Gnostic Insights

About Gnostic Insights

Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

Publisher

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.

Category

education · education · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

1 May 2022

Latest episode

10 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

225 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   10 Oct 2026

   Mining Gnosis Through the Tao Te Ching–verses 1 & 31

   You needn't become a Taoist to be a Gnostic. These are just labels. But truth is truth, and there is only one truth.

2. 

   2 Oct 2026

   Mining Gnosis Through the Tao Te Ching–verse 41

   Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week I started hopefully a series, of mining gnosis through the Tao Te Ching. Last week’s episode explained the process by which I mine gnosis through the Tao. (https://gnosticinsights.com/mining-gnosis-through-the-tao-te-ching-verse-40/) I’ve been mining that gnosis for well over 20 years without even realizing that it was going to turn into Gnosticism or a Gnostic interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. The Tao Te Ching is an ancient Chinese manuscript. It’s full of gnosis, and I have found it to be entirely compatible with the gnosis taught through the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I use here at Gnostic Insights to share my gnosis with everyone. Today we’re going to do another verse from the Tao Te Ching, the next verse in the book, verse 41. I’m not going to explain to you again the process by which I do this, but let me begin by reading to you Jonathan Starr’s interpretation of the Tao Te Ching (https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Ching-Definitive-Lao-Tzu/dp/158542269X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=8PW242S3W7S6&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.JCYSw4WMwkT1lBKGPS2kQ09cv-vXIkUR5PVAkQ6h72ksuPXDwhhnb2YsCw0esfeC2e1wGsYzVNnUTYFd8v_KDa-NWc9cN1NfY_A3KvC6-LDyiwbm14ZGnpK4gIIOHKZCblrY5MkBe8H8P4r2M2aEb5kFMWiuN4LggIYETlkKcIKoJ6ZkFCgDNhnpGy5-zeAOVH2azzeDwQ-QUmRrfd3c21xXVpYxMQZxa_5y0BIojTM.ta6ZRWfLVVKa4xkqPc9cgeeI_TvMlh_sbAV9QFG3gPk&dib_tag=se&keywords=jonathan+star+tao+te+ching&qid=1790860674&sprefix=%2Caps%2C220&sr=8-1), verse 41, and here’s how it goes. The best seeker hears of Tao. He strives with great effort to know it. When an average seeker hears of Tao, he thinks of it now and again. When the poorest seeker hears of Tao, he laughs out loud. Tao is always becoming what we have need for it to become. If it could not do this, it would not be Tao. There is an old saying: The clear way seems clouded. The straight way seems crooked. The sure way seems unsteady. The greatest power seems weak. The purest white seems tainted. The abundant seems empty. The stable seems shaky. The certain seems false. The great square has no corners. The great vessel is never filled. A beginner may be clumsy, but after practice, what talent! A large drum may sit silently, but when banged, what noise! Tao lies hidden, yet it alone is the glorious light of this world. So that’s verse 41 by Jonathan Star. Now, for comparison’s sake, let’s look at another translation of the Tao Te Ching, this one by David Bentley Hart from his new book, Tao Te Ching, A New Translation (https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-New-Translation/dp/0300284993/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1G0OQRRNXILU5&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.BJwrICEBViCMYepql1bJgZx1hWTxbBYVie6LXw04AlFpgvMd5s7Fekd10fSTCfcf9Hu4tGYqY4siFHm1HJPl1sqEul3wimhMgRu7_h6gCXCpuSJ8juLVZijkVyoz9h54Njj9GWrmdvimd7-ItgtFJGvN28IjKkpKbuJifFalS_FXRpxvRbs63BXk9Tt0_1UKDN_vghkkqBXTb1_Vuhuf8AmsFazSWw-ng4qkiLIpGUg.ug8JIUQcvcCYw-UUGOPKURfJHie6u9BMm42SWPz3IIs&dib_tag=se&keywords=david+bentley+hart+tao+te+ching&qid=1790951367&sprefix=david+bentley+hart+tao+te+ching%2Caps%2C177&sr=8-1). And thank you very much, Gabriella, one of our followers, who recommended it. The very best scholar listens to the Way and lives diligently in accord with it. The scholar of middling gifts listens to the Way, at one moment believing, at another losing faith. The poorest scholar listens to the Way and finds it risible. Then again, if he did not laugh at it, it would not really be the Way. These then be our maxims: The way of enlightenment seems dim and obscure. Every advance along the Way seems like a retreat. The easy level path seems arduous and uneven. The most exalted power seems like a plunging chasm. The purest clarity seems tarnished and dark. The most abundant power seems impoverished. The most formidable power seems like frailty. What is most substantial seems fluid and inconstant. The ideal square has no corners. The finest vessel takes till evening to perfect. The sweetest melody is hushed and tenuous. The perfect form has no shape. The