Gnostic Reformation, Clear and Simple

About Gnostic Reformation, Clear and Simple

Most of the gnosis presented here comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices. My retelling of the mythos is just good news for modern man. It is not hermetic; it is not a translation of wisdom from an Egyptian God. It is not New Age. This Gnostic Gospel is simply the story of who we are and where we come from. The gnosis I am sharing here honors God the Father and, as you begin to remember this inherent truth, you will experience a more joyful life. When we use our free will to remember our true inheritance, the god of this fallen universe loses its power to control us. When we turn our eyes upward to the Father--the God Above All Gods--we are freed from the burdens of this world. Once you begin to remember that you are truly loved by our heavenly Father, you will suffer less. When you begin to walk with virtue rather than embracing vice, you will be happier; you will be joyful. Not all of the time. Bad things do happen. But suffering as a response to life’s challenges is unnecessary. We are living in a fallen world, and that, I suppose, is another gnostic heresy. For some reason, modern Christians want to insist that this world is blessed by God and is blessedly perfect. But we all know this world we live in isn’t perfect and when you deny that fact you become unduly frustrated and sad, even to the point of depression. Pharmaceuticals are not the solution--gnosis is. Gnosis means knowing. This sort of knowing is not related to book learning. Gnosis refers to remembering what you already know. The point of spiritual study is not to learn new things but to mine what you already possess deep inside of you. When you study new ideas, you must continually weigh the information you are taking in against your own discernment. The purpose of this podcast is not so much to teach you about Gnosticism; the purpose is to stimulate your own innate gnosis. And there is really only one gnosis that matters in the end—remembering the Father, your cosmic origin, and the purpose of being alive. cydropp.substack.com (https://cydropp.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Cyd Charise Ropp

