Épisodes

  • Transformative Near Death Experiences
    Jan 13 2024
    These people who died and had their near death experiences weren't earning a glimpse of Heaven. They just died in the middle of whatever they were doing, the way we all do. And yet they were taken directly into the Heavenly realm, and these people were sent back because it wasn't time for them to be dead yet. And when they come back, they bring the peace, love, joy, the conviction that death is not final. They have felt themselves in the warm embrace of the Father, or of Jesus, or of Angels. There was no anger there. There is no judgment there.
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    26 min
  • NDEs part 3: Reincarnation, Research, & Gnosis
    Jan 20 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. I’m really glad that you’re with me and that we are exploring these topics together. Today I want to share with you an article that was first printed in the UNT Digital Library. That’s the university library system. It’s by Bruce Greyson, and it’s called Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories. This was printed in autumn of 2021 and it is accessed through the University of North Texas Library system. My brother looked this up for us because of our topic last week on near death experiences. And, you know my brother, Bill Puett, is a hypnotherapist. He is a retired philosophy professor. Nowadays he helps people through therapeutic hypnosis. Bill often has experiences with his clients of that in between place that one experiences between lives. Many times Bill asks a client to go back and remember when an upsetting trigger first occurred in their lives, and sometimes these people jump back into a previous life. That is how Bill has become so familiar with the idea and working with people’s past life experiences. Bill had raised the question with me after last week’s episode, Well, what about the in between place? How do these near death experiences comport with the place that Bill and his clients are so familiar with—that being the in between place where they work on past life issues. And, the in between place is where a soul is prior to being reincarnated. At least that’s the therapeutic metaphor that seems to be going on in these situations. So let’s look at this article together, Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories, and we’ll see if we can make sense of it in a gnostic way. Let’s begin with reading the abstract. An abstract on an academic article is the overview, the summation, of what the article is going to be about. So let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say. “Some features of near death experiences suggest that consciousness may continue to function after death of the body. The life reviews of some NDEs [that’s near death experiences] include what seemed to be memories of a past lifetime, some of which involve verifiable details suggesting that the experiencer has lived more than one life and can recall events from successive lives. These apparent past life memories parallel the claims of young children who remember past lives. Furthermore, some children’s past life memories include scenes from the period between lives that parallel descriptions of the realm in which NDEs occur. Some children’s past life memories include anomalous features that contradict common beliefs about reincarnation. In addition, the idea that humans reincarnate into a new earthly body seems to contradict the common NDE feature of encountering deceased persons in a non-earthly realm. However, those apparent contradictions can be resolved by reconceptualization of prevailing ideas about time and about what aspects of human consciousness may survive bodily death.” So, the article goes into what is a near death experience, and we don’t have to redescribe that because we covered it in depth in last week’s episode. And then the next section is called The Life Review, which also presents examples of that 360° life review that we covered in the last episode. Well, this is interesting. He cites an example from 1791, “When British Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort was only a 17 year old midshipman he fell off the boat into Portsmouth Harbour. Unfortunately, he had not yet learned to swim. After exhausting himself in his struggle to breathe, he lost consciousness and immediately experienced a feeling of calmness and noticed changes in his thinking. He later described it in this way. ‘From the moment that all exertions ceased, which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation, thought rose above thought with the rapidity of succession. It is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who has not himself been in a similar situation. The course of those thoughts I can, even now in great measure, retrace the event which had just taken place. The awkwardness that had produced it were the first series of reflections that occurred.’” He talks about remembering his childhood, another shipwreck… “’travelling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession. Not, however, in mere outline as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences. Indeed, many trifling events, which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination with the character of recent familiarity.’” This was printed in Beaufort’s ...