way is hidden and nameless. Yet, for just this reason, the Way knows how to nourish and fulfill. So that’s verse 41, interpreted by David Bentley Hart. Now I’m going to share with you my interpretation of verse 41. And remember, all of these interpretations come from a myriad of choices, because we’re dealing with pictograms. And you can interpret the pictogram in many, many ways. I’m going to go through verse 41 line by line, pictogram by pictogram, and interpret it in a more obviously Gnostic type of way. The best, wisest, highest, student or type of person, hears Tao earnestly, attentively, with devotion, and lives in accordance with it, practices with diligence. The average, middle type of person hears about Tao and sometimes follows, sometimes believes, and sometimes doubts, sometimes loses it. The lesser, lowest, inferior type of person hears about Tao and ridicules it, laughs out loud. If they did not laugh, it would not be thusly the Tao. Now, before going on, let me explain that Tao means the Way, the path, and it is the Way of the Father. It is the path of glory. The Tao is the emanation of what we call the Father in Gnosticism. So whenever the Tao Te Ching speaks of Tao, think of it as the word of God, or the Way of the Father. And these first three stanzas described the three types of human, and interestingly enough, these exact three types of humans appear throughout Gnosticism. The Tripartite Tractate describes these three types of humans in verses 98 through 100. The best, wisest, highest type of person is called the pneumatic, P-N-E-U-M-A-T-I-C, also interpreted as the right ones. The pneumatic, those of God, are on the right. Those of the good thought, workers and servants of the Father, of the Father’s beauty and rest. The average middle type of person, as it says in the Tao, maps to what in Gnosticism we call the psychic, the fiery ones, the middle ones. They are characterized by a lust for power and ambition, and that is most humans. That’s from verse 100. And the lesser, the lowest, the inferior type of person, who laughs at Tao and ridicules it, they are referred to as the hylic, the left, the dark ones, the last. And they are brought forth by envy and jealousy. That’s verse 100. So, in other words, those who ridicule the path, who ridicule the Father—it’s their envy and jealousy that pulls them down. The middle type, the psychic, the fiery ones, the middle ones, they are characterized by emotion. They’re emotional. And this emotion brings them to a lust for power and ambition, because the emotions are resonating to the fallen ego, or the ruler of this world, the demiurge. And all of the emotions that get stirred up down here in the cosmos by the demiurge and the archons, they are meant to engage the majority of humans in fighting each other in the never-ending war for power and control, because of their ambition, and just being stirred up and upset all the time. The fewest type is the pneumatic, and those are the teachers of the Word of God, the saints, the prophets, the children of God in the truest sense, in that they have the heart of God, the heart of the Father. They’re not doing this ritualistically or rule-bound. They’re not hypocritically pretending to be good moral people. They are good moral people, and that’s how they view the world, through the eyes of the Father. Carrying on now in verse 41, Therefore, constructive sayings, proverbs, and maxims, such as the following: The enlightened Tao is the path to illumination, seems obscure, dark, and dull. Advancement toward Tao seems like, or resembles, retreat, falling backwards. And in a Gnostic way, we would say that what the seeker is retreating from, the retreat, the falling backward, is from worldly concerns and patterns. Because in order to follow the Way, you need to disengage from the world. The Bible says we are in the world, but not of the world. So, it’s like water and oil—they can be in the same bucket, but they do not mix. The next verse says, The straight and smooth Tao, path or Way, seems like, resembles, roughness—uneven, and difficult. I interpret this to mean that the actual path of Tao, the Way of God, the Way of the Father, the Way of glory, the glory beam, is straight, but it seems difficult, uneven. The path of glory coming down from above is true and straight and perfect, but our attempts to walk it are difficult. The next line is, The highest, exalted, superior Te—that’s power or virtue. It’s in the title of the book, the Tao Te Ching. The Way of Virtue resembles an empty chasm. So, the virtue around us in the world is like a vacuum. It’s an emptiness, it’s a chasm. And I would say from a Gnostic point of view that that is because the world is full of the Demiurge. We second-order powers were sent here to bring the love, consciousness, and life of the Father into this chasm. So, the Way of