave Bill an important piece of Gnosis during that conversation, and he gave me an important piece of Gnosis during that conversation, and I thought I would share those with you today. This is part of our ongoing process of mining our Gnosis.
I’ll share with you what Billy’s problem was with the interview on Aeon Byte. He doesn’t particularly care for the Bardo Thodol (or The Tibetan Book of the Dead) as being particularly Gnostic. In his kind way, he said I did a good job of translating it into Gnostic speak, but it really isn’t Gnostic.
So here’s what we know. In the interview and in my previous writing about it— “Overcoming Death” in the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book—I’ve talked about the process of coming to realization that is laid out in the Book of the Dead and how each level, each Bardo, becomes more and more horrific as people resist going onward and upward, and they’d rather go back and down. And it just keeps getting horrible until, according to the Bardo Thodol, they run around looking for a new body to reincarnate into in order to escape the Bardos. So the way the after death experience is described, Billy wanted me to share with you that there is no such thing as the unhelpful deities, the fellows that are running around trying to chop up the resistant soul into little tiny pieces. That is not a real thing. Archons would not be able to follow us into the in-between place after our physical body passes away, because they don’t come from above. They are stuck with the Demiurge down here in the material sphere. What is more likely is that these wrathful deities of the Bardo Thodol are actually memes. They’re meme bundles that are generated and projected by the deceased person’s own conscience. And if it’s this negative type of hellacious experience, it’s from the deceased person’s guilt-ridden conscience.
As I did mention in the interview, these wrathful deities are not punishments from God, because God does not punish us after we die. We turn punishment upon ourselves in the process of our life review. We feel bad. We feel guilty. We feel remorseful about the way we treated others, and we wish that it wouldn’t have happened. And we come face to face with the negative things we did during our life in the afterlife place. In essence, the more self-centered and mean of a life that a person lives here on earth, it carries with them in the form of their memes into the afterlife as their karma, and they need to work it out when they’ve died. If it’s really overwhelmingly terrible, because you can’t hide, you can’t lie to God, the chastening fire of the Aeons is meant to cleanse us and purify us so that we can go onward and upward. And what is being cleansed and purified are those negative memes that caused us to be such a bad-natured person when we were alive on earth. If one allows that purging to take place during that 360-degree life review where we see and experience the pain we caused others, we reflect it back upon ourselves.
Now, the reason why in the Bardo Thodol you have wrathful deities chasing after people with swords is because those are their meme bundles. Particularly, those memes are going to be stuck in their heads if you’ve got someone reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead in your ear for a week or two, several times every day after you pass away. If you are stuck in one of these Bardos and you’re not able to go onward and upward, or willing to go onward and upward, and you keep looking down and back, these memes that are being murmured into your ear concerning wrathful deities hacking you to death are going to form the vision you’re having after you die.
We Westerners who do not have the Bardo Thodol read to us on our deathbed are not likely to have those same sorts of visions. If you watch the near-death experience videos on YouTube, the overwhelming majority of them are positive. They’re onward and upward types of visions with angelic-like creatures. Very few, I think I’ve only watched one, are hellacious, bad and negative and terrible, and those are from the memes that that person brought in with them; that’s what they can’t let go of. They can’t let go of that kind of, oh, I was a bad person, I’m going to be condemned to hell forever, type of meme bundle. But you see, it’s our own subconscious, it’s our own guilt that holds us in that position. It’s not God’s wrath. It’s not the aeonic wrath. No one hates us up above. Up above, it’s love.
So then I asked my brother, as we were discussing these things, what in particular are the entities we encounter after we pass away? Who are these entities? And once again, I’m referring to the YouTube videos of near-death experiences where they’re greeted by creatures of light and beautiful butterflies that exude love. What are those? And also, many people, as we know just from common knowledge, when they’ve crossed over to the other side, are greeted by relatives who crossed over before them, right? They’re greeted by loved ones—mom and dad, anybody they loved might be there to greet them on the other side. Well, who are those? What are those? Are those just memes? Are those just projections? So we talked that over for a while, and here’s what we have come up with. Tell me what you think of this.