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    30 min
  • Interview with Hathaway Jane
    Jan 27 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today’s episode is an interview with one of your fellow listeners to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Her name is Hathaway Jane. Hathaway wrote to me saying how much the Gnostic Insights episodes have meant to her. She’s also purchased and read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, and she has some very kind words to say about how meaningful they have been to her. She said she’d like to talk to me on the phone and I suggested that we go ahead and do it as a public interview so that we can share her growth and her path with everyone else here. Hathaway has studied Jungian analysis independently for many years now. For the past 15 years, she’s studied Carl Jung’s writing, particularly the Red Book and the Black Book, and then all of the other books that Jung wrote, as she says in the interview. And I find this remarkable because Jung is not easy to read, and Hathaway did this with a high school education at the time. She’s now attending university and she is in her last year of college studies. After she graduates from the university she wants to attend the Pacifica Graduate Institute in order to become a Jungian analyst. She studied Carl Jung independently through the Center for Applied Jungian Studies, which you can find on the Internet, and she’s also part of the Philemon Foundation. So let’s hear Hathaway’s journey. Cyd: Hey, Hathaway. Hathaway: Yes, how are you? Cyd: I’m just fine this morning. How are you? Hathaway: I’m good. Cyd: It’s so nice to hear your voice. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for being here. Hathaway: Oh, no problem. I think your book is incredible. I’m not kidding. I mean, I have told you in my life I lived through my ego self 100% and I definitely had different personas that I put on for my family, so-called friends, people I thought were my friends. And it’s strange because I think I told you from 16 to about 29 I was an addict. And every day I wake up and I feel so incredibly blessed, just because, seriously, I mean, I know how hard it is. I know that. I honestly I shouldn’t be here—like there were a few times that came real close to not being here. And, my life was such a crazy mess, I can’t even explain. I got sober and I still was just in something inside me. Just was like this child that—this is what I’ve always felt this way—I’ve always felt like off. I don’t know to explain it really. Like I wasn’t like the other kids. I was an only child and spent a lot of time alone, and just went through some experiences that I would never wish upon anybody. Jung’s , in Bollingen, Switzerland https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ And I made it out and I see so many people who don’t. I mean, right now our country is in the middle of an opiate crisis, which nobody talks about. And it’s just like, what is going on here? And I honestly do believe that everything that’s going on here is a spiritual matter. And so I started with Carl Jung. And I don’t know if you know a lot about Jung, but Carl Jung, his whole life—he started writing the Red Book, and this was his own personal notes and all these beautiful mandalas that he drew. And then he built himself like little—it wasn’t that little, but it’s quite big. It’s at Bollingen. They called the Little Castle. And this castle, it’s so symbolic. He built it because of his dream. Because one day Jung said to himself, I’m 40 years old. He’s like, what is this? I don’t want to go to cocktail parties. This is stupid. He’s like, I have everything I need. I have more money than I could ever want. I’m successful. I’ve known. He’s like, this isn’t life. There has to be something beyond this. And he started asking himself, do I know my soul? And he went through this whole transformation where he literally was, like, begging his soul to speak to him. And his soul did in his dreams. Now I don’t have dreams like that. So Jung has another way of doing it, which is called active imagination. I do mine through a learnt meditation, where I go to a trance level. But, after reading the Red Book I got very involved in CAJS—which the Center for Applied Jungian Studies. And my first teacher was a man by the name of Shane Eynon. He’s a psychoanalyst. He’s incredible. Like, I was so blessed. And for the first time in my life, I was just, like, it just, it really did, it smacked me in the face. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And then I was like, Oh my gosh! Because then I thought, I am out here racking up credit card debt to buy stuff I don’t need. Like, I am living in this illusion, and that’s a very weird thing to experience. Cyd: Now, how long after you had become sober did you discover the Jungians? Hathaway: Probably about 10 years after I’d been sober. And, during those 10 years, I wasn’t a nice person. I ...