Te is the Way that we are to behave as second-order powers, spreading love and consciousness. Also concerning this idea that the highest Te seems empty, in the Tripartite Tractate, verses 59-65, it says, describing the Father’s relationship to the Totalities, that have been emanated from the Son–so, this is way upstream, this is before any humans, before any second-order powers, even at the very inception of the flowering of the Father into the fullness of consciousness that comes down to us—the Father doesn’t reveal Himself to the Totalities, yet they yearn for Him. What they know of the Father is but a trace of Him, revealed as a pleasant odor. So, the Father does not reveal Himself to the Totalities, which are the Totalities of the variables of the Son, all of the properties of the Son, but yet they seek the Father, like they’re pulled into a vacuum. The Father doesn’t reveal Himself, but, like a beautiful aroma, they long to reunite with the Source. It’s another way of looking at that verse. Carrying on with verse 41. Most perfect and pure clarity, innocence, looks like, or appears, sullied, tarnished, disgraceful. That is puzzling, isn’t it? I think it’s because those who actually express the path of Tao, or the Way of the Father, righteousness, they can be painted by others as disgraceful, tarnished, sullied. Their motives are denigrated. They’re made fun of, in the manner that the Hylics make fun of righteousness itself. So, even if you are passing through this world in a perfect and pure and innocent manner, you will look to others tarnished, disgraceful. The next verse says, The most abundant, overflowing, far-reaching Te, which is power and virtue, appears insufficient, defective, lacking. So, this is saying that the most abundant, glorious, righteous path that you may be on seems like it’s not enough, and it seems like it’s lacking something. I mean, after all, where’s your ambition to succeed? Where’s your ambition to acquire a big house and a lot of material goods? What are you lacking that you don’t have that drive? The next verse says, Firmly established and vigorous Te, power, virtue, goodness, appears unsteady, flimsy, forced—like a stuck door. Now, we could also interpret that to mean that we are not faithful in our righteousness. We act righteously, or are in the glory beam and doing God’s work, but then we fall out, and then we have to force our way back into that glory beam, not because it is rejecting us, but because we have stumbled and fallen away. So, we have to come back to it, and the pictogram is forcing a stuck door open. The next verse says, Genuine, solid, substantial, reality, truth, and virtue, seems fluid, unsubstantial, uncertain, faded. This is because we’re living in the world, and it has different values, demiurgic values, than the Father and the pleroma of the Fullness of God. The virtues are the solid and substantial reality. The Father, Son, and Fullness hold and dispense truth and virtue to us freely. But to us, it’s insubstantial. You can’t grab it. You can’t hold on to it. You can’t prove it to an unbeliever. It seems like it’s faded. The next verse is, The supreme—that is, greatest, perfect—region has no corners, boundaries, or angles. It cannot be limited or contained. And that is the Father’s kingdom. That’s the ethereal plane. The Father itself, the Source, is illimitable. It’s formless. It has no corners, no boundaries. It cannot be limited or contained. The next verse says, The supreme—that is, the greatest, the most perfect—vessel, implement, talent, or tool, is slow to mature. I would say that we are the vessels into which the Spirit of the Fullness of God lives, is poured, emanates. We carry it with us, and we are slow to mature. Verse 95 of the Tripartite Tractate says, The seed of promise is guarded for an upcoming mission. The next verse of the Tao Te Ching says, The supreme, greatest, perfect, tone, or sound, or we could say vibratory pattern, lacks sound, is silent, is hard to hear. The Tripartite Tractate refers to the Totalities, which were the first emanations of the Son—before they became the Aeons stacked in their hierarchy, they were called the Totalities of the ALL, and they were simply all of the properties and powers of the Son, sitting there in that starburst pattern—they all acted as one. They were coexistent with the Son. They didn’t have their own identities or egos at that point. The Tripartite Tractate describes the Totalities as the Silences. They do not have voice until they give glory and thereby become self-aware. It was through giving glory to the Son and the Father that the Totalities noticed themselves—that they were each individual properties—and that noticing of themselves immediately caused them to migrate and arrange themselves into their proper positions, places, duties, and names. And that is what I refer to