Category

religion & spirituality · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

25 Jun 2023

Latest episode

10 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

163 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   10 Oct 2026

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

   Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to The Gnostic Reformation on Substack. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp and I’m your host. This episode of Gnostic Insights is going to continue discussing Gnosis and the Tao Te Ching. In the previous episode of Gnosis and the Tao Te Ching, verse 40 (https://gnosticinsights.com/mining-gnosis-through-the-tao-te-ching-verse-40/), I described how I translate the Tao Te Ching using Jonathan Star’s Tao Te Ching—The Definitive Edition (https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Ching-Definitive-Lao-Tzu/dp/158542269X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3AO6P5PHE6Y8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.JCYSw4WMwkT1lBKGPS2kQ1gziDta78E-8JmgMsyake_77jG2FESijMJ_uFAFp2lTT631Q02yLaaDEKdq0O9w3zKVtiRE8Rez04-6hU99sTfaIF0xZKfvhqhBrQHDrMeAagJxrRiAPIOCrvu1H7tqPfj4xbShas611t4En8IsvJB_ie1yIZxMcy8GJFftwbQUA2MbjE6icrsay0DuTB2yezd7lmEbdrkn3s3q4kgfnog.xTe4bqxDFZ-iMg955qBl4cjeyvuyIfU6hzArKDLjJF0&dib_tag=se&keywords=jonathan+star+tao+te+ching&qid=1791640906&sprefix=%2Caps%2C738&sr=8-1). Today’s episode evolved from two earlier Simple Explanation blogs where I first interpreted the Tao Te Ching using Simple Explanation terms. Years later I added Gnostic terms to the articles and released the episode as a podcast on December 3, 2021. You needn’t become a Taoist to be a Gnostic. These are just labels. But truth is truth, and there is only one truth. Many wisdom books over the ages have written about this truth, and our familiar Gnostic scriptures that are contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls or in the Nag Hammadi are merely one set of Gnostic scriptures. But other cultures have had similar revelations worldwide and throughout time, and that’s why I share the Tao Te Ching with you. We will begin with verse 1, and I’m taking this from the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, (https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061142662/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22IJP1LRCREA8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.O9HUbT-BY2VteBmBh0aEnQCxsnXhdlHZXN14phpNdScFlTR71DrNhcotGG8agD_dsi26U0bmK8rBO534DEx5zPW8MLUUCbBPYpqryLuVp-83N75JXQpxXYHGQPg9WIFZudkOGc48rTZ8to4jN-uUniqXeTyvXaS9UnUwRHWwV-NgzwH6AdukzziJWIuddgLbCh5ypH_m6SGW3h0u0HBU3SBSacLWJ7ISyQ0xEcUxROk.W8YdaWeUO9Bf82JHoUCdQVkrKu8NQGgkwvlmCn7N8bc&dib_tag=se&keywords=tao+te+ching+stephen+mitchell&qid=1791650022&sprefix=tao+te+ching+steph%2Caps%2C191&sr=8-1) which reads like this: The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding. In 2010, I posted an article to my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog (https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2010/01/simple-explanation-of-tao-te-ching.html)about verse 1 here, and this is what I said about it back then, as I was translating it into Simple Explanation terms, and it goes like this: The information and principles of organization imagined in ideal form in the metaverse are more perfect and complete than we can ever articulate. Pure conscious awareness without time and space exists outside our universe. Abstract thought on the part of pure consciousness defined creation prior to the Big Bang. In our universe, we are only able to recognize objects and concepts we have named. When we set down our meme bundles, we are freed from personal preference. In that clear state, we may perceive the workings of the universal model and our role in it. Remaining attached to our memes obscures the inflowing metaversal patterns and keeps us tethered to our familiar material and relational patterns. Pure undifferentiated consciousness dwells in the unformed darkness of the metaverse. The thought patterns that produce light and matter arise out of the metaverse, but the manifestations of these patterns take place within our universe. The portal into our universe is the gateway to all understanding. So that was spoken in terms of my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything Theory of Everything Model. But since that time, I have become knowledgeable concerning the Gnostic terminology and concepts. And so, let me re-translate this into Gnostic terms that you may be more familiar with. To begin with, as explained in the previous episode, the Tao Te Ching speaks of the Tao. This is what we refer to as the Father in Gnostic cosmology. And the Father that can be spoken about? Well, obviously we cannot capture any description of the Father. The Father is unformed consciousness. It’s pure consciousness without thought. And for us to attempt to describe that, obviously it’s not possible. But we can say that that’s what it is, even though we can’t quite articulate it, see? The name that can be named is not the eternal name. So when we say, oh, we’re speaking of the Father, we’re just saying the Father that is this category of pure consciousness, our ground state of the universe, the resting matrix of all that is—but it’s not the same as the Father. It’s just that we are conceiving and calling the Father, because the Father is greater than that. The unnameable is the eternally real. So the Father is eternal. That means there is no time. It’s not that it’s infinite time, it’s that it is eternal. It is outside of time. And the Father is the eternally real substance that predates all of existence. And by the way, that is the nugget of gnosis. When it is said we’re supposed to gain gnosis, what we are attempting to realize is the gnosis that there is this thing we call the Father, or in Simple Explanation terms, the metaverse. It is outside of everything we know, and it pre-exists everything we know. It is before time and space. Naming is the origin of all particular things. So one thing about humans in particular, since we are the ones who speak with language, in order to conceive of anything, in order to think about a concept, we have to have words to describe it to ourselves. We talk to ourselves about it. Or to describe it to someone else, like I’m talking to you, we have to put this into