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    36 min
  • Consciousness–It’s a no-brainer
    Feb 3 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I read a very interesting article this week from Scientific American, February 1st, 2024 edition. It’s a brand new article by a science writer called Rowan Jacobson. It was interesting to me because it just so happens to uphold—finally prove, in essence—one of the hypotheses of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You know, my Simple Explanation theory of everything was written over 15 years ago. The blog‘s been up that long, and there’s a book by the same name. If you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s a secular version of what we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. But it is gnosis nonetheless, because I believe that the universe was setting up for me in the Simple Explanation theory of everything, a way that I would then be able to read and interpret the gnostic gospel. That’s why the latest book is A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, whereas the first book was A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. And, in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was pre-gnostic gospel for me, I didn’t have a clear way to separate non-living material from living material. In my early diagrams, the hierarchy is a straight flow upward from the subatomic particles, on up through life, on up through cells. But, whereas in the gnostic gospel interpretation, there is a clear break provided to us by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there’s a clear break between the mud—that being the material that is not alive—and the meat—that being all of us animals, all of us creatures, everything that’s alive. Whether it’s a plant or a single celled organism or a human, every living creature is different in kind than the purely material objects. And the material objects are the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the aggregates of minerals on up to the hard rocky bodies, like comets and planets. According to the Tripartite Tractate, these are not alive. The bodies themselves are part of the Fall. They are the dead byproduct of the Fall. They don’t think; they have no consciousness. What does have consciousness is the ego of the Demiurge, and so, at least here in our cosmos that we are familiar with, every material object that is not considered living, such as rocks and sand, well, those are extensions of the Demiurge. Those are extensions like a puppet master and strings, right? They are the Demiurge’s extensions of its consciousness, and it is not fully conscious because it is lacking the One’s Self that comes from above. Its One Self fled, that being the Aeon known as Logos. So, Logos and its ego have become separated and it’s its ego that has constructed this material cosmos in which we dwell. Whereas Logos itself, the Aeon Logos, fled back up to the Fullness. Anyway, this is a long preamble to what we’re trying to actually get to here, and if all of this was just gobbledygook to you, you need to back up and become familiar with some of the terminology from the gnostic gospel that I present here. So I will put a link to a more basic type of introduction to these concepts right here in the transcript to this podcast. Back to the Scientific American article. It’s called Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems, Simple Cells Can Do It. And the subtitle is Tiny clumps of cells show basic cognitive abilities, and some animals can remember things after losing their heads. So, what this article is about is a new branch of cognitive science called basal cognition, and they are coming to believe that the brain is not required for thinking. Well, that has been a tenet of the Simple Explanation going back 15 to 20 years now. The brain is not the origin of thought or consciousness, it’s merely like a radio that tunes it in. Your neurons are not where memories live. The memories are outside of us. What the neurons do is grow in response to the stimulus of those externalized thoughts, and some scientists are coming to recognize that fact now. They fought this all along. Most scientists, including most cognitive scientists who study the brain, keep looking for places in the brain where the memories live. But these basal cognition scientists now realize that the memory doesn’t live in the brain. And by the way, to skip to the conclusion of the article—where the memories reside as far as they are concerned is in the electromagnetic grid that the creature emits or dwells in. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist who has for a long time been an outcast in the scientific community because he’s been saying that all along. His research and his books are about how our thoughts and our relationships with one another exist in a field around us and a field in between us. Like between two people who have love for each other, there’s a sort of a rubber band, I think he described it. A rubber band stretching between them, which is an electromagnetic field that keeps ...
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    28 min
  • The Gnostic Christ
    Feb 10 2024
    The reckoning is self reflexive—from your ego for the benefit of your Self. It is your own egoic consciousness feeling regret for its past deeds. And the point of the reckoning and repentance isn’t punishment—it’s not a spanking by God. It’s for you to realize the harm you have done to yourself and others during this sojourn in material life, in order to strip off those egoic memes and rejoin the Aeons in the Fullness. Remember, the ethereal plane is separated from the darkness below by a Boundary. We need to leave the darkness behind in order to rise above. We don’t strip off our egos—we retain our identities—but we do strip off the pernicious lies and memes that have kept us bound to the cosmos.
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    29 min
  • The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated
    Feb 17 2024
    Here's a treat for you. This is the entire Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book read by the author, Cyd Ropp. This is the little book published in 2019 that was the springboard for all of the gnostic work that followed, including this podcast and the new, much longer, book that is about to be released. This is the simplest presentation of gnosis that you will ever find. Only the essential gnosis was included. It is all based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi texts. The gnosis you will find here is the type of gnosis that proceeds from an initial thought--the first thought of the Originating Source. That thought then flows outward and through a few levels downward until it manifests within all of us living creatures here in the cosmos. There are no fables in this gnosis--only the reasonable outflow of the path of consciousness. This is the story of consciousness.