as their egos. And in the beginning there, the egos of the Aeons—it’s all good. It’s merely their designation. It’s not a striving for power or anything. That all comes from the fall. The next verse says, The supreme, greatest, perfect form has no form, material, or substance. Speaking of the illimitable characteristics of the Father. The next verse says, Tao remains hidden, concealed, in the background, without name, nameless. For this exact reason, Tao knows how to, is excellent at, providing support, nourishment, fulfillment, and completion. So this is a paradoxical type of verse, because the Tao, or the Father, the Father’s righteousness, the Fullness of God, remains hidden and concealed in the background. You can’t put a finger on it. It’s hard to name. But because of its nature, it is able to get inside and carry us forward. It is all around us. It’s imminent and eminent, meaning it’s within us and outside of us. By the way, in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I described that shape, that basic shape of energy that is this cosmos, as toroidal, the shape of basically a donut or a bagel with a zero-point hole in the middle. So picture a donut with a tiny, tiny center. And I’ll put an illustration in the transcript here. I hypothesize that the bubble called our cosmos is shaped like a torus with a zero point hole in the middle. We are floating in the sea of the Father’s originating consciousness and it not only surrounds us but flows down the funnel into our here and now and out into our material universe. It floats in the sea of consciousness of the Father, both at the tremendous scale—our entire cosmos, our universe is wrapped in a torus—but each one of us, each one of our parts, our cells, our organs, all of the units of consciousness in us, our Self, is shaped like a torus, energetically or spiritually, you could say. And the thing about the torus, when you think about it, if it’s floating in the sea of illimitable consciousness of God, think of it like a torus-shaped bubble. So that means that the center of the torus is completely available to be touched by God, because God pours down the funnel at the top of that donut into that hole, see? And the zero-point field at the middle is here and now, and then it passes down below as energy, as karma, as history. This is Simple Explanation stuff. It’s not exactly out of the Tripartite Tractate, I admit, or out of the Tao Te Ching. This is my gnosis, having to do with toruses. And my long-running blog, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything (https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-simple-explanation-of-fractals.html), and the book of the same name (https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Explanation-Absolutely-Everything-Conscious/dp/B08JB5WQP7/ref=sr_1_2?crid=O0F6LO2WWPH6&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XdZirVIgYnGshUkLDLM4cH7_E2xhOh3j93qPAMcCLe4Gevvoh6PqZSnNTKy-5UIkrglvxOnoeJ9G4TnhYMwrOASbbnZowrVmCEJlSyS4FcBO0ZYySYUEIjjQ8ejiRL6-6wU-cVMWb-1Svrz00a5B4eCb3js5EOpFnvebXLWarHXe8aQJpIds8YiNwuaPrBnf.YXftkEl0nr-XVZrTMpt3sTiuD-VbCYPs0SilMLMtcBE&dib_tag=se&keywords=a+simple+explanation+of+absolutely+everything&qid=1790869222&sprefix=a+simple+explanation+of+absol%2Caps%2C182&sr=8-2) that you can still purchase at Amazon, describes everything in that torus shape and shows you all of the motions and flow of the torus. The reason I bring it up is that if you properly picture the shape of the torus, you can see that the entire exterior is bathed in the Father’s essence. The outside is out there touching the Father. And when you come down into the funnel, which is still outside, it’s still touching the Father, it comes together at the center, at the zero-point field at the middle of the torus. And now, all of a sudden, you’re inside. Personal history (karma) wraps continually around our unit of consciousness, along with our meme bundle (beliefs), and flows back through the funnnel at the top to inform our future choices. So this is how the outside of consciousness reaches the inside of each unit of consciousness. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what I’m saying. It’s a big, big concept. And that was verse 41 of the Tao Te Ching. I’ll carry on with another one of these next week if you tell me that you like this. So leave me your comments, and I’ll continue going through the Tao Te Ching in a gnostic, interpretive manner. Please, I’d like to dialogue with you, so leave your comments, questions, anything you have. These are only my gnostic interpretations of the Tao Te Ching and they are not, by any means exhaustive. God bless us all, and Onward and Upward! Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form. Name * First Last Email * Stripe Credit Card * Choose your item * Item A - $10.00 Item B - $25.00 Item C - $50.00 Total $0.00 Submit

