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Video Description
The Secret Book of John is the closest thing the Gnostics left to a complete map of reality: how a false god was born, how the world got built wrong, and how a spark of something real ended up trapped inside us. This documentary reading from the Conscious Radical channel opens that second-century text with care and full context.
The video carries a needed content note for a passage depicting sexual violence, and it rereads the biblical names Elohim and Yahweh as part of the text’s own ancient critique of the creator-god. Strip away the cosmology, the video says, and what remains reads like a threat assessment for the present day.
Full Video Transcript
In 1945, a farmer digging Nag Hammadi in Egypt found a sealed jar of buried books.
One of them was the Apocryphon of John, the secret book of John.
And on the surface, it’s a beautiful cosmological text that describes a private conversation between John and Christ,
where the mysteries of heaven and earth are revealed.
but if you were to take the cosmology out of it it can be read as a warning or a threat assessment
for a world that perhaps didn’t exist yet but I think it is a world that exists now. So you can
read this book in a number of ways in each way will tell you something different and I do get
comments that I lean too hard on religion and on Gnostic texts but there is a reason I keep coming
back to them there is far more in here than a religious belief system I think
whoever wrote this was describing a system that they had witnessed I think
they described it in a way that was coded and not easily understood if read
at face value and I’m actually noticing that a number of youtubers are doing the
same that altering names or describing things in code so that they aren’t
shadow banned or demonetized so this for me feels very real and very apt for our
present time. And as many of my returning watchers will know I like to read
through various lenses. The Apocryphon of John feels like a coded internal
company document that’s been leaked out in the present day and that’s the
version that I want to explore today. So I’ve taken this from the texts that are
shared freely on gnosis.org and specifically the 2005 translation by
Stephen Davies. I’ve also read from the translation provided by the Holy
apocrypha. Both of these translations are linked below but what I’m sharing today is my plain
English version adapted from those translations. So what I’ll do is I’ll read through the plain
English version and also share it on screen so that you can read through it at your own pace
and then where appropriate I’m going to walk you through what I think are some of the specific
things for us to be aware of today. As an aside wherever the book says a demon or a ruler
try and rephrase that as a mechanism or a system and whenever it says prison read that as your
ordinary life on an ordinary day. What I believe is that underneath all of the beautiful cosmology
is that there is a message that a conscious mind can be managed without ever feeling as though it’s
being managed and throughout the book it provides methods we can absolutely relate to in our world
today. As always, take what lands for you and leave what doesn’t. I am never asking you to
replace one belief system with another. All I ask is that you question what you think you know and
be open to explore and be curious, finding your own truth and understanding. Regardless of what
you believe, I still think it’s worth your time because the book does appear to be full of
warnings. But before we start, I just want to share a bit about the text itself. Four Coptic
copies of the Apocrypha of John have survived. Three came from the Nekomadi find of 1945 in
Codices 2, 3 and 4. The fourth surfaced earlier and separately in the Berlin Codex and was bought
in Cairo in 1896 by Karl Reinhardt and it was later studied by the German scholar Karl Schmitt.
There are two lengths, a long version and a short version. The longer versions provide greater
mythological detail. The short version is found in the Berlin Codex and Nag Hammadi Codex 3.
The long version is in Nag Hammadi Codices 2 and 4. Now scholars agree that the text was written
in Greek in the second century and we know this because the church father Irenaeus spent a great
deal of time attacking the text and its heretical cosmology in his book Against Heresies which was
written around the year 180. The copies we have are a couple of centuries younger than that and
the closing portion of the longer version features a poetic monologue often called the Providence
monologue or hymn of salvation. In this passage the light comes down to awaken humanity from the
chain of forgetfulness the text describes how the epinoya of the light who was in him is the one who
will awaken his thinking prologue one day john the brother of james both of them sons of zebedee
was on his way up to the temple a pharisee named aramanius stopped him and pressed him where’s
this teacher you used to follow john said he’s gone back to where he came from the pharisee
pushed harder that man from nazareth conned you he lied to all of you he shut down your
hearts and pulled you away from the traditions your own people handed down hearing that got to
me i john turned away from the temple and went out to an empty stretch of high ground on my own
i was in a bad way turning the questions over and over how was the savior chosen for this why did
his father send him here at all? Who even is his father and where are we supposed to end up?
He’d told us this world is a copy of a perfect one but he never actually explained that other
world to me and then right in the middle of all of that it happened. The sky opened, everything
lit up with a light coming from somewhere above and the ground shook. I was scared and then again
A small child was standing in front of me in the light.
But as I watched, he turned into an old man.
Then he shifted again into a young man.
I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at.
It was one figure wearing several forms at once,
each one showing through the others, three shapes in a single vision.
He spoke to me.
John, why the doubt?