the form of words. And words is the same as naming. In the Old Testament, in Genesis, it said that man gave name to all the animals, right? Or is that a Bob Dylan song? I think that’s how Bob Dylan said it in that song, man gave names to all the animals in the beginning, in the beginning. So that is how Dylan put it. But in Genesis, it says that it was the job of mankind or humanity to name all of the animals. And we humans didn’t only name all the animals, we named everything. We name concepts. That’s what we do. We are little meme generators. Do you remember there was a movie, what, about 15 or 20 years ago, called, What the Bleep Do We Know? [released in 2011] Did you see that movie? They claimed in that movie, that when the ships, the sailing ships from the Spanish came and encountered the Native Americans for the first time, I think it was the Americans, that the natives that were standing on shore could literally not see the sailing ships because they had never conceived of a large ship like that with sails. And because they had never named it, they literally could not see it. And they didn’t notice that they were being invaded by the Spaniards until the Spaniards pulled those ships right offshore and began to disembark. And then they could see that they were boats and there were people. That’s what how they put it in that movie. Anyway, according to verse 1 of the Tao, it says, naming is the origin of all particular things. Because until you name them, it’s just one big observation without any particularity. It’s like if you look at a painting and you look at it as one gigantic gestalt prior to noticing the colors, and then you name the colors, or prior to noticing the shapes or the objects in the painting, and then you recognize those objects by naming them and those shapes by naming them. Before naming things, it is all undifferentiated. So naming is the origin of all particular things. Then the Tao says, free from desire, you realize the mystery. And I discussed that at length in the previous episode from November 28, 2021 (https://gnosticinsights.com/gnosis-and-the-tao-te-ching-v-21-4-48/). [Perhaps I will rerun that episode next week—back in 2021 I wasn’t posting transcripts, so you Substack readers probably didn’t get the earlier Tao episodes.] Our memes, and our words, and our orientation of emotions to objects is a pattern. And in order to get beyond those patterns of what is familiar and what we already can know and name, if you’re trying to expand your realization to beyond what you already know, you have to drop what you know, because the memes, the meme bundle that you’re already holding onto, defines what you know. So in order to transcend that, it’s extremely helpful to put away those memes, to drop them, to get rid of them, at least during the process of contemplation. And only then can you realize the mystery, can you see beyond what you know. The Tao says, caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. And the manifestations is another word for our material universe. We are in a manifested state here in this universe, with time and space and objects, materiality, things we can touch. But prior to this physical state, it was all conceptual, it was all idealized. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. So that which we don’t know, and that which we are surrounded by, and which we can touch and taste and see, all arise from the same source. And we call that source the Father. In the Tao, the source is called darkness, darkness within darkness. In other words, the depth of consciousness is so deep that we can’t penetrate it. It’s a darkness within darkness. It’s untouchable. And that is why in my illustrations, I illustrate the Father as the black page underneath the other figures. The blackness is the ground state. Yet it is the gateway to all understanding. And this is why the Gnostic gospel basically invites us to remember the Gnosis that we had prior to our instantiation. We can remember the Gnosis of the Father, of the Son, and of the Pleroma, because this is where our consciousness derives from. We are being poured into this universe, and we take this physical manifestation form. But the consciousness is one unending flow that comes from the Father. All right, that was verse 1 of the Tao Te Ching. Now let us go on to verse 31 of the Tao Te Ching, which is from a post on the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog from May 6th of 2011 (https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2011/05/simple-explanation-of-tao-te-ching.html). Here is verse 31, which I’m going to read to you directly from my own personal translation that I took off of that Jonathan Star Complete Tao book, which I mentioned in the previous 2026 episodes. He’s put all of the pictograms for the verses on one side of a ledger, and then all possible translations for each pictogram on the right side of the ledger. And in this way you can use your own discernment to kind of drift down the right side of the ledger and find the Gnosis that is most meaningful to you. The Gnosis will emerge from the words written on the right side. And so I was reading the Tao many years ago prior to my familiarity with the Gnostic cosmology, and the words that I use here are from the Simple Explanation cosmology, which is entirely consistent with our Gnostic cosmology, by the way, but it is put in less religious terms, more generalized terms. So here’s how that goes. Verse 31: Even the finest instruments of war cannot bring good fortune. All units of consciousness seem to detest them. Therefore, one who is aligned with the universal unit of consciousness avoids them. Consciousness prefers the passive, the weak, the feminine. War gives preference to the active, the strong, the masculine. Instruments of war are the least fortunate of all tools. In opposition to the instruments preferred by the indwelling Lord, our universal unit of consciousness, they should only be used when unavoidably compelled. Detached restraint is the best policy. Even in victory there should be no boasting, but rather find beauty in the universal unit of consciousness. Truly, those who find joy in killing others cannot expect to instantiate heaven on earth. Joyful events celebrate the feminine. Sorrow and calamity prefer the masculine. The second-in-command occupies the masculine position