3. 

   26 Sept 2026

   Mining Gnosis Through the Tao Te Ching–verse 40

   Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. You know, I often tell you that I’ve been a Christian since I was about five years old, and I’ve been a follower of Jesus in particular, sometimes going to church, most often not going to church. But I’ve always loved Jesus, and I’ve had many dreams and visions of being with Jesus, and this has shaped my current Gnosticism and the reason why I favor the Tripartite Tractate as the book out of the Nag Hammadi codices that I gravitate to, because it’s definitely Christian. The myth is different than our typical Christian myth. However, the characters are the same, if they do take on slightly different roles. For example, Christianity conflates the Son, Jesus, and the Christ as one character. But in Gnostic Christianity, the Son is the first emanation of the Father, and this is simply to indicate—this has nothing to do with gender—this simply indicates that the Father is so illimitable and immense and unfathomable, yet the Father wanted to be known, wanted to have companionship, let’s say, and so the Father emanated His “only begotten Son,” as we say in Christianity. That wasn’t Jesus or Christ, that was the Son. And the Son is like the bucket dipped into the sea of the great consciousness of the Father. The Son is a particular entity with a particular countenance or face, and the Son contains all of the attributes of the originating consciousness, the Source. The Son is more relatable, because like the Son, we too are monads, which means we are a particular entity. We have a particular point of view, and our point of view here on earth is our physical point of view, what I’m looking at versus what you’re looking at, but it’s also the point of view of our meme bundle, of our ideology, of the way we think. It’s our point of view. Each one of us is unique. Obviously, we’re each unique. Our physical bodies are similar but different. We were born in similar but different manners. We live similar but different lives. We eat similar food, but it’s always different. Everything about each one of us is unique, and in a spiritual way, we think that our uniqueness contributes to the totality of the Fullness, to the totality of the experience of what it means to be alive here on this planet Earth. That’s why each person needs to grow into who they are meant to be. We have our temporal worldly parents, mom and dad, the ones who birthed us and gave us our genetic inheritance, but we also have our aeonic parents. There are Aeons in the Fullness of God, ethereal beings, a multitude, an infinite number of Aeons, and they get together in various combinations, different Aeons with their different positions, places, points of view, duties. It’s their address, but they are otherwise all identical because they all are emanations of the Son. They are all variables within the Son. So we have these aeonic parents. They get together and procreate us. We are the descendants of the Aeons of the Father. We descend into this material space. We are descendants from our aeonic parents as well as our physical human parents. So in the same manner as we inherit our genetics from our parents, what we’re going to look like, how our bodies go together—that all comes through our human parental lineage—but through our aeonic lineage, we inherit who we are meant to be. That is the perfection of our Self, our particular combination, and we’re each different, we’re each unique aspects of the Aeons of God. So if someone is a great mathematician, or a beautiful singer, or a wonderful mother, or housekeeper, or a person with any sort of talent whatsoever—and we all have our unique talents—those are the things we inherit from our aeonic parents, from the archetypes—from the archetypal singer, the archetypal mother, the archetypal Aeon, with its unique combination of talents. At least this is my interpretation. This is Cyd’s interpretation of how these things go together. So we all inherit the Fullness of God, the one true Self that is the reflection of the Aeons. Just as the Aeons are all the variables of the Son, we are their fractal fruit. So we carry the Fullness of God within each part of our living bodies. And then we have our aeonic personalities on top of that, which is the particular Aeons which figure most prominently in our aeonic inheritance, the archetypes that we inherit. By the way, this is where C.G. Jung gained his notion of archetypes. If you’ve ever taken the Myers-Briggs personality survey—introvert or extrovert, sensory or intuitive, thought-driven or feeling-driven, step-by-step planner or a big-picture gestalt type—these are the variables of the Myers-Briggs, and those are all variables that reflect Jung’s categories of archetypes. And when you put all those together, there are many, many combinations of possible personality types. Maybe you’re familiar with that system. Well, that’s based upon this Gnostic philosophy, because Jung purchased one of the Gnostic gospels from the Nag Hammadi codices, and it was translated first into German, and then he took his transpersonal theory of psychology out of what he learned from the gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate, which is the same book that we study here at Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation. But