Why the fear?
Don’t you recognise me?
Don’t be afraid, I’m with you.
All of you.
Always.
I am the father, the mother, the son. I am the incorruptible purity. I’ve come to explain it to
you. What is, what was and what’s coming. So you’ll understand the world you can’t see, the world you
can and the immovable race, the ones made whole. Now lift your head, take in what I’m about to
teach you and pass it on to anyone else who carries the same spark, anyone who belongs to
the immovable race. So a small note here, the immovable race is the book’s phrase for the people
who can be woken and can’t be shaken back to sleep. I think it’s less likely to mean the chosen few
and it’s more likely a description of anyone willing to stay awake. The inexpressible one,
the one is over everything nothing has any hold over it it is the source the origin of all of it
the holy thing the invisible one behind everything nothing touches it or taints it
pure light so bright no eye can look straight into it the one is the invisible spirit it’s not even
right to call it a god or to say it’s godlike it’s more than that word can carry nothing sits
above it. Nothing controls it. Everything exists inside it but it isn’t inside anything else.
It depends on nothing so it has no beginning and no end. It’s complete in itself so it needs
nothing. Utterly whole, light. The one has no edges because there’s nothing outside it to be a border.
You can’t investigate it because there’s nothing standing apart from it to do the investigating.
you can’t measure it because there’s nothing outside it to measure against
you can’t see it because no one can picture it
it lasts forever because it simply exists
you can’t get your head around it because no one can
you can’t describe it because there are no words that fit
it is endless light purity holiness without a mark on it beyond
comprehension completely untouched by decay not perfect not blessed not divine
it’s beyond all of those not physical not non-physical not huge not tiny you
can’t pin a quantity or a quality on it because it sits past the reach of
knowledge itself the one isn’t one being among other beings it’s far beyond that
and even beyond is the wrong word it stands outside the whole realm of existence and time
because anything that exists was made and anything inside time had its time handed to it the one
takes nothing from anywhere it just knows itself in its own perfect light the one is majesty itself
without limit. It’s the source of every realm and it produces every realm. Light producing light.
Life producing life. Blessedness producing blessedness. Knowledge producing knowledge.
Good producing goodness. Mercy producing mercy. Generosity producing generosity. And yet it doesn’t
own any of these things the way you’d own a possession it pours out light beyond measuring
beyond understanding what else can i say its realm is timeless calm silent at rest before anything
else existed it’s the head of everything holding each part in place through sheer goodness this is
the book describing the source of reality by saying only what it is not it’s simple logic
really how can you describe something that is indescribable you can’t fit something infinite
into finite words so instead of a fake definition they use negatives the origin of reality
we’d know nothing about the thing that can’t be spoken of nothing about the thing too vast
to measure if it weren’t for the one who comes out of the father he’s the only reason we know
any of this the father is wrapped in light he knows himself in that light and that light is
the pure spring the water of life that keeps every realm going he sees his own reflection
all around him catching his image in the spring that pours out of him and he falls in love with
the image he sees in the light water that spring of pure light water surrounding him out of that
his own self-aware thought came into being appearing to him in the blaze of this light
she stood in front of him this is the first of the powers the one before everything else she
rose out of the father’s mind she’s the providence behind everything her light is a reflection of his
light she came from his image in his light perfect in power the image of that invisible perfect
virgin spirit she’s the first power the glory of barbello glorious among all the realms the glory
of revelation she gave glory back to the virgin spirit and praised him because she came from him
this first thought is the spirit’s own image she is the womb of everything she comes before
everything she is mother and father at once first man holy spirit three times male three times
powerful three times named a realm beyond time that holds both the first thing to rise among
the invisible realms then barbello asked the virgin spirit for foreknowledge he agreed
foreknowledge came forth and stood beside providence brought into being through the
virgin spirit’s own thought and foreknowledge gave glory to the spirit and to barbello the
spirit’s perfect power because she was the reason it existed at all so the very first thing to come
out of the source is as she, Barbello, the mother father, sits at the top of reality before any male
god. The book calls her male female, three times male, three times named. So this isn’t a modern
idea read back into an old text. The book names them both together on purpose. Later on in Christian
orthodoxy they stripped male female into a single male god and the mother was written out. The
gendered feel of the names in translation is partly real the greek and coptic carry grammatical
gender but the deeper point stands on the page itself so although the text included both the
translators only chose one primary structures of the divine mind bobello asked the virgin spirit
for incorruptibility he agreed incorruptibility came forth and took its place beside thought and
foreknowledge and it gave glory to the invisible virgin spirits and to Barbello because she was
the reason it existed. She asked for everlasting life. He agreed. Everlasting life came forth and
they all stood together. They gave glory to the invisible spirits and to Barbello because she was
the reason it existed. She asked for truth. He agreed. Truth came forth and they all stood
together they gave glory to the invisible spirit and to barbello because she was the reason it
existed so this is the fivefold realm of the father the first man who is the image of the
invisible spirit who is providence who is barbello who is thought together with foreknowledge
incorruptibility life everlasting and truth these five each hold both male and female so counted
fully they come to ten, the father’s realm, secondary structures of the divine mind. The