on the left. The commander-in-chief takes the place on the right, or the feminine side. An arrangement on par with a funeral rite. Accordingly, killing others causes all units of consciousness to weep with sorrow. Victory in battle is, therefore, an opportunity for mourning and should be treated as one. Now, in our Gnostic cosmology terminology, when I speak of units of consciousness, it’s our Self, our big S Self. Our Self is in contrast to our ego. So, our personality is made up of a couple of parts. The ego is that part of us that interacts with the manifested world around us. Our ego also comes to us from above, but then the memes of our earthly existence stick to our egos like iron filings drawn to a magnet and befuddle us with confusion. Our Self is a pure reflection of the Pleroma above. We are the fruit of the Pleroma in Gnostic cosmology. We are their children. And our consciousness is the same as their consciousness. Our Self, which is that spiritual part of our Self, is a reflection of the consciousness of the Pleroma coming down from the Son, coming down from the Father. That’s our conduit to upwards. Pure consciousness comes down to us, into our Self. So, taking another look at verse 31: Even the finest instruments of war cannot bring good fortune. All units of consciousness, that is, all of our Self that reflects the Father above, seem to detest the instruments of war. Therefore, a person who is fully aligned with their true Self, and with the Father and the Pleroma and the Son, avoids using these instruments of war. Consciousness—that is the Father—prefers the passive, the weak, the feminine. And in Taoism, feminine is not a negative term. Passivity is not a negative term. It’s not better to be active than passive. It’s not better to be masculine than feminine, and vice versa. It’s simply that passive means receptive, yin, whereas masculine is active, yang. So, according to the Tao Te Ching, consciousness prefers the passive state in us, whereas war refers to the never-ending battle that we are engaged in down here. Remember, the Second Order powers, all of us creatures, were sent down here from the Pleroma to engage the deficiency and overcome it. Not to kill it and wipe it out and destroy it from the face of the earth, but to redeem it. But the tragic thing about us Second Order powers is, once we came into this manifested universe, and we begin to engage in this never-ending battle with the Demiurge and the Archons, we tend to forget that our actual mission is love and redemption, and we think we’re just supposed to kill them. That is an error in Gnostic thought. It’s also an error according to the Tao. It says that instruments of war are the least fortunate of all tools, and they are in opposition to the instruments of the indwelling Lord. And the indwelling Lord, in Gnostic terminology, is the Pleroma, or the Christ. If you are redeemed, you have some sort of heavenly-from-above indwelling Self that is in alignment with and powered by the Pleroma, the Son, the Father, and the Christ. So the instruments preferred by this indwelling of the Pleroma is love. I’m going to love you to death, and not, I’m going to chop off your head. Detached restraint is the best policy, and that is very difficult to come by. I, myself, am a very passionate person, and it’s very hard for me to approach conflict with detached restraint. And I so admire people who have an approach of detached restraint, because bluster and anger and threats don’t really move the ball forward. It just re-engages us in the war. Detached restraint, it says here in the Tao, is the best policy. Even in victory, there should be no boasting. But rather, in the victory, you would find the beauty of the Father. It says, truly, those who find joy in killing others cannot expect to instantiate heaven on earth. So, you know, terrorism is not a good idea, is what it’s saying. Or going ballistic and running over people with your car is not going to bring joy to the Father above. It is a tragedy. Joyful events celebrate the feminine. That is, passivity is the face of joy. Sorrow and calamity prefer the masculine. These acts of violence are active yang-type events. They are manifested parts of the war. They are not coming from the consciousness of the Father in the Pleroma. Then this verse 31 talks about some ancient Chinese ritual type of placements, which I think are not that important to our discussion. But that’s what that’s about. The commander-in-chief takes the place on the right, the feminine side. And the second in command is the one that occupies the yang position, the position on the left. So, at least they’re in balance. The commander-in-chief, she, is supposed to be more passive, slower to act, more contemplative. This is the job of the commander-in-chief, to be in touch with the Father’s will. Whereas the second in command is the guy commanding the troops. He’s the one holding the swords that’s ready to rush out in battle at the command of the commander. Verse 31 notes that the same arrangement is the way they did their funeral rites, with the masculine position on the left and the feminine position on the right being the way that people stand and mourn those who have fallen. Accordingly, it says, killing others causes all units of consciousness to weep with sorrow. Victory in battle is, therefore, an opportunity for mourning and should be treated as one. So, he’s saying that battle is analogically the same as a funeral. Battle and funerals are the same type of activity, causing all units of consciousness to weep with sorrow, including the units of consciousness of the Aeons above in the Pleroma and the unit of consciousness of the Son. Victory in battle is, therefore, an opportunity for mourning and should be treated as one, not as something to rejoice over. And that is the wisdom of verse 31. Here’s how I discuss that in terms of the Simple Explanation in the article I wrote back in 2011. It said, this verse is most obviously about how we should react to war and the slaughter of war. Simply put, killing an enemy is only a last resort when absolutely compelled by circumstances. Even then, victory is never sweet, never an occasion for boasting or celebration. For according to verse 31, good cannot come from it. Heaven on earth will not result from war. It’s axiomatic. Axiomatic means a law of the