First off, the loved ones that greet us on the other side. Billy believes those are indeed the loved ones greeting us from the other side. They are not projections out of our own subconscious. They’re not memes. And he feels very confident about that because, as you know, my brother is a hypnotherapist who regularly accompanies his clients to that place in between lives in order for them to talk with a deceased loved one, perhaps a child who passed away or a parent who was gone, and you wish that you could have said something to them. It has been his experience and the experience of his clients that those are indeed those people talking to them. They feel very tangible and very real. And I said to Bill, well, how can they just be standing around waiting for you on the other side? Don’t they have other things to do in heaven? Aren’t they already gone or perhaps they’ve reincarnated and they’re back here on Earth?
There’s a very simple Gnostic answer for that. It’s that time and space, as we know them, only exist in this material cosmos of ours. Time is the distance between two points in our material space. In the ethereal plane, it’s no time. All time is one. Time has a very different characteristic up there. So to us, it may seem as though a lifetime has passed since we saw that loved one pass away. And now here they are because we just passed away. But in the way that it works on the other side, no time has passed because there isn’t any time there. So they pass away and boom, here they are to meet us. It’s more as if time is sequential rather than measurable. That’s why when I talk about the cosmogony of the rollout of consciousness, first the Father, then the Son, then the Totalities of the ALL, then the Aeons become self-aware and arrange themselves into the Hierarchy of the Fullness—there’s no time that has passed during that rollout. They’re practically instantaneous. It’s like no sooner had that happened than this happens. So it was no sooner had the Son been formed than he became a Father as his variabilities, the Totalities, branched out from amongst him. And then, next thing you know, those Totalities have sorted themselves and become self-aware as the Aeons. Well, that’s a sequence of events, but it’s not like five minutes later or a hundred years later. So time doesn’t really have any meaning for us in the afterlife.
On the ethereal plane, there is no time because the ethereal plane is in fact the entirety of the Father. And what it says of the Father, or the Source, as people like to call it nowadays, as the Tripartite Tractate says in verse 52, “He is without beginning and without end.” You see? There’s no time. There’s no beginning. There’s no end.
For not only is he without end, being unborn makes him immortal as well, but he is also unchangeable in his eternal being, in that which he is, in that which makes him immutable, and that which makes him great. He does not move himself away from what he is, nor can anyone else force him against his will to cease being what he is, for no one has made him what he is.
So there’s a point to the immutability of the Father: that there is no time.
After the Fall, what was created down here in the material cosmos is referred to as an economy in the Tripartite Tractate. So we are living in the material economy, and things are different here. Here we do have time and space. Verse 102 says, “He placed the lights that constitute the starting point of the structure over the organization of the things below.”
So our economy has a starting point. It is not eternal. We’re a bubble inside of eternity. But since we come with the remembrance of the Father in the Fullness as well as eternity, we are those of the remembrance. It says, verse 117,
Because the seed of the promise about Jesus Christ had been deposited, whose revelation and unification we have ministered to, this promise now enabled instruction and a return to that which had been from the beginning, that of which they possessed a drop inciting them to return to it, which is what is called redemption.
So redemption is an indication that we are moving out of the realm of time and space and back into the realm of eternity. It says in verse 119, “The road to eternal rest leads from humility to salvation.” So that’s the promise: eternal rest.
This applies to humans as well as to angels, it says. And so that is how it is that all these various people can be in the same place at the same “time” once you pass over to the other side, because that’s where they are. They are there.
Now, who are these beautiful, loving, angelic creatures that people encounter in their near-death experiences? I’m going to link it in to something else that I talked about on this Aeon Byte interview. Do you remember that I said, regarding the Third Order of Powers that come along with the Christ, that there is a Third Order Power for every single Second Order Power, and that it fits over us like a glove? We are co-existent that way. That is how it is when we recognize the Christ we can be fully redeemed because that part of Christ looks like us—there’s a part of Christ that looks like Cyd—that Cyd part of Christ, those Third Order Powers that make up Cyd sit right on top of Cyd’s Second Order Powers. You are a particular constellation of aeonic traits, and you have a particular Third Order constellation that sits right on top of your Second Order, and then you’re fully redeemed, and you’ve got one of the Third Order Powers taking care of every single part of yourself.