father looked into Barbello into the pure light surrounding the invisible spirit and Barbello
conceived and brought forth a spark of light, one whose blessedness was close to hers but not quite
equal to it. He was the only child of that mother father, the only offspring, the only child born
of the pure light the father the invisible virgin spirit celebrated the light that had come out
rising from the first power who is providence the forethought who is barbello the spirit anointed
him with goodness and made him perfect he lacked nothing because he had been anointed with the
invisible spirit’s own goodness he stood in the spirit’s presence and it was poured over him the
moment he received that anointing he gave glory to the spirit and to the perfect providence
because she was the reason he existed. He asked for mind to be a companion to him. The spirit
agreed. When the invisible spirit agreed mind came into being. It took its place beside the anointed
one and gave glory to the spirit and to Barbello. All of these came into existence out of silence
and thought then he set out to act through the word of the invisible spirit will became action
appeared alongside mind and gave glory to the light and then word came into being following
after will the christ the self-generated one made everything through the word everlasting life and
will mind and foreknowledge all stood together they gave glory to the invisible spirits and to
barbello because she was the reason they existed tertiary structures of the divine mind the holy
spirit brought the divine son born of him and barbello to completion so he could stand before
the great invisible virgin spirits as a self-generated christ and honor him with a
mighty voice the sun came through providence the invisible spirit set the sun over everything every
authority answered to him the truth inside him let him understand all of it he is known by the
highest name of all a name that only gets told to those worthy of hearing it given from the light
which is the christ and from the incorruptibility as a gift of the spirit then the four lights which
came out of him stood in front of him their four core powers are understanding grace perception
and consideration. Grace belongs to the realm of the first light called Hamosel with Hamosel
are grace, truth and form. The second light is Aureole over the second realm with Aureole are
conceptualization which the book calls epinoya along with perception and memory. The third light
is Devatai over the third realm with Devatai are understanding, love and idea. The fourth light is
llf over the fourth realm with llf our perfection peace and wisdom which is sophia those are the
four lights twelve realms stand before the son of the powerful the christ brought into being through
the intention and the grace of the invisible spirit all of it came about through the will
of the holy spirit then out of the perfect minds for knowledge through the intention of the
invisible spirit and the will of the sun then out of the perfect minds for knowledge through
the intention of the invisible spirit and the will of the sun the perfect human appeared its
first real showing the virgin spirit names this human adamus and set him over the first realm
together with the mighty christ and the first light harmazel and its powers the invisible one
gave adamus an unbeatable power of mind and adamus spoke praising the invisible spirit
everything came from you everything will return to you i’ll praise you and give you glory and the
three-part realm father mother son the perfect power adamus’s son seth was appointed over the
second round with the second light aureole the children of seth were placed in the third round
with the third light davitai that’s where the souls of the holy ones are kept and in the fourth
round where the souls of those who didn’t know the fullness the ones who didn’t turn back right away
but came around to it eventually there with the fourth light alele and all these beings give glory
to the invisible spirit so we have just read through quite a lot of names and rather than
trying to remember them all try and hold the feeling of what they’re exploring here everything
in the real world the true one comes into being by asking receiving and giving glory back everything
has been consented to it’s all relational and it’s all generous this is important for us to keep in
mind because what happens next breaks it and everything wrong with the world we live in flows
from that one break a crisis that became the world here’s what happened sophia whose name means
wisdom one of the powers of thought decided to act on her own she drew on the thinking and the
foreknowledge of the invisible spirit and she set out to bring an image of herself into being
but she did it without the spirit’s consent and the spirit didn’t approve she did it without her
male counterpart’s input and he didn’t approve either without the spirit’s agreement without
her partner even knowing she went ahead and made it her power was real so the attempt wasn’t barren
something did come out of her but it came out imperfect and it looked nothing like her because
she’d made it alone without her counterpart what she produced was misshapen a being unlike herself
sophia looked at what her desire had made it had twisted into the shape of a dragon with a lion’s
head, its eyes throwing off lightning. She threw it far away from her, out beyond the realm of the
immortal beings, so none of them would see it. She’d made it in ignorance and now she wanted it
hidden. She wrapped it in a glowing cloud and set its throne in the middle of the cloud so no one
could catch sight of it. Only the Holy Spirit, the one called the Mother of the Living, knew it was
there she named it Yaldabaoth. Yaldabaoth is the chief ruler he took a great share of power from
his mother then left her and moved away from where he’d been born he put himself in charge
and built realms of his own lit by a brilliant flame that’s still burning even now. So this
would be really easy to misread as a woman caused the fall but that’s not really what it’s saying
the book has already just put a feminine at the very top of reality and Sophia is rescued and
restored later on the flaw the book is actually pointing to is creating alone out of isolated
desire without consent and without relationship so in this book’s logic that’s how something is
malformed the rest of the text is the consequence of something created in isolation the fashioning
of this world. Yaldabaoth joined with the mindlessness inside him and began producing
rulers, modelling them on the perfect realms above, the ones he’d never actually seen.
