I have posted the article below to my podcast at The God Above All Gods – Gnostic Insights . You may listen to the audio version there. This article will appear in my upcoming book...
The Father
As you know, we've been looking at the gnostic Gospel
according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books in the Nag
Hammadi scrolls. The Tripartite Tractate is a book that focuses on the origins
of our universe and everything in it, including us. So I thought we would look
around again today and revisit the Tripartite Tractate and what it has to say
about the Father as the first principle of gnosticism.
Philosophers
often speak of the hard problem of consciousness. Materialist scientists don't
believe in consciousness. They believe in a thing called monism, which is that
we are only our physical bodies and that any appearance of consciousness or of
a soul is merely a by-product of physical mechanisms, hormones, atoms moving
around--this sort of thing. The counterpoint to that view, often called
dualism, is that, yes, we have a physical body and then we also have a soul and
it's your soul that survives after death. This gnosticism that comes from the
Nag Hammadi is a religious system that presupposes that there is a soul and
there is a body.
It seems to
me that the soul that people speak of surviving is the consciousness that began
with the Father and derives from the Father. And that is why, whenever I
discuss the system of consciousness, whether it's in the Simple Explanation
of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, it
always begins with the Father, because the Father is where consciousness
resides. The Father is consciousness itself. The Father is another word for consciousness.
Then this entire creation cosmology that's presented through the Tripartite
Tractate and then re-presented again in my book, The Gnostic Gospel
Illuminated, is the path by which consciousness proceeds out from the
Father through the Son, through the Totalities and the Pleroma of the Hierarchy,
and on into the Second Order of Powers that populates the earth.
This is why
we begin with the Father. The Father is the ground state of consciousness, and
so this is why we begin to build out from the Father the flow of consciousness.
My Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book and blog are devoted
to the notion of panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness resides in
everything. In gnostic terms we say that the Father extends his consciousness
throughout all living things that populate the cosmos.
I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled
out. The word for that sort of study is “cosmogony,” which is defined as the
study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me--to start
at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how
everything came to be and who the principal players are and then, after that is
established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, “Why are we
here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live?” After that, we can
finally consider the termination of the universe and what happens after we die.
All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate
of the Nag Hammadi. This knowledge is known as “gnosis.”
Today we begin at the very beginning, and that has to do with
what is called the Father. This story, this cosmogony, begins before the
beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos
existed.
I'm going to
compare a couple of different versions of the Tripartite so that we have a
fuller picture of the Father. One of the books I'm going to use is The Nag
Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer; the translator in this case was
a person named Einar Thomassen. The other version we are going to compare it to
is the one posted at the Gnostic Society library at gnosis dot org and
reprinted in The Nag Hammadi Library, translated by Harold Attridge.
The
introduction says, "As for what we can say about the things which are
exalted, what is fitting is that we begin with the Father, who is the root of
the totality, the one from whom we have received grace to speak about
him." Another version says, "In order to be able to speak about
exalted things, it is necessary that we begin with the Father, who is the root
of the all and from whom we have obtained grace to speak about him, for he
existed before anything else had come into being, except him alone."
I invite you now to think of the originating consciousness as
a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history. It is nothing
but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists called
the Buddha Mind. This clear state of pure consciousness is something people try
to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious,
but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind.
This is the originating Father. The Father has no thought, no images, no structure
or form, no thing at all. This pure consciousness is the Father.
There is no
gender associated with this Father. Obviously the Father is not a man with a
beard and long robes. The Tripartite Tractate says, “Rather, he possesses this
constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through
perception, whence also comes the title, ‘The Incomprehensible.’ If he is
incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who
is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word,
untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along
with his form and his greatness and his magnitude."
This passage
affirms that no matter how much we try or science tries, the underlying
consciousness underneath our existence will never be grasped, will never be
measured. It can't be discovered.
Which begs
the question—if the Father is unknowable, then what are we doing here
describing him? If the Father is incomprehensible, then why are we even
discussing him?
What we are
doing here at Gnostic Insights, and what I believe the writer of the Tripartite
Tractate was doing, is that we are describing the Father as what is called a first
principle. In philosophy, a first principle is a first cause, an origin,
from which all else proceeds and all subsequent arguments are based. First
principles are not provable; they are a priori assumptions upon which all else
proceeds. This is why here at Gnostic Insights we spend so much time discussing
the Father. The Father is the a priori, the first cause, the uber first
principle of all else that follows—not only in a religious sense, but in a
cosmogenic sense, as it is the basis upon which everything in our universe may
be logically deduced.
