Episodi

  • Universal Salvation–an Introduction

    Universal Salvation–an Introduction
    Nov 2 2024
    I thought today I would start sharing with you a book that I am reading by David Bentley Hart. Hart wrote that translation of the New Testament that I’m very much enjoying, because it mirrors the same language that the Gnostic gospel uses in the Nag Hammadi codices, particularly the Tripartite Tractate, which is what I share with you here at Gnostic Insights. David Bentley Hart is extremely eloquent and erudite. His prose puts me to shame. He is a great writer and a brilliant mind. He’s an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher. And the deal is, he does seem to love God. So his philosophy and his theology goes through what seems to me to be a very Gnostic heart and orientation on his part. So I’m reading this book now called, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, because I could tell from reading the footnotes in his New Testament that he and I agree on this universal salvation. I seem to be coming at it from a different place than he does, but I must admit I’m only about 40 pages into the book, so I don’t know if he’s going to cover my orientation or not. My major reason why everyone and everything that’s living now will return to heaven is that everything comes from heaven. So if everything doesn’t return to heaven in the end, if most of it, as a matter of fact, was thrown into eternal fires of torment, well, God itself would be lessened. The Father would be less than he was at the beginning, and that’s an impossibility, because the Father was, is, and ever shall be the same. He is not diminished by the love and consciousness and life that flows out of him. But if that life, love, and consciousness winds up in a black hole at the bottom of an eternal pit of torment, well, there’s so many things wrong with that statement, just absolutely wrong. And that’s what David Bentley Hart’s book is all about, and he has several ways he’s going to explain why that can’t be so. The reason I say it can’t be so is that all consciousness, life, and love come from the Father. So in the big roll-up, if we accept the proposition that there will be an end to this material existence, which is what all Christians and Jews profess, and if everything that emanated from the Father in the beginning, beginning with the Son, which is the first and only direct emanation, and then everything else emanates through the Son, well, if it doesn’t return at the end of material time, then the Father and the ethereal plane would be diminished, because it poured out all of this love and consciousness into this material realm, and it all has to return. The Tripartite Tractate says that everything that existed from the beginning will return at the end of time. In verses 78 and 79 of the Tripartite Tractate, it’s speaking about the shadows that emerged from Logos after the Fall, and it says, Therefore their end will be like their beginning, from that which did not exist they are to return once again to the shadows. “Their end will be like their beginning,” in that they didn’t come from above—they were shadows of the fallen Logos. And so when the light comes and shines the light, the shadows disappear. Furthermore, in verses 80 and 81, the Tripartite Tractate says, The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, that is, after the Fall, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not exist from the first. So these shadows didn’t exist in the Pleroma; they were shadows, they were imitations of the unity which existed from the first, and that unity is the Fullness of God—the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And it is only these shadows that will be evaporated at the end of time, that will not go to the ethereal plane. All living things will, because we’re not shadows of the Fall. We are actually sent down from the unity, from the Fullness of God, with life, consciousness, and love. And so all of that has to return to the Father. So that is where I’m coming from, that God can’t be lessened, made less than it was at the beginning. So everything will be redeemed and returned. And of course, practically all of Christianity nowadays believes that most everything that was emanated from the beginning will be destroyed, or put into a fire of torment for all eternity. Anyone who wasn’t baptized, or anyone who didn’t come forward to profess a belief in Christ. So that’s most of the other cultures, most of the world, and the conventional Christian church doesn’t even realize that animals are going to heaven. I often comfort people whose pet has just passed away, and they’re missing them so badly, and they love them so much, and it hurts so much, and I ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    26 min
  • Universal Salvation pt. 2

    Universal Salvation pt. 2
    Nov 9 2024