There were twelve. He set the first seven to rule the seven spheres of heaven and the next five to
rule the five depths of the abyss. He shared out a portion of his fire to them but none of them the
real light he’d stolen from his mother. Because that’s what he is, ignorant darkness. When light
gets mixed into darkness, the darkness lights up. But when darkness gets mixed into light,
the light fades. What you’re left with is neither one nor the other, just dim. This dim ruler goes
by three names, Yaldabaoth, Saklas, which means fool, Samael, which means the blind god. He’s a
blasphemer out of sheer thoughtlessness. He said, I am God and there is no God but me. He said it
because he genuinely didn’t know where his power had come from. His rulers then made seven
authorities of their own and each of those made six demons apiece until there were 365 in total.
The seven have animal faces, a sheep, a donkey, a hyena, a seven-headed snake, a dragon, a monkey,
a face of fire. These are the seven of the week and they run the world. Yadabayev built his whole
creation as a copy of the realms above him trying to make it just like the indestructible ones
not that he’d ever laid eyes on them it was the power inside him the part that came from his
mother that gave him a sense of the pattern of the cosmos above when he looked out over everything
he’d made he’d announced to his crowd of demons i am a jealous god and there is no god but me
but saying that he gave himself away he admitted to his own demons that there is another god
because if there were no other god who exactly would he be jealous of so the line i am god and
there is no god but me is a direct quote of the god of the hebrew bible the book knows exactly
what it’s doing it takes the most famous claim of the creator god and puts it in the mouth of a blind
ignorant ruler who doesn’t know where he came from and that’s the whole provocation of the text
and it’s possibly why it was buried. It isn’t attacking any people, it’s attacking a concept
of God, the jealous authority who demands that you never look higher than him. You would have
also noticed 365, 365 and 7 are the numbers of time itself, so 365 days in the year,
seven days in the week the text is being precise it says these powers rule the world and it calls
the seven the seven of the week it doesn’t seem like a vague claim it’s suggesting that the
structure of measured time the calendar and the week that we operate inside was built by the
rulers as part of the prison time is not neutral background in this book it’s part of the prison’s
walls. So why would time be part of the prison’s walls? Well we’re going to come to that in the
next part because it’s where it talks about fate. It binds people into periods of time and seasons
and creation goes blind, ignorant of God above everything. The real, the fullness, is described
as timeless, eternal, peaceful, silent, resting before everything. So the book is framing that
what is real sits outside time whereas the counterfeit world runs on time. To trap a
fragment of the eternal you wrap it in time. Days, weeks, years, seasons, deadlines, ageing,
the sense that the past is gone and the future hasn’t come. That’s the part of this machinery
that keeps you from noticing the part of you that was never in time at all. The calendar is how the
prison keeps its shape the seven specifically are the planets so in the ancient world the seven of
the week were the seven visible wandering bodies the sun moon mars mercury jupiter venus saturn
our weekday names still carry them saturn day sunday moon day and the romance languages keep
Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus in Tuesday through to Friday. Each planet ruled a day and a sphere
of the heavens. That’s the seven heavens that the text keeps mentioning. In the surrounding culture
those seven planetary powers were objects of reverence. People read their fates from them
and they worshipped them and ordered their lives by them. The Apocryphon takes that entire respected
system and recasts it as a menagerie of ignorant demons with animal faces, a sheep, a donkey, a
hyena, a snake, a dragon, a monkey, a face of fire. It’s a deliberate desecration of the sky
that everyone else was praying to. The message is that the powers you think govern your destiny,
the ones written into the days of your week, aren’t gods. They’re Yadubayov’s jailers and their faces
are beasts. Astrology seems to be the target. This is really an attack on fate as it’s read
in the stars. The ancient world believed the planets fixed your character and your destiny
at birth, that you were bound by Haimamini, fate written in the heavens. The text names
fate exactly that way, the last variable loop, stronger than the gods. So the seven planetary
rulers and the 365 aren’t just time they’re the belief that time and the stars have already
decided you the counterfeit world says your life is scheduled your fate is fixed the calendar
runs you the apocryphon of john says that this is the prison talking and the spark in you predates
every single star the rulers didn’t just build a body they built the schedule that you live inside
and told you that’s your reality. 365 and 7 are the ancient names for the things that now look
like the calendar on your phone, the working week, the relentless forward tick that keeps you
too bound to periods and seasons to remember that there’s anything else outside them. The text is
saying the containment isn’t only in your wants, it’s in the rigidness of time. You were handed a
measured life sunrise to deadline to weekend to birthday to the slow
arithmetic of aging and told that’s all there is so this seems to be a warning
about any system that can only see itself
Yaldabaio’s failure is a certainty with no idea what it doesn’t know he measures
the little he can reach and he calls that everything that’s the failure of a
system built to optimize one number and treats that number as though it’s the
