Gnostic Insights

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. And Happy Easter, everybody! This is the time of year when Christians all over the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. Holy Week leading up to the resurrection is a rough one because it’s the passion of the Christ where the scriptures talk about and people reenact the trial of Christ, his walk with the cross to the hill of Calvary, and then his agony on the cross.

We all know that story. But what does it mean? Why is there su...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week, I had a good conversation on the telephone with my brother that I thought I’d share that with you today. It’s another aspect of what I call Gnostic Psychology that my brother Bill, Dr. Bill Puett, and I have been developing. He wanted to share with me an article about psychopathy and his Gnostic insight about the article.

These conversations started when I was probably about four years old, and Bill was a young teenager at that point. He was already a ph...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The goal here at this Gnostic Insights podcast and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack is to share with you information from the Nag Hammadi, primarily from a book in the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, concerning the gnosis of our existence.

The reason that it’s important to discover this gnosis is because gnosis is your personal reassurance that you are loved and not alone. Gnosis isn’t just about knowledge or arcane knowledge or mythologies or uncovering past histories of old religions. Gnosis is wisdom. It’s understanding. And primarily this g...

The animation is posted to YouTube. Click here to watch!

I had the children’s book converted into an animation, set to my narration of a previous episode. The animation is alright, but I bet that within a few months AI will have developed to the point where the animation would be quite a bit more polished. We did the best we could with the tools at hand. I hope you enjoy this experiment and find the overall effect to be pleasant and educational.

This animation of the book is not aimed at children, but pi...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.

First I have to tell you, what was lost has been found. I went back to White City VA yesterday and had an acupuncture treatment. And on my way out of the building, I saw a maintenance man, a custodian at his cart with his broom. I thought to myself, well, if anybody should be able to find something, it would be this guy. I told him I lost a book two weeks ago, somewhere between 201 and 209 in a lady’s room on a windowsill.

Last week, I started talking about the nature of this Gnostic Reformation that I’m describing here. It turns out that the approach to Gnosticism that I am sharing with you here at Gnostic Insights is a reformation of what is understood to be Gnosticism. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode yet, it would be really good for you to start there. Go back and listen to or read the episode called, This Gnostic Reformation.

I didn’t read any books about Gnosticism; I actually read the Nag Hammadi itself. I used my own meth...

I occasionally get comments from people that the Gnosticism I’m sharing with you here at Gnostic Insights is different than the Gnosticism they’re accustomed to or the Gnosticism they see elsewhere on the internet. And that is very true, and that is why the Substack is called the Gnostic Reformation.

This Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you—yes, it comes out of my own personal gnosis. It is a compilation of both Valentinian Gnosticism, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, but also I’ve combined it with my own Theory of Everything...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. It’s been a few weeks since I recorded a live episode, and here I am. Now, I don’t have any particular Gnostic insights for you today. However, I do have some interesting news to share and a very strange experience I had a couple of days ago. So, let’s start with the news.

One of the reasons I don’t have a new episode for you this week, in particular a philosophical episode, is because I’ve been working on a stage play called A M...

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 tal...

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 common...

God is loving and merciful, not judgmental and cruel

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. 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 readi...

I thought today I would share with you a book 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 do...

When I first conceived of my theory of everything named “A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything” back in 2008, I was unfamiliar with Gnosticism. A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is presented in secular terms, using common concepts from all fields of human endeavor from math and science on through religion, psychology, and sociology. In A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, God is usually referred to as Metaversal Consciousness, and we here on this plane carry that consciousness forward into this life as Units of Consciousness. A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything was written to appeal to folks who usually don’...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.

This morning I’m going to read to you a large section out of the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book out of the Nag Hammadi scriptures that I generally follow and teach from. This is about the distinction between the Father and the Son.

And again, remember there is no gender. The Father is our Father. It is the source of consciousness out of which all of us come. All consciousness, all life, all love in the universe comes from this One Source. An...

Is transgenderism a mental disorder? Is transexualism a delusional pursuit? Is sexual identity a cultural value arbitrarily assigned at birth? This is the topic of today’s discussion.

My first experience with a person seeking transexual modification was as a private practice marriage counselor in Idaho, back in the early 1980’s. This fellow was seeking an official diagnosis of transexualism as required by the state in order to proceed with surgical procedures. He had been denied certification by other psychologists and was hoping I would provide him with the needed diagnosis.

One session was enough for...

I had another episode planned for today, but at the last minute I decided to rerun this Christmas episode for you. I think this will become our traditional Christmas episode here at Gnostic Insights. And, if you are new to this podcast, welcome! Next week’s episode will be controversial, so I thought it best to wait until after Christmas for its release.