    God is loving and merciful, not judgmental and cruel Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week I began sharing with you what is essentially a book report on the book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart, and he’s the translator of the New Testament that I’ve been using. So, last week we got up to page 21 out of this book, and now I’m all the way up to page 85, so we’ll see what happened in this latest round of reading. Now, David Bentley Hart’s style of writing may not be for everyone. It’s very academic, very high-minded and educated and erudite—difficult to follow if you’re not accustomed to reading scholastic writing. But I believe his heart’s in the right place, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. I will do my best to reinterpret what he is saying in simpler words, in case you’re interested in the content, but not in its delivery method. So, picking it up on page 21, Hart says, And what could be more absurd than the claim that God’s ways so exceed comprehension, that we dare not presume even to distinguish benevolence from malevolence in the divine, inasmuch as either can result in the same endless excruciating despair? Here the docile believer is simply commanded to nod in acquiescence, quietly and submissively, to feel moved at a strange and stirring obscurity, and to accept that, if only he or she could sound the depths of this mystery, its essence would somehow be revealed as infinite beauty and love. A rational person capable of that assent, however, of believing all of this to be a paradox concealing a deeper, wholly coherent truth, rather than a gross contradiction, has probably suffered such chronic intellectual and moral malformation that he or she is no longer able to recognize certain very plain truths, such as the truth that he or she has been taught to approve of divine deeds that, were they reduced to a human scale of action, would immediately be recognizable as expressions of unalloyed spite. And he’s talking about the idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell and will suffer eternal torment. That is an interpretation or misinterpretation of the word brought about by incorrect translation of the original Coptic Greek. Most of our Bible translations come off of old Latin Vulgate translations, and then they’ve been modernized. But that’s how errors are brought forward. And what Hart has done in his New Testament translation is go back to the original, very oldest transcripts, still in Greek, before they were translated to Latin. And he did what he called a pitilessly accurate translation, where Hart was not trying to make the words that are being translated fit into a predetermined doctrine, like everyone going to hell, or like the Trinity, or eternal damnation. These things we’ve been taught to believe are in the Scripture, but when you actually go back to the original Scriptures prior to the Latin translations, they are not in the Scripture. And so this book that I’m doing the book report on here, That All Shall Be Saved, this is about universal salvation, and doing away with the idea. And he says in this section I just read you, that it is a malevolent idea, unalloyed spite, unalloyed meaning pure spite on the part of God, that’s going to send everyone to hell that doesn’t get it. And that we have been commanded by the Church over the last 2,000 years to just nod our heads and say, oh, well, it’s God’s will, or oh, well, how can I presume to distinguish benevolence from malevolence, good intention from bad intention on the part of God, because God is so great and good. We’re supposed to be docile believers, to acquiesce, that is, to go along with, to quietly and submissively accept that we don’t get it, that we don’t understand the depths of the mystery, and someday we will, and that God is good, and God is just, and therefore everyone’s going to hell, except for those few preordained elect from before time began. So this book is entirely against that proposition. So moving on, what I did was I read the book through, and I’ve highlighted the parts that seem worth sharing or very interesting. Now we’re jumping to page 35, where he says that certain people, of my acquaintance who are committed to what is often called an intellectualist model of human liberty, as I am myself, [he says], but who also insist that it is possible for a soul freely to reject God’s love with such perfect perpiscuity of understanding and intention as to merit eternal suffering. And we can tell from the context that perpiscuity means you get it. So he’s saying, how is it even possible for a soul to freely reject the love of God and consign oneself into eternal torment? It just doesn’t work. It’s not possible. He says, this is an altogether dizzying contradiction. In simplest terms, that is to say, they, [that is, the intellectualists], want to assert that all true...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    28 min
  • Universal Salvation pt 3

    Universal Salvation pt 3
    Nov 16 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today is part three of my book report on David Bentley Hart’s book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. The past two weeks we covered the beginning of his book, the Introduction. I’m going to begin this section by reading out of his final remarks, because he does a good job of simplifying his arguments here at the end of the book. So we’ll start with that. Hart says on page 201, It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of the early church that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations. Belief in universal salvation may have been far more widespread in the first four or five centuries of Christian history than it was in all the centuries that followed, but it was never, as a rule, encouraged in any general way by those in authority in the church. Maybe there are great many among us who can be convinced to be good only through the threat of endless torture at the hands of an indefatigably vindictive god. Even so much as hint that the purifying flames of the age to come will at last be extinguished, and perhaps a good number of us will begin to think like the mafioso who refuses to turn state’s evidence because he is sure he can do the time. Bravado is, after