whole of reality in today’s world that would be engagement share price the quarterly figure
the recommendation engine algorithms if it can’t be counted then it doesn’t exist the jealous line
gives him away guarding a monopoly that he’s afraid of losing so what we could take from that
is to distrust the authority that presents itself as the full picture or the only way
Sophia’s repentance meanwhile his mother started moving back and forth because she’d realized she
was now missing light her brightness had dimmed and since her partner had never approved of what
she did she grew darker at this point John breaks in master what does it mean she moved back and
forth and he laughed and said it’s not the way Moses put it moving upon the waters nothing like
that when she saw the wreckage the evil that had happened and the light her son had stolen
she was filled with regret in the dark of her ignorance she started to forget and to feel ashamed
she couldn’t get back up above yet but she began to move that’s the moving back and forth the
arrogant one had drained power from his mother because he was ignorant he actually thought no
one existed except her he looked at the swarm of demons he’d made and set himself above them all
but when the mother understood how badly deformed that miscarriage of hers was she realized her
partner had never approved she wept furious with grief and repented all the realms of the fullness
heard her prayer of regret and asked the invisible virgin spirit to bless her the spirit agreed
and poured the holy water over her drawn from the whole fullness her partner didn’t come down to her
on his own but he came through the whole fullness to restore her to what she’d been she was lifted
back up above her son but not all the way home she’d have to stay in the ninth sphere until she
was fully restored so even though Sophia made a mistake she still gets a route home nobody’s
written are off which matters later because the same offer is about to be
extended to us also just to explain the layered heavens in the cosmos in this
text is built on stacked spheres counted upwards from the ground the seven
planetary rulers hold the first seven spheres the seven heavens with one
planet each that’s the machinery of time and fate the part that runs the world
above those seven sits an eighth sphere called in Gnostic writing the Ogdoad
the eighth which is the boundary layer the edge of the fixed star heaven the
last point before you leave the ruler’s territory above the eighth is the ninth
the Ennead which is the threshold just below the divine fullness it’s the
highest you can be while still not being fully at home Sophia fell all the way
down when she made yelzabeoth her repentance lifts her back up and the text is very careful about how
far she’s placed above her son so she’s no longer down in his ignorant round but it isn’t fully
restored either to her own eon she sits at the ninth meaning that she’s free from the prison
and the seven spheres of fate and she’s right at the threshold of home so the ninth is the highest
rung of the not quite yet it’s the waiting position she’s been forgiven and she’s held at
the ninth until she is fully restored until the deficiency her mistake tore open is repaired
which the text later says happens only when the trapped light is gathered back up out of humanity
so her restoration is bound to ours she can’t go the last step home until the sparks she’s
responsible for are woken and returned so she’s waiting on us and waking up is not the same as
being home you can be lifted clear of the prison you can be lifted past the seven spheres of fate
you can be standing at the ninth and still have work to finish the number is the text way of saying
waking up is part of it but it’s not the end of the road humanity begins then a voice came down
from the highest realms saying the man exists and the son of man the other way
if the chief ruler had it and he assumed it came from his mother he had no idea
what the voice really came from the Holy Mother Father perfect Providence the
image of the invisible one the father of everything the one in whom everything
came to be this was the first man he showed himself to them in the form of a
human being the whole realm of the chief ruler shook the foundations of the abyss trembled the
underside of the waters above the world of matter lit up and his image was reflected there every
demon and the first ruler looked up together and in that light they saw the image on the surface
yadubayev turned to the demons under him and said let’s make a man in the image of god and in our
own likeness so that this reflection will give us light. Yadav turned to the demons under him and
said let’s make a man in the image of God and in our own likeness so that his reflection will give
us light. So each of them drawing on one another’s power built a piece of the man
each adding a trait that matched something that’s seen in the image above them.
they shaped a being out of substance modeled on that perfect first man and they said let’s call
him adam so his name will hand us the power of light now a quick note here look at their motive
for creation the rulers copied the divine image not out of reverence but in order to harvest light
back for themselves. They’re trying to build a human to be used as a battery. That’s extractive
logic, to make the thing so that we can take from it. Construction of the human body. The seven
powers set to work, each producing a raw material for the body. Goodness made bone, providence made
sinew divinity made flesh lordship made marrow kingdom made blood zeal made skin understanding
made hair then the swarm of demons took those materials and started assembling the limbs and
the body itself they began with the head and from here the text turns into an inventory
and named entity for every single piece of a person abron made the head menegestroth made the
the brain. Asterechmi, the right eye. Thaspomochia, the left. Neronumus, the right ear. Bissum, the left.