Now back to
the idea of gender. The reason this consciousness is called “Father” and not
“Mother” has to do with the direction of movement initiated by the Father. The
Father is a consciousness that extends outward from itself. It emanates; it
doesn’t receive. The Father extends consciousness. Extension is sometimes
translated as will, but it refers to the Father reaching out for what he is
driving toward. The Father extends consciousness out from itself as the
originating source. In this sense we can contrast that extension with the
concept of “female,” which is receptive; which is that which takes into itself.
The Father gives; the mother receives.
This Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts but rather
love--the sensation of what we call love. So this consciousness simply is,
without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without
beginning or end; utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone.
The Father is often described as all-knowing but what is
there to know? All-seeing but what is there to see? All loving but what is
there to love? Omnipotent wisdom and will, but to what end? There is nothing
there.
Quoting the
Tripartite Tractate, "It is said of him that he is a father in the proper
sense, since he is inimitable and immutable. Because of this, he is single in
the proper sense and is a god because no one is a god for him. Nor is anyone a
father to him, for he is unbegotten and there is no other who begot him, nor
another who created him. It is, then, only the Father and God in the proper
sense that no one else begot. As for the Totalities, he is the one who begot
them and created them. He is without beginning and without end."
So what this
is saying is that other gods with a small g have been created or been
born, but not this one. This is the original God with the big G that no
one created. This is the original source.
Quote: “Not
only is he without end, he is immortal for this reason that he is unbegotten,
but he is also invariable in his eternal existence, in his identity, in that by
which he is established and in that by which he is great. Neither will he
remove himself from that by which he is, nor will anyone else force him to
produce an end which he has not ever desired. He has not had anyone who
initiated his own existence. Thus he is himself unchanged, and no one else can
remove him from his existence and his identity, that in which he is and his
greatness, so that he cannot be grasped. Nor is it possible for anyone else to
change him into a different form or to reduce him or alter him or diminish him.”
The other translation
is very much like that. “He is without beginning and without end, for not only
is he without end, being unborn makes him immortal as well, but he is also
unchangeable in his eternal being, in that which he is in, that which makes him
immutable and that which makes him great." Of course, immutable means
can't be mutated, can't be changed. He does not move himself away from what he
is, nor can anyone else force him against his will to cease being what he is,
for no one has made him what he is now.”
As an aside,
I am reminded of the Hadron Particle Collider located in Cern, Switzerland—the
largest and most complex machine on earth. The function of point of Hadron Particle Collider is to crash elemental
particles into each other, trying to split them into smaller and smaller
pieces, attempting to break particles into the smallest possible particles. And
in fact, what the Hadron collider has been trying to do for the last number of
years is to fire particles at each other with such great force and speed that
they break into the essential particle of the universe that they're
calling the Higgs boson, or the God particle. They are literally looking for
the "God particle." And, indeed, exactly ten years ago, on July 4,
2012, scientists declared they had found it.
This Tripartite
description of the Father, the God Above All Gods, is saying: you cannot break God
up into smaller pieces. He is immutable. He is indiscoverable in that sense. So
we would have to make a prediction that these particle accelerators and colliders
will not be able to find the God particle, because God is not discoverable. They
may have found the Higgs boson, but God itself is undiscoverable. It cannot be
broken into smaller pieces, and it seems to me that that is what this next paragraph
is talking about.
"Therefore,
neither does he change himself, nor will another, (such as a scientist),
be able to move him from that in which he is, from what he is, from his way of
being, or from his greatness. Thus, he cannot be moved, nor is it possible for
another to change him into a different form, either by reducing him or changing
him or making him less, for this is truly and veritably how he is unchangeable
and immutable, being clothed in immutability. Thus he is called without
beginning and without end, not only because he is unborn and immortal, but also
because, just as he is without beginning, he is also without end. In this
manner of being, he is incomprehensible in his greatness, inscrutable in his
wisdom, invincible in his might, and unfathomable in his sweetness."