all, the chief virtue of the incorrigibly stupid. He goes on to say, I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the Infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves. And to remind you, if you didn’t hear the past two episodes, Infernalist refers to the notion that there is an unending hell of pain and torture for the unregenerate or the unrepentant. Further down page 202, Hart says, I honestly, perhaps guilelessly, believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical for the simple reason that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity, which is equivocation, so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains. To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that, on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose or to permit the imposition of eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a complete contradiction. All becomes mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious ability to believe impossible things. [Jumping down the page, he says,] Can we imagine logically, I mean not merely intuitively, that someone still in torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her sufferings have, in a sense, only just begun, and, in fact, will always have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence, not to mention simple good taste, to make this horrid notion seem palatable to ourselves. And all because we have somehow, foolishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we must believe. Really, could we truly believe it all apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe. So, what he’s saying here, what I’ve been talking to you about, is the idea that God, the God Above All Gods, what we call the Father in Gnosticism, would condemn people to everlasting torment, everlasting torment, with no other goal than to punish, because they’re never going to get out of it. That’s what everlasting means. And so it’s just punishment for the sake of punishment, and that that great, unlimitable God would impose this punishment on little, limited, finite beings who only lived a brief millisecond of time in the great span of time of God. That God would create these people for the purpose, basically, of condemning them to everlasting torment. You see, that is not even rational. It doesn’t make any sense. Not if you believe God is good. It’s impossible. Now, if you think that God is evil, well, then that’s not God, is it? By definition, if you believe that God is cruel and vindictive and unreasonable, well, that’s not the God Above All Gods. And this should come as relief to those of you...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    25 min
  • We are all in ALL

    We are all in ALL
    Nov 23 2024
    Universal Salvation–part 4 Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m going to do my best to wrap up this review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It’s not to tear down Christianity. It’s to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity. And so this talk of universal salvation is a necessary component of believing in the glory of God. Because universal salvation of all souls, not only all humans, but the dogs, the cats, the birds, the grasses, all living things, have to return to the Father, or else the Anointed loses power. The Father loses parts of himself. Okay, let’s get back to David Bentley Hart. So we’re going to run through these four meditations that are the body of his book. The first meditation is, Who is God? He says, The New Testament, to a great degree, consists in the eschatological interpretation of Hebrew Scripture’s story of creation, finding in Christ as eternal Logos and risen Lord, the unifying term of beginning and end. There’s no more magnificent meditation on this vision than Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the progress of all persons towards union with God in the one pleroma, the one fullness of the whole Christ. All spiritual wills moving, to use this loving image, from outside the temple walls to the temple precincts, and finally beyond the ages into the very sanctuary of the glory as one. Okay, let me jump in here to say, do you notice that the New Testament words, when you use the correct translations, are the same as the translations in our Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi? Logos is the eternal spirit of humanity and the risen Lord. The Fullness is the one pleroma, the whole Christ. And in this statement, it’s saying that all that is spiritual, which includes the spirits that reside within each of us, will all move as one into the pleroma of the Christ. That’s who Christ is to us. He’s the head of our pleroma. And when I speak of pleromas, I always picture that pyramidal shape, that hierarchical shape, and the capstone is the head. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us. When Paul spoke of this, he was applying it literally to the temple in Jerusalem, where there were the walls of the temple, and most of the people were outside of the walls, and some of the people were in the temple precincts. And finally, the very sanctuary of the glory, where only the priests were allowed. These are the three parts that were mentioned, and these are archetypal of the movement of humanity, Hart is saying, from the outside of the pleroma of the Christ, into the pleroma of the Christ, and then into the very glory of God through the Christ. On page 90, Hart says, If one truly believes that traditional Christian language about God’s goodness and the theological grammar to which it belongs are not empty, then the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not and cannot possibly be the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ. If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him. And that’s the end of the chapter, Who is God? And that pretty much states my basic belief on why everyone is going to heaven, because we all come from the Father, and therefore we all must return to the Father, because the Father cannot be diminished in any way. And if he lost us, he’d be diminished. Do you see? The second meditation is, What is Judgment? And the subtitle is A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology. And eschatology, that’s one of those big theological words that just means the end times, the end of time. On page 93, Hart says, There’s a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament. And yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus as even the thinnest shadow of a hint, nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts. There is one verse in the Gospels, Matthew 25-46 that, traditionally understood, offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea, but then now Hart’s going to explain how that can’t be true. And then he says there are also perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation, and he says nothing’s clear in Revelation, so he’s not going to go there. But, What in fact the New Testament provides us with are a number of fragmentary and fantastic ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    35 min
  • Free Will Is Essential 2024

    Free Will Is Essential 2024
    Nov 30 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week we finished up our four-part series on David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, and I skipped over the Free Will chapter because we just ran out of time. But this week I’m going to re-record an episode that was first aired on April 29th of 2023, and this time I’ll include the transcript with the audio post so that you can read it as well as hear it. This week’s episode is called Free Will is Essential, and essential means necessary. It’s baseline, it’s foundational, it’s a must-have. All of us Second-Order Powers have free will. The Aeons have free will. That’s how it is that Logos was able to choose to fall. We’re not helpless puppets. We do become helpless puppets when we sign up with the Demiurge, rather than with the Father in the Fullness. The Fullness and the Father allow us free will because that is essential to God’s nature, and we are direct emanations as fractals of that nature. We are made in the image of God. The Demiurge does not want you to have free will. That’s what causes all the troubles with the Demiurge and these pesky humans in particular, because we have free will, and the Demiurge hates free will. The original economy was that of the hierarchy of the Fullness, where every Aeon knew its place, position, and duties for cooperative overall functioning. Each of the Fullnesses lived in a state of joy, benevolence, and harmonious agreement, giving glory to the Father and never to each other or to themselves, according to the Tripartite Tractate in verse 86. The Second Order of Powers was created in order to bring life and love into what is called the new economy or new organization. This new economy was in the mind of the Father all along, even before the Fall. It is a unique feature of the Tripartite Tractate that the book does not describe the Fall in terms of sin and blame, but rather as an event that was destined to come about in order to usher in a new economy that differed from the ethereal pleroma where the Aeons dwell. The Tripartite Tractate says, The free will which was begotten with the totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him. The intent then of the Logos, who is this one, was good, and before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the totalities, he acted magnanimously from an abundant love and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory. Thomason translates the word magnanimously in the scripture above as presumptuously. Yet the intention of the Logos was good. The Tripartite Tractate is unique in its gentle assessment of not blaming Logos for the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate says that this act of disobedience by Logos was within the will of the Father after all, and it was necessary to usher in an organization that needed to come forth for the revelation of the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says, For it was not without the will of the Father that the Logos was produced, which is to say, not without the will will he go forth. But he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being. The Father knew what would happen, and the Father found it fitting that Logos should be conceived as he was and take the action that he did. The Father knew that this was the path that would lead to material creation, the economy that was to come, “So that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being.” Logos mistook his will for that of the ALL. Logos overreached because of his presumptuous thought but he was unable to reach the illimitable Father and he Fell. After the Fall, the Self of Logos rejoined his fellow Aeons above in the Fullness. Logos and the Totalities joined together to create a new fruit from their union that would bring life, love, and consciousness to the Deficiency below. Logos and the Fullness brought forth these little ones of the Second Order out of his newly restored pleroma, so that they could receive the