The nose, the lips, the teeth, the tonsils, the uvula, each with its own named maker. The neck,
the throat, the shoulders, the arms, the hands down to the individual fingers and the fingernails.
It keeps going straight down the body. The breasts, the shoulder joints, the belly, the navel, the ribs,
the hips the marrow the skeleton then the organs one by one the stomach the heart the lungs the
liver the spleen the intestines the kidneys the veins the arteries the breathing itself then down
through the hips the genitals the thighs the legs the shins the knees the feet the toes all the way
down to a demon named miyamai who made the toenails and it still isn’t finished a whole second roster
of powers has handed the job of animating each limb seven more govern the body as a whole others
are assigned to the senses one over perception one over reception one over imagination one over
integration one over impulse underneath all of it sit four basic conditions hot cold dry wet and
matter is the mother of all of them then at the center there are four chief demons one over
pleasure one over desire one over distress one over fear and out of those four every passion
branches out of distress comes envy jealousy grief and resentment discord cruelty worry mourning
out of pleasure a great deal of harm and false pride out of desire anger fury bitterness
outrage dissatisfaction and out of fear horror flattery suffering and shame the total came to
365 working together to finish the body piece by piece and the text says that there are even more
that it hasn’t listed running other passions and if you want the rest it tells you to go and look
in the book of zoroaster all of yadav’s servants labored to complete the body and then for a very
long time it just laid there it didn’t move meanwhile yadav’s mother wanted the power back
that she had handed over to him so she prayed in earnest to the most merciful one the mother father
of everything for help now you could easily pick this up and create an organizational chart where
someone sat down and mapped out the entire inside of a person, every organ, every joint and then
every emotion, each one handed to a named controller so it could be worked and managed
from the outside. This is more than a metaphor when you view it against today’s world. Your
attention, your outrage, your fear, your wanting is all measured and modelled and owned by people
whose income depends on them. The book warned that your inner life would be charted by someone who
meant to use it. So watch what attempts to manipulate your feelings and ask what it’s
selling or who benefits from your response. Yaldabaoth deceived. By his sacred command,
the highest realm sent down the five lights disguised as Yaldabaoth’s own chief advisors.
This was the setup that would draw his mother’s stolen power back out of him. They told Yaldabaoth,
breathe some of your spirit into the man’s face and his body will stand up. So he did. He breathed
some of his spirit into the man not realizing that spirit was actually his mother’s divine power
he had no clue what was really happening because he lived in ignorance and with that breath his
mother’s power left him and it passed into the human body the one modeled on the original image
the body moved it grew strong it shone the other by your demons were eaten up with envy
they’d all worked together to make this thing they’d each poured their power into it and now
its mind was far sharper than theirs sharper even than the chief’s rulers own when they saw that the
man shone with light and out thought them and carried none of their evil they seized him and
they threw him down into the lowest depths of the material world so this is actually the good news
your light was smuggled in and now they can’t get it back out they built a cage and accidentally
filled it with light which is the one thing that they were trying to keep out so whatever you
believe the idea is that you hold light and they can’t reach it the beginning of salvation the
blessed one the mother father the good and merciful one looked with compassion on the mother’s power
that the chief ruler had let slip out of himself and because yadabos demons might overwhelm the
fragile living body again out of great compassion he sent adam a helper from his own good spirit
a being full of light came forth and he named her life she works alongside him for the whole
of creation she taught adam where his people had come from and how he could climb back up which
turns out to be the same road he came down she was hidden inside adam so the rulers wouldn’t
catch on because her whole purpose was to undo the disaster their mother had set in motion
adam started to stand out because a trace of that light was living in him his mind was far beyond
his makers so the rulers and demons put their heads together and schemed they mixed fire and
earth and water with four burning winds churning it all together and they dragged adam down into
the shadow of death their plan was to remake him this time out of earth water fire and wind
but read what those four things actually stand for matter darkness desire and the counterfeit
spirit the whole thing became a tomb a new kind of body those thieves locked the man inside it
chained him in forgetfulness and made him something that could die this was his first fall
his first separation from the light and yet the light inside him would keep lifting his thinking
upwards a note on the phrases to watch from here on so the book’s word for this is the counterfeit
spirit sometimes translated as the artificial spirit it’s listed as one of the four raw
materials the second body is built from alongside matter and darkness and desire it means a false
inner self a copy of the real spark that’s installed to run you and you could read this
as an imposed inner voice that you mistake for your own one other caution before we go on because
the word artificial will pull some of you straight to artificial intelligence. Set that aside for now
as this text is describing something people have lived inside for as long as there have been people,
an installed set of wants that feels native. AI is a few years old but this mechanism is ancient
so it’s fair to say that our newest tools are the most powerful delivery system that this
counterfeit has ever had but the counterfeit came first by about 2,000 years and it would still be
running if not a single machine had ever been switched on. So I will say counterfeit spirits
through most of this to keep us pointed at the old human thing not the shiny new one. Adam in
Yaldabaoth’s Paradise. The rulers took the man and set him down in paradise and told him to help
himself, eat whatever he liked. But their kind of food is bitter and their beauty is rotten.