We can
conclude from this description that if humanity managed to destroy the earth by
way of a worldwide nuclear war, the Father would still be unchanged. The Father
would still exist underneath it all, without having been affected. So while it
may be the case that we can destroy ourselves, we certainly cannot destroy the
Father.
Carrying on,
"In the true sense, he alone, the good, unborn and perfect father who
lacks nothing, is complete, filled with everything he possesses--excellent and
precious qualities of every kind. Moreover, he has no envy, which means that
all he owns he gives away without being affected and suffering no loss by his
gifts, for he is rich from the things he gives away and finds rest in what he
graciously bestows."
The other
translation says that the Father is “unfathomable in his sweetness in the
proper sense. He alone, the good, the unbegotten father and the complete,
perfect one, is the one filled with all his offspring and with every virtue and
with everything of value, and he has more, that is, lack of any malice…”
The book goes on, "He is of such a kind
and form and great magnitude that no one else has been with him from the
beginning. Nor is there a place in which he is or from which he has come forth
or into which he will go. Nor is there a primordial form which he uses as a
model as he works. Nor is there any difficulty which accompanies him and what
he does. Nor is there any material which is at his disposal from which he
creates what he creates, nor any substance within him from which he begets what
he begets. Nor a co-worker with him working with him on the things at which he
works. To say anything of this sort is ignorant. Rather, one should speak of
him as good, faultless, perfect, complete, being himself the Totality.”
So if we're
going to think about our modern physics again and cosmology, and if we think if
there may be multiverses, that is, we are just one universe in a sea of other
universes floating in this great pool, this Father that we are describing would
be back before all of that. He's not the Father of our universe alone; he's the
Father of the entire sea within which other things float. Everything comes out
of him, but he himself pre-exists all of that.
"There
is no name that suits him among those that may be conceived, spoken, seen or
grasped, however brilliant, exalted or glorious. It is, to be sure, possible to
speak such names in order to glorify and praise him to the extent of the
capacity of whoever wants to give glory, but the way he is in himself, his own
manner of being, that no mind can conceive, no word express, nobody see and
nobody touch, so incomprehensible is his greatness so unfathomable, his depth
so immeasurable, his exaltedness is so boundless.”
Here at
Gnostic Insights we would say that although the Father cannot possibly be
grasped, we all possess a sense of him, for we all contain the seed of his
consciousness. The Father wished to be known; to know and to be known. To love,
and to be loved. Therefore the Father has provided us a cookie trail to follow
in our quest for gnosis.
It said that
we use these words of praise or glory to the extent that we, the ones who
speak, are capable, but they fall far short of actually describing what is the
Father. The Tripartite Tractate then goes on to say, "and since he has the
ability to conceive of himself, to see himself, to name himself, to comprehend
himself, he alone is the one who is his own mind, his own eye, his own mouth,
his own form, and he is what he thinks, what he sees, what he speaks, what he
grasps himself, the one who is inconceivable, ineffable, incomprehensible,
immutable while sustaining joyous, true, delightful and restful, is that which
he conceives, that which he sees, that about which he speaks, that which he has
as thought. He transcends all wisdom and is above all intellect and is above
all glory, and is above all beauty and all sweetness and all greatness and any
depth and any height."
This is my
description of the Father prior to conceiving of the Son. These are
descriptions of the Father as the first principle, also known as the God Above
All Gods. You can see for yourself that these descriptions of the Father are
not the same as the description of God in the Bible. The God of the Old
Testament is personified. God in the Bible is someone who can sit and have a
discussion with men around a camp fire or speak out of the middle of a burning
bush.
Our gnostic God
exists prior to all of that and is far greater than all of that. This God is
not in a personified form, walking around on earth or floating just above earth,
looking down at us. This Father is the gigantic, illimitable consciousness that
underlies everything. This is an entirely different type of being than the God
of the Old Testament, Jehovah. That personified character arises much later in
the creation story than the Father we are describing.
But this is
the beginning. Everything began with this Father Above All Fathers. This God Above
all Gods is only goodness, joy, sweetness, true, and delightful. It is not a
warlike or a jealous god. It would not send people into battle or kill the
first-born of the entire Egyptian nation. This God, as you can see, is
qualitatively different than that. This God is love.
The Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland, is the largest, most complex, and most energetic machine on earth.
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Dr. Ropp is always happy to communicate with sincere truth-seekers.