Today, we’re going to look at the nature of the Christ—the who, what, why of Christ. Most people are familiar with seeing the baby Jesus in the manger and that’s what we celeb...

Last week’s episode, The Key to Gnostic Cosmology, was well-timed to greet the slew of new subscribers who joined The Gnostic Reformation as a result of the wonderful review by The New Unhinged that appeared on Mariah’s  Substack website on November 28, 2025. It’s titled: Roast for Relief #17: The Gnostic Who Broke My Brain in the Best Way  If you haven’t seen the piece yet, please hightail it over there and take a look. It’s funny and reverentially irreverent at the same time. I feel honored by Mariah’s appreciation and the hours she spent on the review.

In 2019 I posted an article to my new Gnostic Gospel blog called, If All Are Redeemed, Why Not Be Sinful? And I’d like to share that with you today.

One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ and all will someday return to the Paradise of the Fullness. Yay! Everyone’s going to Heaven! No one is going to hell, not even the Fallen angels. What joy! This seems to fly in the face of Christian orthodoxy that promotes the idea that only those humans who confess a be...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I think we’ve got a lot of new listeners now and new subscribers. And since you haven’t been with us from the beginning, I’d like to review the Gnostic cosmology.

A basic premise of Gnosticism is that we are all born with gnosis inherent within us. We already have the answers. We already are our perfect Selves. But because of the nature of the never-ending war that we find ourselves in here in this material cosmos, we forget our inherent nature. And we beg...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.

Last week we started an episode called Gnostic Psychology Slideshow, Part One, and today we’re going to wrap that up. It’s a slideshow that I presented at my class at Southern Oregon University on the Simple Gnostic Gospel, and so I will be describing for you and posting the transcript on the GnosticInsights.com website and also at Substack. In the written transcripts, you’ll be able to see the PowerPoint slides, which really, I think, helps to clear things up, to clear up confus...

Welcome to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp and I’m your host. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.

And welcome to my new listeners and readers. So glad to have you aboard. And of course, I’m always very grateful for those of you who have been with this series since the beginning.

This week was my final lecture at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University on the Gnostic Gospel and the topic was Gnostic Psychology. So I’m going to share with you that f...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to share with you the PowerPoint lecture that I gave yesterday at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University, and the topic is Christ and the Third Order of Powers. We began with a review using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart, and this is just a very… this is too difficult of a chart to describe to you.

You’ll have to see it, so I recommend that you go to GnosticInsights.com and find this episode, or the Gnostic Reformation. This i...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, and I’d like to welcome our new readers and listeners.

What is the Antichrist? By definition, of course, the Antichrist would be the opposite of the Christ. So, before we understand the Antichrist, it would be helpful to understand what we can about the Christ.

Christ, according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, is composed of the Aeons of the Fullness, both in their aggregated entirety known as the Pleroma of the Fullness of God, or the hierarchy of the Fu...

This is the lecture I delivered to my adult education class this week. It caused quite a stir. One dedicated atheist dropped the class at this point in a huff. It seems that the class is quite alright discussing gnostic concepts in the abstract, but when it comes down to Earth, then it gets real. Suddenly it’s a war between science and religion. The part that ticked off some of the students was demonstrating conscious life within the cells. In other words, consciousness comes down to the cellular level and then levels up through intelligent design to become us...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review the relationship between fractal consciousness and the outflow of consciousness through Logos and the Aeons, and how the consciousness of Logos led to the Fall. I’ll be reading several verses from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi books.

If you are new to Gnostic Insights, don’t worry about grasping everything I say. Just listen and go with the flow. The gnosis will reveal itself, so relax.

AEONS

“Each one of the aeons is a nam...

We recently had an episode called Synchronicities, broadcast on September 13th of 2025. In that episode I reviewed a Why Files episode about synchronicities and shared some amazing synchronicities that look like coincidences, but they’re just too precise to be coincidental. They give an indication of this very strange nature of the universe that we live in, and in that episode we discussed how the quantum mechanics of this universe at the quantum level seem to explain how these amazing synchronicities occur.

In the synchronicities episode, I talked about one of the funny things about quantum mechanics—that...

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what Gnosis is, and hopefully be able to actually realize Gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts.

By the way, what is Gnosis? We keep talking about Gnosis and Gnostic. Gnosis means knowing, and in the Gnostic frame of reference, Gnosis refers to re...

This week I appeared as a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. I’m going to make that YouTube video this week’s episode. The interview went well and the viewers like it very much, judging by their Comments of the episode. I’m including the YouTube link here on the transcript. The episode is called “What Is The Gnostic Pleroma? ”

The episode lasts an hour and a half. People in Comments said it was their favorite episode from Aeon Byte. Seemed to cause quite a positive stir among the viewers.