life-giving light born from the thought of brotherly love of the preexistent Fullness, in contrast to the phantoms that had arisen from the Fall. These powers of remembrance resembled the Aeons whose likenesses they were, and they were in harmony with themselves and with others of their kind. And, as you know by now, the Second Order of Powers manifests as every living thing that is on this planet Earth, from the cells on up through the humans. The restored pleroma of Logos and the Hierarchy of the Fullness conceive a new fruit called 2nd Order Powers. The Fullness is the 1st Order. The new economy of the Second Order of Powers reflected a different method of doing business from their images in the Fullness. In the new economy, the powers vied for position and authority within a limited space known as the Boundary. Here, those of the imitation who continued to ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    27 min
  • My Correspondence with an Educated Atheist

    My Correspondence with an Educated Atheist
    Dec 7 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’ve been having some good correspondence with a relatively recent listener who actually responded to my request for an illustrator of the children’s book. She had only just come across the podcast and had no knowledge of this Gnostic Gospel approach. She and I exchanged a series of correspondences during the month of November, and she’s been asking good questions, so I thought, why not share them with everybody? The conversations began by talking about the artistic concepts for the children’s book. I sent her the text of the book and my descriptions of the characters and the scenes. And she said, I’m not surprised your last artist had trouble. It’s quite a sophisticated and tricky project. One of the things that immediately came to mind when I saw the sample image of the Demiurge was the fact that he was coated in mud. Now I thought your allusion of mud up, spirit down was really clever, having a typically elegant and simple style. However, because this is a kid’s book, something you can give to a clever six to eight year old, I was wondering if the mud is the right way to go visually. For children, mud can carry the connotation of being dirty, unclean, and shameful. Whilst I guess there is an element of shameful dirty to the mud up illusion, would you say that the primary takeaway for kids is that the copy that Logos created is imperfect, not as amazing as the original, rather than being shameful, dirty, sinful? But maybe the mud is a key takeaway from the gospel and you feel you can’t take liberties with the ancient text. So first off, I want to mention, and I didn’t mention this in my reply to her, is that the mud up, spirit down metaphor is mine. It’s not out of the Tripartite Tractate. It is only my simple way of characterizing how the molecules bind to the spirit of life. Mud up, spirit down. That predates my reading of the Gnostic Gospels. That’s out of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I’ve taken that metaphor and applied it to the Tripartite Tractate. She told me she had encountered Gnostic Insights during a 6-hour drive and that it was great to experience a dive into the world of Gnosticism. I dimly remember encountering it via my medieval history A-levels. It was a joy to hear your elegant and nuanced take on what is, let’s face it, a rather involved topic. I found it extremely insightful. I’m one of those people, you mentioned in an episode, who is not coming at it from a Christian background. Ever since the vicar told me I’d burn in hell when I was eight, I set my head against all things Christian and was a smug materialist for most of my life. Even as recently as 2019, I was a hardcore atheist along the lines of Sam Harris, et al. However, the pandemic and the frightening response to it from governments ripped holes in what a Gnostic might call my meme cloud. Worryingly, even superbrains like Mr. Harris seem to have lost their reason during COVID. During those dark days of compulsory jabs and masking, et al., I sensed a malevolent presence at work in the world. I can remember thinking that if this force I sensed, ruining small businesses, turning families against each other, ramping up fear, let alone the actual disease itself, was indeed something approaching genuine evil. But by rights there should be a parallel entity working for good out there. I’m yet to experience that directly, but who knows? At the time I considered the idea that there might be two gods, one good and one bad, and wondered if anyone had thought of that since the Manicheans. So I’ve been on a spare-time quest dipping into Buddhism, Hermeticism, and to some extent Christianity. In terms of the latter, I’ve never been able to get past the typical issues of how to explain the evil in the world, and the whole thing about the mentally ill being damned, or tiny children being damned, pets not going to heaven, and many other issues which you’ve addressed. As you rightly point out, the Old Testament God seems like a curlish type, ordering parents to sacrifice their kids to prove their faith, and sending down plagues and floods, etc., etc. From listening to your podcasts, Gnosticism seems to have a lot of answers. I also like the way you sidestepped the delicate Sophia issue. Woke Feminism may have overshot the mark, however. Eve, Sophia, Pandora, Medea, etc., have been unfairly treated. I look forward to learning more as I go through your amazing smorgasbord of recordings. And I wrote back and said, I was also struck hard by the pandemic fear-mongering. It seems as though society has divided itself into freethinkers who believe in personal liberty, and those who prefer to shelter under the wing of oppressive government coercion. My orientation has always been toward personal liberty, and I think this helped me to see through the lies from the get-go. Go ahead and buy A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel if you haven’t already...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    27 min