Their food is a con, their trees are godless, their fruit is poison and what they’re really
offering is death. In the middle of the garden they planted the tree of their life. Let me tell
you what that tree really is and the scheme behind it. The plan they cooked up to make a counterfeit
spirit its roots are bitter its branches are dead its shade is hatred its leaves are deceit its
fruit is death its seed is desire and it only ever blooms in the dark anyone who eats from it belongs
to the underworld now the other tree the one they call the knowledge of good and evil is something
else entirely. That one is the light, Epinoia. They ordered Adam not to touch it. They stood
guard in front of it to keep it hidden because they were afraid he might look up toward the
fullness and suddenly see the shabbiness of what they’d trapped him in. But I’m the one who got
them to eat from it. I asked the saviour, Lord wasn’t it the serpent that got Adam to eat? He
smiled and said the serpent got them to eat for its own reasons to plant sexual desire so that
Adam would be useful to it that’s a different thing Yaldabaoth worked out that Adam had disobeyed
because the light inside him had made his mind sharper than the ruler’s own so trying to claw
back the power he’d put in Adam Yaldabaoth wiped his memory he made him completely forgetful
I asked the saviour, what completely forgetful actually meant? He said, it’s not what Moses wrote
that God made Adam fall into a deep sleep. It wasn’t sleep. Adam’s perception was covered over
and he went unconscious. It’s what Yadav said through one of his prophets, I’ll dull their
minds so they can’t see and can’t understand. A quick note on this is that the book flips the
garden of eden completely eating from the tree isn’t a crime it’s actually part of the rescue
mission the forbidden knowledge is what would wake you up and the light being is the one urging you
to take it the authority that forbids it is the one with something to hide so whatever you believe
about genesis try and sit with the reversal because in this telling don’t eat don’t question
don’t look higher is the voice of the jailer not of the god if you were to read this now the ruler
states his own method forgetting isn’t sleep here it’s perception deliberately veiled minds being
dulled so that they don’t see or understand and this forms part of the master key woman comes
into being the light inside adam buried herself deep in him the chief ruler tried to dig her out
of his rib cage but she can’t be caught the darkness chased her and never laid a hand on her
so instead the chief ruler drew a portion of power out of adam and used it to shape a second person
one with a woman’s form modeled on that light being he’d glimpsed he put the power he’d taken
from the man into the woman it did not happen the way moses said it did with a rib adam saw the
woman standing beside him and in that moment the light appeared to him she lifted the veil that
had been dulling his mind and he sobered up out of his dark drunkenness and recognized her as his
own counterpart he said this is bone of my bone flesh of my flesh this is why a man leaves his
mother and father and joins himself to a woman and the two become one because his helper is being
sent back to him. Sophia, our sister, came down descending in innocence to recover what she’d
lost. That’s why she’s called Life, the mother of the living. Through her help, people can reach
real knowledge. And I appeared as an eagle perched on the tree of knowledge in order to teach them
and pull them up out of the depths of sleep, because the two of them had fallen and knew they
were exposed. The light appeared as a being of light and switched their minds on. When Yaldabaoth
found out they’d slipped away from him he cursed his earth. He hunted down the woman as she was
making herself ready for a man and handed her over so the man could be her master because he didn’t
understand the divine strategy at work. The man and woman were too frightened to break away from
who kept exposing his own ignorance to his angels and he threw them both out of paradise
wrapping them in heavy darkness the chief ruler saw the young woman standing next to adam and
realized the light of life was inside her too yadav was completely in the dark meanwhile the
providence of all seeing what was coming sent to help us protect the divine life within eve
Then Yadaviv raped Eve and she bore two sons. Their real names were Elohim and Yahweh. Elohim
has a bear’s face, Yahweh a cat’s face. One is just and one is not and it’s Yahweh who is just.