Now, in that Aeon Byte interview, I talked some about Guardian Angels, and as I say, this is not in any of the Gnostic books that I’ve run across. If you’ve run across that concept, go ahead and write to me and let me know where to find it. But it seems to me, my gnosis tells me, that this notion of Guardian Angels is part of the remembrance. As it turns out, most people that have been asked do believe in Guardian Angels. What is a Guardian Angel then?
Here’s what I think your Guardian Angel is. It’s your Third Order Power that looks like you. We are each constellations of various characteristics and traits of the Aeons. We mostly overlap if we’re humans. We overlap less if it’s my constellation of Aeons and my dog’s constellation. My dog has a dog constellation of Aeons of Christ. I’ve got a human constellation, but my particular traits and talents and appearance, that is how I differ from your particular traits and talents and appearance. So we’re mostly overlapping in our Second Order Powers, but we also have absolutely unique constellations. So I’m not 100% like you. Nobody’s 100% like me. My Guardian Angel is that constellation of Third Order Powers that is like me. And it’s going to be a different constellation than your Guardian Angel because you’re slightly different. So your constellation of Guardian Angels are going to be the ones like you.
My Guardian Angels are the ones that are assigned to me by the Christ. That’s my Christ. It comes with a face that I can recognize. They come with a face that everyone can recognize and that’s how they know it’s their Christ. Same thing with the Guardian Angel. It’s your Guardian Angel. We don’t just say a Guardian Angel came and took care of me. No, my Guardian Angel came and took care of me.
Okay, now let me clear up another point from that interview and it touches on what we’re talking about right now. I’ve been saying that we have Aeonic parents, that we have both earthly parents and then we’ve got Aeonic parents—this constellation of countless Aeons that make each of us up. But according to the Tripartite Tractate, our Aeonic parents aren’t all the way up there in the Fullness. They’re not at the Aeonic level. They’re one fractal level down. The Aeonic parents of the Second Order Powers is the restored Pleroma of Logos after he left the Fall and returned to the Fullness. We are birthed out of the Pleroma of Logos. Remember, Logos contains within its body a fractal of all the other Aeons in the Fullness of God. And when Logos returned to the Fullness after the Fall, abandoning the Demiurge down below, it was the fractals of Logos that made little baby spores descend down here. There’s a reason for that.
The Fullness of God is pure and all good. It was not touched by the Fall. Only Logos was touched by the Fall. So when Logos returned to the Fullness, the memory of the Fall and the memory of materiality is contained within Logos. It was held apart from the rest of the Fullnesses in order for them to maintain their purity and for them to be not over much troubled by our travails down here in the cosmos, because their primary focus is upward, not downward. Logos has to continue to look downward as well as upward because half of Logos remained below—the Demiurge. That abandoned part of Logos, the Demiurge, is its presumptuous thought, is its egoic thought. But the part of Logos that returned up above to its brethren in the Fullness, that’s the part that was of the good thought. That’s all of his fractals of the One.
Now if you’re new to Gnostic Insights and you haven’t heard any of this talk before, I can hear how complicated this sounds. It’s not really. It’s just different and new. So please don’t throw up your hands in despair at this being overly complicated because really you don’t even need to know this. I just thought it’d be fun to share with you some fresh Gnosis. All you need to remember is that we come from above and that we will return to above. We do not earn our way into heaven. We can’t.
Heaven is absolutely pure. Redemption was the job of the Christ and the Christ’s Third Order Powers. As I said in the interview, reincarnation does not get us incrementally closer to perfection. We’d never reach perfection that way. So the way we reach perfection is by accepting the Christ, accepting the Third Order of Powers with our names on it. I accept my Third Order Powers. You need to accept your Third Order Powers. Or you could just call it Jesus, if you’d like, because Jesus is a very special character. Jesus is like us—fully human and fully God Above All Gods. And when we accept the Christ into us, we also then are fully human and fully God Above All Gods.