  • Correspondence with an Educated Atheist pt.2

    Correspondence with an Educated Atheist pt.2
    Dec 13 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week, we had part one of Correspondence with an Educated Atheist, and after posting that, I received an email from my correspondent, and it was very interesting because it turns out that all this time I thought I was corresponding with a female because this person’s name is one of those gender-neutral names, like my own name, Cyd. I was often miscategorized as a male coming into a new classroom or, like, going to summer camp I was put on the boy’s side and so forth because my name was unusual back in the 1950s. So this person has this sort of name that could be taken either as male or female, and I just assumed it was a female. That’s a funny thing to me. Now, flip that whole conversation from last week, and every time I said she, please insert the word he, and now I’m re-recording part two so I can correctly identify my correspondent. He was very gracious about the misunderstanding, of course. Very, very nice person. He had asked, “Is it possible that the truth of creation might be something difficult or even something unpalatable?” And I answer, well, that’s what a lot of people are saying, isn’t it? I think it is a message meant to dishearten us, meant to depress us. I notice that the people who believe that are not happy campers. In the end, it doesn’t matter what memes we cling to here on this material plane. All will be revealed when we pass over to the other side. He asks, “Is it too much to ask for some sort of indication or revelation or glimpse of the existence of the Fullness? What actions would you suggest should be the next step?” And I say, it’s not too much to ask. It’s what prayer is all about. If you have never prayed to the higher power, you simply find a quiet spot or maybe in the middle of the night when you’re lying in bed awake and you just ask the Source to reveal itself to you. “Ask and you will find. Knock and the door will open.” [Matthew 7:7] You can ask for revelation. You can ask for an unmistakable sign. When I was a young believer, I would ask for things expecting them to happen, and they did. Once as a teenager, I was hitchhiking up the California coast. I had no fear for myself because I was and still am an innocent, and I believe that Jesus walked everywhere with me and that he would protect me from all harm. One night I camped with strange men, but I preached to them and no harm came to me. In the morning, we were all hitchhiking together for the first ride of the day, and I prayed out loud for a red pickup truck to come and pick us all up. About a minute later, a red pickup truck came and picked us all up. It was quite a testimony to those men, like a real miracle. I realize that Christianity has gotten a bad rap lately in the progressive and atheist circles, but remember that the institution is not the Source. The map is not the territory. You can pray to Jesus or to the Father or to the Source or to the Fullness of God. They are all listening. If you pray for revelation with an open heart, your heart will be filled and you will know. Millions of people throughout the years have done just that and have come out the other side walking with God, walking with Jesus. This has nothing to do with salvation or church doctrine. This is going to the Source. I love you. I’m proud of you for opening up and exploring these spiritual depths—onward and upward. In our most recent correspondence, he says, Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions in some detail. I will take a while to read and reread your answers. I have found the Simple Explanation book on Audible, so I am going to download it and listen in the car as a starting point. Gnosticism is complex, he says, yet also appealing. There are a few things that don’t seem necessary, like a complex celestial hierarchy with different Aeons and their pre-assigned roles, rather like cogs in a great machine. As someone who has spent a lot of time with historical texts, this name and place function in a heavenly order feels like the product of an ancient worldview. As we know, the establishment church and the kings loved order and it was stressed for their own reasons. However, just as modern humans are all about individuality, at times overly, ancient societies were obsessed with kingship and order. So just as it is a feature of New Age religions that it’s all about individual Self-expression, does it follow that the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was reflecting the perception of a rigid order and hierarchy in heaven? This business of a complex organizational structure in heaven with angels, archangels and the rest of it kind of feels like the product of a human imagination. Is that a fair point? He goes on to say, however, putting that aside, all of the key questions that have made me rule out religions in the past, the cruel concept of original sin in Christianity and likewise karmic punishing people for past life mistakes ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    28 min