that’s not what I’m actually here to talk about today. What I really wanted to share with you was the Tao Te Ching. Tao is spelled T-A-O, but pronounced Dow. Te is T-E, and Ching. So the Tao is the way, the eternal, ethereal way. The Te is its expression here on Earth, or in the cosmos, and Ching means book. So the Tao Te Ching is the book of the way and its expressions, and is said to have been composed by a sage named Lao Tzu ages ago, around 500 BC, during the time of Confucius. However, probably it’s also an amalgam of many ancient wisdom texts and insights from many Chinese sages put together by Lao Tzu. Now the legend of Lao Tzu is that he was an old man. He had served the emperor. He was the keeper of the royal archives in the state of Chu. He was tired. He wanted to go away and die. And so he was driving his ox out of the city and away from humanity so he could be by himself and pass away. But the gatekeeper of the city saw that the sage was about to leave the world, and he said, Master, you’re about to renounce this world. Please compose a book for me. And it is said that Lao Tzu came down from his ox, sat down, and for several hours wrote a book in one sitting. And then he handed it back to the gatekeeper, got back on his ox, and traveled to the West. Now this is a symbolic telling because, first off, he needed to pass through the gatekeeper to leave the city. And it was the gatekeeper who implored him for wisdom before he would leave and never share his wisdom anymore. Lao Tzu wrote the book in one sitting, and this particular episode of history is captured in many, many ancient Chinese paintings. So if you ever see the old man on the ox or the old man sitting and writing, that’s Lao Tzu composing the Tao Te Ching. And leaving through the gate that goes to the West implies that this teaching was for all peoples. You may wonder why I am talking about the Tao Te Ching here in this Gnostic venue. The answer is that the Tao Te Ching helped me mine my own gnosis years prior to discovering the books of the Nag Hammadi, proving that we can all mine gnosis without having access to so-called Gnostic texts. As we seek out the Truth in religions and sacred writings, it is our own gnosis that draws the understanding out of these sources. Steeping oneself in religion without using discernment to mine the gnosis therein does us no good. Merely being “religious” does nothing to advance your wisdom or understanding of the world and God if you do not mine the gnosis to be found there. But if we read with a gnostic heart and mind, then the gnosis is there to be found. When you find a verse or precept that clicks with you—that is your gnosis being mined. And, why do we call it “mining” instead of “learning”? It’s because we carry the Fullness of God within us, as I was saying. Yet, we forget it because of the confusion in the world. So we mine the gnosis that is already an inheritance of our aeonic parents. We don’t learn it from books, or religions, or podcasts. We don’t learn it from the world laterally. We mine the gnosis that is within and we look upward to the Father for discernment. Today, we are going to mine the Tao Te Ching. Tao is the supreme reality, what I often call the Father, with the base consciousness of the Source. Lao Tzu called it the Tao, the Way, the Path. Te is the shape and the power of Tao as manifest here below. So Tao is the transcendent reality, and Te is the imminent reality. That is, transcendent being above, ethereal, immaterial; Te being here we are, we’re in the material world now. How can the Tao be manifest as the Te? Te does reflect the Tao. It’s the virtue practiced here below. I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching since I was a teenager, and at first it was just completely mysterious. It read like a book of poetry where you don’t really understand what’s going on, but the words were so beautiful and went together so nicely that I picked it up throughout my lifetime to read it. Then in 2001, a translator and writer by the name of Jonathan Star put out his version of the Tao Te Ching called The Definitive Edition. And this is a wonderful book of the Tao Te Ching, because Star not only repeats the various verses of the wisdom, but the book includes a translation key. He gives first one possible translation of the Tao Te Ching for all 81 verses, so it reads like a regular book of the Tao Te Ching that you would pick up from any of the other authors. But then he gives a verbatim translation with notes for each and every verse, and that’s at the back of the book. And that verbatim translation includes the original Chinese pictorial symbol for each and every word and all of the possible meanings that that symbol could mean. See, ancient Chinese is different than the way we write now. We have these characters that stand for sounds and that replicate speech, but Chinese pictograms don’t work that way at all. Each word or symbol is a picture. It may be a house with feet. It may be a cow’s head. It’s an abstract drawing of a concept. It’s a conceptual language with no translation given. So if you were to read it in its symbolic form, it could have any number of meanings, depending on how you interpret the pictogram. So at the back of Star’s edition, he includes the pictograms in order of each and