universe—an axiom is a law. Secondly, this verse talks a lot about left and right, feminine and masculine. These are references to yin and yang, not women and men, per se. And by the way, I think that in the Gnostic Gospels that I’ve read contained in the Nag Hammadi scriptures, or the book of Thomas, for example, when it talks about the feminine or the weakness of the feminine, this is what it has meant. It’s not saying that women are weak. It’s saying that the passive position is actually the one preferred by the Father, in order to be able to hear the gnosis. The Tao says, about this yin-yang polarity, that consciousness requires a yin state of mind, whether it be your own personal unit of consciousness, your own Self, or the universal unit of consciousness, that is, the pleroma and the Son of God, with which your personal Self longs to be united. To be or to become conscious, one must cultivate and dwell in the passive feminine yin state, which is to say, the receptive state. War, conflict, and killing are evidence of passionate yang states, the masculine active mode. Verse 31 is advancing the axiom that the mode of being required by war is antithetical to that required by consciousness. So it’s one or the other. Either you’re in your war-like state, or you are in your Gnostic state. But to be within gnosis and to be wielding the sword at the same time doesn’t work. Lao Tzu equates beauty and joy with consciousness, or with the Father, and being in alignment with the universal unit of consciousness, which is the Son and the pleroma. This is why he equates killing with sorrow, because to wield the sword, the gun, the explosive vest, or the truck, is never the metaversal plan, is never the will of the Father, and will never bring the desired joyful outcome. And, by the way, as a quick aside, the war-like God of the Old Testament, the one that was always sending the Hebrews into battle, this is actually the demiurge of this universe. This is the creator of this universe, but it is not the same as the will of the Father above. The demiurge is after the fall. The demiurge has amnesia. The demiurge does not remember the will of the Father, and cannot dip into the well of Gnosis. So, the demiurge is all yang, we could say, whereas the Father is yin. So, when people are being compelled by God to pick up the sword and kill others in the name of God, this is actually in the name of the demiurge. And, indeed, the demiurge is the God of this manifested universe, Jehovah, Yahweh, but he is not identical, as far as Gnostic thought goes, to the God Above All gods. You see, they’re completely different states of being. One is the active yang state of our manifested universe, and one is the passive yin state of the Father. And, lastly, here’s how I interpret the part about the second in command occupying the yang position and the commander occupying the yin. When seeking enlightenment or alignment with the Father, the pleroma, God’s will, the God Above All gods—your personal Self needs to hold the commander’s position in your soul. If your Self is in control, rather than your little me mind—your emotional yang passions of your ego—you will be in the passive yin state, and be able to channel the Father and the pleroma. In that yin state, it is just fine for the passions and the mind, the ego, to be second in command. This is how it should be. When those roles are reversed, as they are for most people, whose theater of action is the material world, then their yang state precludes the receptivity required for enlightenment. In other words, their ego is in control and they are in the Yang state, they are in the active mode, and they are not being receptive to the will of the Father. Therefore, when, with full consciousness of the tragic consequences, the Self must preside over war or battle; this is an occasion for mourning, as if we were presiding over a funeral. Okay, I’m going to leave you with that today. That’s two more of the Tao Te Ching verses. There are 81 altogether. I probably won’t be sharing all 81 here on Gnostic Insights. Maybe just a couple more next time or, with your encouragement, perhaps I will keep them coming. Thank you for spending this time with me. Feel free to send me a line using the comments form at the GnosticInsights.com website (https://gnosticinsights.com/) or Comments under the transcript on Substack. I always respond personally. I like to correspond with my listeners. So, until next time, God bless, and Onward and Upward! You may purchase a copy of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything here at amazon.com (https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Explanation-Absolutely-Everything-Conscious/dp/B08JB5WQP7/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3B9ORU6LJXU55&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.0ZO3K1Haib7FZKO3IiiImYALuGSgkq2pECxf5Jvm1qgGevvoh6PqZSnNTKy-5UIkrglvxOnoeJ9G4TnhYMwrOASbbnZowrVmCEJlSyS4FcBO0ZYySYUEIjjQ8ejiRL6-6wU-cVMWb-1Svrz00a5B4eCb3js5EOpFnvebXLWarHVgxh6sBJc3vorEXGB_KlXsMdlE08UBiaD_3NrJxKI4jw.byy3fR1WCy6mjXW854U-grLJmq2MANte4ldXVGHGltc&dib_tag=se&keywords=a+simple+explanation+of+absolutely+everything&qid=1791650772&sprefix=a+simple+explanation+of+absolutely+everything%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-1) The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Gnostic Reformation! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cydropp.substack.com/subscribe (https://cydropp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   3 Oct 2026

   Mining Gnosis Through the Tao Te Ching, v. 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 Star’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. 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. 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! The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. 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3. 

   26 Sept 2026

   Mining Gnosis Through the Tao Te Ching

   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. My gratitude is unending. The Gnostic Reformation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading The Gnostic Reformation! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cydropp.substack.com/subscribe (https://cydropp.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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