It’s funny, when the intervie...

This week I re-watched an episode of The Why Files. Are you familiar with The Why Files? It’s a very fun show I watch on YouTube regularly. The episode I watched again was called Synchronicities, the Science Behind Your Meaningful Coincidences, and this was first broadcast in June of 2025. I enjoyed it a lot. I’d seen it before, but I wanted to watch it again.

You know, we talk about synchronicities in the Gnostic community. It’s a word that was created by Carl Jung, and as we know, Carl Jung was Gnostic, and he, in par...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Boy, am I busy lately. I’m preparing a 10-week course to teach “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel” at Southern Oregon University, which begins in a couple of weeks, so I’m busy with that. I’ve also been doing a lot of publishing. I’m waiting to receive the hardback copy of Children of the Fullness, a Gnostic Myth. Once I see that and that it looks good, I can release that book as a hardcopy and hopefully get it into libraries. That’s my ultimate goal...

My brother, Bill, and I had a good long talk the other day concerning what humans refer to as “death,” and its connection to the apparent material nature of the universe. Here’s the upshot of that conversation.

If you visit my gnostic websites or have bought your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, you’ve seen my diagrams many times by now. Perhaps you remember that my own gnosis was unlocked through several years of contemplation on the simple phrase: “mud up, spirit down.” That little ditty eventually turned into these two diagrams:

Here’s your chance to get a free copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I’m giving away free ebook editions this weekend, August 23 through Tuesday, August 26. In return, I only ask your to leave a review for the book on amazon.com. The free book download counts as a verified buyer purchase and qualifies you to leave a book review. We need to boost our amazon reviews so the algorithm will favor the book in searches. Please help out. Don’t feel you have to have achieved any degree of gnosis before leaving a review. If you...

A piece of business here– I have taken down the contact me form on the Gnostic Insights website because all I ever get from it is junk emails that jam up my box. So if you want to contact me, probably the best way to do it is to go to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack and then leave a comment underneath the latest podcast episode. Then I will definitely see what you are writing to me. Or you could contact me through LinkedIn, but I don’t want you to contact me if you’re trying to sell me som...

I thought today what we’d look at is the entire run—the overall big picture. You can’t get a bigger picture than this of our existence and our universe. So this is the overall, overarching flow of consciousness from the Source to us and then after we pass how it all rolls up. This is the entire run, or cosmology, all rolled up into one package and presented for you today.

All of this comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. The Nag Hammadi was a set of ancient books that were dug up out...

My neighbor’s dear dog, Morgan, passed away last week. She was a terrific working dog who helped out with Search and Rescue operations, finding people lost in the woods, alive or dead. We held a Memorial service for Morgan on Sunday. All of her doggie friends were invited, puzzled to find her missing at her own party. I sang a rendition of Amazing Grace, adapted for dogs. Here I am singing it, tears and all.

Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost but now am fo...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This is a repeat of an earlier podcast. It’s the most complete explanation I’ve ever given on archons, and since I mentioned archons in last week’s episode, I wanted to give the full explanation of what are archons, because archons are mentioned quite often in Gnostic circles.

Also, a piece of news, the children’s book is completed. It’s gorgeous. It’s exciting.  It’s for the little ones. It’s for you to read to your children or grandchildren, ages two to six, probably...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. We’re having some summertime reviews here. Today’s episode is a replay that was first broadcast on August 20th of 2022, and it’s all about the Demiurge and the boundary that was put up around this material universe. We have a lot of new listeners and readers at the Substack. And so I think that this is new information to a lot of you. And for those of you who have been with me for several years now, it’s always a good idea to review. So, here we...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review one of the basic original teachings here at Gnostic Insights, and that is how what we call the Fullness or the Pleroma of God—how it came to be, what it is, what does it mean when the New Testament, for example, says the phrase the Fullness of God.

For Christians this generally just is an idea that God is big and great and huge and it’s full, it’s full of everything, the fullness. Yes, but it’s actually...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to read one of the books out of the Nag Hammadi that we haven’t talked about before. It’s called Authoritative Discourse, Authentikos Logos, and it was part of the original Nag Hammadi codices. I’ve been thinking of codices as scrolls but actually they were the first form of bound books. It’s a very short book, unlike the Tripartite Tractate, which is the second longest book in the Nag Hammadi. This is one of the shortest books in the Nag Hammadi, but it was...

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I have another treat for you this week, a conversation with my brother Bill and myself concerning what is knowledge? How do we know what is true? This is a field of philosophy known as epistemology. My brother Bill was a philosophy professor. He taught this at the university level for many years. I hope you enjoy this conversation and you learn something from it.

[Cyd] 

Okay, recording in progress. Here we are. Hi, B...