every verse, and then all the possible words that each of those pictograms could mean. And it’s the way you put together those words that shapes the translation you give. Another thing about the ancient Chinese language—there’s no difference between the subject and the object. You have to figure out—is this the subject speaking? or is this the object that’s being referred to? There’s no order to the sentence, so that’s another layer of interpretation. How does this apply? Looking at just a few characters from verse 27, which reads—and excuse my Chinese, because I don’t speak Chinese, so I’m reading this in the English type of translation, having had no instruction on how to say these things—shi wei hsi ming. Shi means this; wei is called, hsi can mean follow, one who follows, practice, unite, merge, conceal, cover, secret, penetrate, force, steal, secure by devious means, double, twofold. Hsi generally means to enter or secure by deceptive or secretive means, thus connoting an invasion, attack at night, penetration, something that’s done in secret, concealed. The next word, ming, means light, enlightenment, to enlighten, one who is enlightened, mystical vision, shine, luminous, illumined, brilliant, insight, discernment, awareness, understanding, wisdom, shines forth, conspicuous. And ming is comprised of the pictogram characters sun plus moon, and from that you get all of those interpretations. So then you put together a combination of possible meanings, and any translator can come up with a dozen plausible translations of every single word, every single verse. So those four words, shi wei hsi ming, can mean following the light, following one’s own light, one who follows the light, followers of light, following the path of light, or following the guidance of the inner light. Using other definitions, you could say the practice of mystical vision, concealing your brilliance, penetrating the luminous, the shining practice, blending the light, the secret of enlightenment, or penetrating into mystical vision. Then people often add, during their translation, modifiers to make things more clear in the direction they’re trying to translate. So an interpretative modifier could include shining the light on all that is hidden, the practice of enlightened beings, or the practice that leads to brilliant insight. Some noted translations have rendered those four words as, this is called, following one’s discernment, stealing the light, inherited enlightenment, following the light, or double enlightenment. So you see, everything is up to the interpreter and the translation. Looking back on all of this, I think that these past 25 years of reading the Tao Te Ching in this way has helped to train my mind to see more possibilities in every way that something is written, even not in Chinese. But when I read the Tripartite Tractate, for example, the Tao Te Ching has trained me in a more relaxed and informal way of interpreting what is written, much less precisely than the way many people read ancient documents. Now, I’ve had that formal training from my classical rhetorical graduate work, but I have had this Tao Te Ching type of looking at all possibilities for the way something might be said, or what is the meaning above. This has helped to give me that what I call meta-vision, M-E-T-A, vision, the higher view of what is being said or attempted to be communicated. I think that this is why I enjoy rising above the precise definitions of words we exchange in English here to what is the actual meaning that the speaker intended to convey. That’s quite a bit different than taking exactly what they said—but what did they intend to convey? Not what did I wish that they would say, or what other people impugn upon them as having said when they deny they didn’t mean that. You can’t say, oh yes, you did. You have to look at what the speaker was attempting to convey. And I think that that is what this reading of the Tao Te Ching for the past 25 years has helped me in my gnosis. So I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching all these years, as I’ve said, and since 2001, I’ve been stepping through the concordance and the translation matrix at the back of Star’s book. At first, I used it during the writing of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, (https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Explanation-Absolutely-Everything-Conscious/dp/B08JB5WQP7/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2CZXZJHFXL43T&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.CI8OIoYGfrKNSPdCEAn-5PI8dnGK8lOoWeIlTdmknpHVqkubZSZCjTRY1Fr_hYSaUbQ4kz_FkEO8u34BJWoE6bSVaP4I3DjgKUuzytFuvR_dHD2Hud5lN5V17seTbQoExmeY3xxI-4gU9g2OqpTS3XjxfTqzFSALTld84oJi_N3jwPY1m9WDXzEsGqEGPSqMMCYW2yqZNk9Ai0PkG3bayL4cJT8_0AohaFkcwY2Y2kM.wJf2WBrg0USog39g9dzWBQvNkJh2I5o72O5_N_Yg1Eg&dib_tag=se&keywords=Ropp+A+simple+explanation+of+absolutely+everything&qid=1790295662&sprefix=ropp+a+simple+explanation+of+absolutely+everythin%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-2) and there are a couple of verses in A Simple Explanation where I have taken the words as written, run them through the translation matrix–manually, of course; none of this is computer-generated–and then written it down in the manner of The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. What I thought I would do