Okay, so I’ve referenced a couple of quotes out of the Tripartite Tractate. Now that I’ve described it all to you, I’m going to read some of these quotes out of the Tripartite Tractate, and you can now understand better what they mean. And this part that I’m going to be reading to you now, this is out of the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, beginning on page 181. So this was written before. It’s just that it came to me as if it were fresh gnosis this morning, which often happens. I’ll write these things in the book and then forget I’d written it and then have to remember it again. So we’re those of the remembrance, but we’re also those that are forgetful, right? So here’s what it says, the last paragraph of page 181.
We Second Order Powers are fractals of the pleroma of Logos, emanated during the combined prayers of Logos and the Fullness after Logos returned from the fall. We are the Second Order Powers, not only humans, but all living creatures. We come from the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, but not directly. We Second Order Powers are actually fractals of Logos after he returned to the Fullness from the Fall.
On page 182, in the middle of the page, it says,
We humans are also a tripartite system comprised of the spiritual, the psychical, and the physical. The first part of our system is a fractal version of the monad of the Father—the Son. We call that fractal our Self, and it forms our spiritual aspect.
The second part of our three-part structure is called the psychical or psychological, which mirrors our association with the names of the self-aware Aeons of the Fullness. The psychical is the self-aware part of us that think, and that includes our ego. Our third part is associated with the portion of Logos left behind within the boundary of the Fall. Our third part is the material level, the hylic.
Now quoting the Tripartite Tractate, it says,
To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. (verse 98).
Those who belong to the remembrance refers to us Second Order Powers, because we are of the good thought of the Aeons of the Fullness. The thought of which he had stripped himself is the egoic striving of Logos that brought about the Fall. We all carry the fallen ego of Logos forward through our material aspect.
While we vaguely remember we were pre-existent consciousness because we Second Order Powers are those of the remembrance, we forget about our higher nature because we’re all tangled up with the material formed by the thought of which he had stripped himself. The presumptuous thought that Logos needed to lose was that he should attempt to grasp the incomprehensibility and give glory to it, and especially to the ineffability of the Father without the agreement of the Totalities, nor from him who brought them forth, the Father. (verse 75)
When Logos found himself down here below after the fall, he asked himself, what the heck did I do? When he discovered he could not bring the shadows and imitations that had emerged from his pleroma under his control, he left that imitation of himself behind, and what was perfect in him, his self, fled back up to the Fullness. (verse 78) He deserted the material plane and retreated back to the ethereal plane to return home to his Father and brothers in the Fullness.
First he remembered the one who was in the Fullness and entreated him, then his brothers one by one, though always together with their fellows, then all of them together, but before all of these, the Father. This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the all, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the pre-existent ones. And this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back. (verses 82 through 83)
Quoting the previous verse again, To those who belong to the remembrance, okay that’s us. He, that’s Logos, revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself, that is his egoic striving.
Revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself means that Logos imparted to us his knowledge of the shadows and the Fall. When we Second Order Powers come down to this material universe, we come not only with the good thoughts of the Fullness of God, but we come down with the presumptuous thought that Logos had peeled off himself and abandoned below. “He revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention…” Okay, why did Logos reveal the knowledge of the shadows? What was his intention? He did so, “with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material” (verse 98).
So if we had not been given the knowledge of the shadows that form this material imitation, we wouldn’t be able to meld ourselves to the material world. Our bodies are made of non-living mud at the material level. Our bodies, the subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, elements, are made from the bits of the fall that add up to become the material of our physical universe. Knowledge of these shadowy bits was revealed to us in order for us to be able to stick the landing when our units of consciousness exit the ethereal plane and are born into this material world. This ability to merge the ethereal with the material is unique to the Second Order of Powers. Aeons and angels can’t do it because their power is in the spiritual places.
“All the spiritual places are in spiritual power. They are separate from the beings of the thought, since the power is established in an image, which is that which separates the pleroma from the Logos, and it does not permit them to mix with the things which have come into being through a vision of things which are with him” (verse 97).
So that is why it’s logical and necessary that we Second Order Powers are the fruit of Logos in particular, because we get from Logos the knowledge of what happened after the Fall, the particularity of materiality, and that is the knowledge that allows our spirit to meld to the material of the cosmos.
Okay, I hope you followed this, but if you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s not really necessary to know. Let me know what you think.
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God bless us all, and onward and upward!
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