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    39 min
  • Our Awesome Origin
    Feb 24 2024
    Hello there and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. There have been a few things on my mind I would like to share with you today. You know, I’ve mentioned in the past that I do listen to the radio preachers because I want to hear what they’re teaching. I want to see what is the current state of Christian belief and knowledge. By now you realize that this Gnostic Gospel is definitely Christian, because salvation and redemption revolves around the Christ. But the thing that is difficult for me is that there are a few basic principles in this Gnostic Gospel that are in disagreement with what is taught out there generally as Christianity, and I believe that those differences were hardwired into the Bible when the Nicene Council sat down around 330 AD and decided what books to keep and what books to throw out. And, among the books that they threw out was the Tripartite Tractate, which is the primary source that I am deriving my Christian knowledge from in addition to the New Testament. Christians are taught not to seek external sources of truth—that the truth is entirely captured and relayed to us through the Bible. And, if you accept what are called extra-biblical, which means outside of the Bible, sources such as the Nag Hammadi or the Qumran scrolls, the Tripartite Tractate that I am sharing with you, then you will be led astray. You’ll come to wrong opinions, and you are part of the problem and not part of the solution. I don’t want to be part of the problem; I want to be part of the solution. That’s why I do not give up the basic idea that the Savior that we call the Christ is a special, ethereal character that was designed and sent down to us to help us here. Now, ordinary Christian belief states that Christ is the original Son of God that was made at the beginning—was the first emanation of thought from God, and I disagree with that. In the Tripartite Tractate there seems to be a distinct difference between the Son, who is the first emanation of the thought of the Father, and the Christ, who was produced after we 2nd order powers were sent to Earth. The specific mission of the Christ is to help us out. So the Christ figure has, I like to say, all the mojo of the Father and the Son and the Fullness of God, as well as the things that Logos learned from falling to earth and then returning back to the Fullness, such as how to operate within the Boundary and the existence of the Demiurge and the archons. The Christ was designed to overcome all of that. We also disagree about what happens to you if you don’t accept the Christ here on Earth before you die. Conventional teaching is that you will go to Hell and be tortured forever. That’s absurd. That’s absolutely absurd on the face of it, because the nature of the Father is love; the nature of the Son is love. The consciousness of the Father and love are intertwined inextricably together. More than that, we are emanations from the Father and the Son through the hierarchical pattern of what is called the Fullness of God. We come from above. How on earth—how in this cosmos—would all of us not return to the Fullness above? If we did not go back because we ignorantly or stubbornly or through misguided overblown egos believe that we’re the be-all and end-all, and that’s what sends you to Hell for an eternity of torture? Well, there’s two basic principles that are being violated there. One—how does a loving God punish someone eternally? It is not consistent with the nature of God. Now, I was looking up what it means to fear God because one of the radio preachers this week said, Oh, you better fear God! That’s the problem with culture nowadays—people don’t fear God. And the Bible says why do you fear men whose punishment only lasts for a short period but you don’t fear God whose punishment is eternal? That’s entirely incorrect in my opinion. First off, the word fear is a translation of a Hebrew word yirah, YIRAH, and it is just as properly or even more properly interpreted as awe. As in awesome—awe. Which means beholding or seeing something that is so completely beyond our ability to understand and to grasp that we drop our jaws open and our knees tremble because it’s so incredible. That’s what it means to be awesome. And by the way, as a kind of humorous aside, it really bugs me that on the iPhone with the auto fill words, when someone texts me back and they mean to say, Ah, isn’t that cute! or Ah, I’m so sorry! that iPhone autofill types in Awe. Because that isn’t the word. The word for Ah, isn’t that cute. Ah, that’s so neat, that’s A H. Ah. It’s just a sound. It’s an interjection. And I’m not so sure that this isn’t on purpose by some archon that’s in charge of the iPhone as a means of degrading the magnificence of the word, AWE. When you say, Ah, that was really thoughtful of you, it’s not AWE. AWE means you have come face to face with the transcendent God or you’ve visited heaven and ...
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    21 min
  • Gnosis or Not Gnosis?
    Mar 2 2024
    The Demiurge is all about power, control, and mastery, and the Demiurge only allows power to humans who have agreed to serve him. On the other side of the Gnostic ledger—the side that I am promoting—gnosis is not occult. It’s open. It's known. It's personally accessible and, very importantly, it does not have anything to do with mastery or power. It has to do with letting go and letting God. It has to do with relinquishing personal control—taking your ego, your astrologer ego, your alchemist ego, your grandmaster ego off of the throne of your soul and allowing the singular One, the Self that we all share, our fractal of the Fullness of God, to control our lives.
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    20 min