for you right now today is to run through a popular verse in the manner of our Gnostic Gospel that we’ve been talking about. I was going to give you several verses, but look, I’ve used up all the time of the episode just giving you the introduction. So let me just hit one of the verses at random. Star’s translation of verse 40 reads like this: The movement of Tao is to return. The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. The existent world is born of the nothingness of Tao. That’s verse 40. It’s a short one. I realize it’s very difficult to hear and comprehend a chart that is being read out loud, so if you’re listening to this on the podcast, go to the transcript at GnosticInsights.com or at the sub-stack, Gnostic Reformation, and I’m going to replicate this page out of Star’s book as a .jpg and print it right there in the transcript so you can look at the chart and I think understand more clearly what I’m talking about. Reading from the back of the book, it reads, So let’s read again what Star said. The movement of Tao is to return. The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. The existent world is born of the nothingness of Tao. Now let’s look at that through our Gnostic eyes. By the way, the Tao Te Ching probably helped form my own interpretation or vision of the Father as the ground state of consciousness. It is both nothingness and all at the same time. It is emptiness and the complete potential all at the same time. That is the Tao. The Tao is eternal and ethereal, never changing. The Tao is. That is the definition also that we use for the Father, not an old white man with a beard and so forth. That is such a straw dog argument against God, it’s ridiculous. God is the ground state. You could just say, God is all. So the movement of Tao is return; is out and return. This is why the Aeons give glory to the Father, because that is part of the return of the love that the Father is putting out. So love is a cyclical motion. The Father loves, the Tao extends love, and when you love God, the Tao receives love. It’s a cyclical motion, you see? The way of Tao is to yield. Our Father, in the Gnostic sense, is not a tyrant. The Father is yielding, like water, like you put your hand into water and the water yields and molds around your hand. The Father is not ice. It’s not hard. It’s yielding. Who is hard? Who is ruling with an iron hand? That’s the Demiurge. That’s not the eternal Tao. That’s its manifestation without the Tao here in the material world. That is the Demiurge. The way of Tao is to yield. Heaven, Earth, and all things are born of the existent world. So that is saying that everything we can see, the cosmos that exists, this material universe, are existent here below. The existent world is born of the nothingness of the Tao. So this means that even though the Tao is empty, is yielding, is ethereal, is so diffuse it can’t be touched, the existent world that we are in here is born of that nothingness. That is an assurance. How did we get here? What is this? It’s the manifestation of the Father materially, and that’s what came about through the Fall, etc., etc., etc., but that’s not covered here in this verse. So the movement of Tao or the movement of the Father is to return, is to bring everything, take everything out, bring everything back. And that begins with the exchange of love between the ALL and the Totalities and the Aeons and the Father and the Son. They’re all just sitting up there loving on one another, because when you give love, love returns. And the Father gives not only love, but consciousness. The Father emanates its own consciousness, its own sense of Self, awareness, and that emanates into all of the emanations of the Father, down through the Son, down through the Totalities, on into the Aeons, and on into us, all living creatures, not only humans. It’s not a byproduct of electrical firing or quantum channeling. All things originate from the Father. All things that existed from the beginning, that is all the attributes of the Father and the Son, the existent world, is born of the nothingness of the Tao or of the nothingness of the Father and the Son. So that’s the way I would look at verse 40. You know, we add other aspects of the Gnostic myth to that, but we’re not talking about that here. We’re only talking about the birth. We’re not talking about the Fall or the Demiurge or the Shadows—that’s a different subject. Well, I’d like to share more of these verses from the Tao with you here in the next few weeks, I think, because they’re very Gnostic, and they certainly formed the basis for my understanding. That plus Jesus. The Tao Te Ching, plus the words of Christ as manifest through Jesus, and then now these apocryphal books of the Nag Hammadi, particularly the Tripartite Tractate. That’s all that we have time for today. So join me next week. Glad to have you all here. God bless us. God bless you. And onward and upward. I would like to thank a podcast follower who made a very generous donation last week to this podcast. His was the largest single donation I’ve ever received, so the effort on his part was extraordinary. His donation was accompanied by a beautiful letter explaining his path to gnosis and how Gnostic Insights has contributed to his newfound peace. 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