Yahweh commands fire and wind, Elohim water and earth but Yadaviv gave them cover names and called
them Cain and Abel. From that point until now sex has continued and that’s down to the chief
ruler who planted the drive to reproduce in the woman. Through sex the ruler keeps causing new
human bodies to be made and into each one he breathes his counterfeit spirit. He put those
two sons in charge of the natural elements so that they’d rule over the tomb, the body itself.
So this is one of the most deliberately shocking passages in the book and we do need to frame it
so it isn’t offensive. The two names given to those two demon sons Elohim and Yahweh are two
of the names for God in the Hebrew Bible. This book is deliberately framing the names of the
biblical creator and reassigning them downward to the ruler’s offspring. It’s a full frontal attack
on the idea that the God of this world is the highest God. It’s not an attack on people, it’s an
attack on a concept of authority. It’s an ancient equivalent of a banned book saying what’s unsayable
which again could be why it was buried. The children of Seth populate the world. Adam joined
with the image of his own foreknowledge and had a son who resembled the son of man and he named him
Seth, modelling him on the heavenly race above. In the same way the mother sent down her spirit
an image of herself to prepare a landing place for the realms to descend. But the chief ruler
forced humanity to drink from the waters of forgetfulness so they’d have no memory of where
they truly came from. The children of Seth stayed in that state for a while so that when the spirit
came down from the holy realms it could raise them up, heal every defect in them and restore
the whole thing to wholeness. So to read that as now the ruler makes people drink so they can’t
remember where they came from. Forgetting is his masterstroke because a mind with nothing to measure
the present against will accept almost anything as normal. You’re asked to forget constantly by
replacement so this morning’s outrage rolls over last week’s which rolls over
the outrage of last month the feed keeps no memory by design and it trains yours
to match so this is the least glamorous instruction in any spiritual texts ever
written but it’s basically keep a record keep on track remember what was promised
because they have to engineer forgetting so that in itself tells you what you
need to do to keep safe. Six questions about the soul. I asked the saviour, Lord will every soul
be saved and enter the pure light? He said that’s a big question and honestly one nobody outside the
immovable race could answer. Those are the people the spirit of life descends on, the power that
lets them be saved and become whole. They scrub the evil out of themselves, they want nothing to
do with corruption and they get free of rage envy jealousy desire craving the physical body works
against them and they wear it only while they wait for the ones who take it off for them those people
earn eternal life they endure everything to deserve the good and inherit that life then i asked lord
what about the souls the spirit descended on who still didn’t do these things he answered when the
spirit reaches people they’re changed and saved it descends on everyone and without it no one could
ever stand upright after they’re born if the spirit of life grows in them power comes and
their souls are strengthened and nothing can drag them off but if the counterfeit spirit gets into
them instead it leads them astray then i asked lord when souls leave the body where do they go
he smiled and said if the soul is strong it carries more power than the counterfeit spirit
so it escapes wickedness. With the help of the incorruptible one it’s saved and reaches eternal
rest. Lord what about the souls of people who don’t know who they belong to? He said in those
people the counterfeit spirit has grown strong and they’ve gone astray. Their souls are weighed
down, pulled towards wickedness and thrown into forgetfulness. When they leave the body a soul
like that is handed over to the powers the rule is made, chained up and thrown back into prison.
Around and around it goes until it manages to break free of forgetfulness through knowledge
and so in the end it becomes whole and is saved. Then I asked how a soul shrinks down enough to
enter a mother or a person. He was pleased I asked. You’re truly fortunate to have understood
a soul like that should be guided by someone who carries the spirit of life that’s how it’s saved
and it won’t have to enter a body again and i said lord what about the people who reached real
knowledge and then turned away from it he said the demons of poverty take them to a place where
there’s no turning back they stay there until the ones who have blasphemed against the spirit
are punished. Then I asked, Lord, where did the counterfeit spirit come from? And he told me.
So this forms another part of the key. The soul goes round and around, is recaptured, is cast back
until it becomes free from forgetfulness through knowledge. And every other method in the book is
a delivery system for this. Manufactured desire can only keep you if you don’t realise or you
forget that it was deliberately installed in you. Fate only binds if you forget there was ever
another road or path to take. The buttons that are pushed only work if you forget that you were
played the last time. So the cure is very simple. It’s memory or remembering. In this book, waking
up and remembering what you are amounts to the same thing. Three plots against humanity. The
mother father is merciful a holy spirit on our side through the light of providence it keeps
raising up the children of the perfect race lifting their minds in their eternal light
when the chief ruler realized these people had risen above him that their minds outstripped his
own he wanted to shut their thinking down but he had no idea how far past him they’d gone
and he couldn’t stop them so he made a plan with his demons each of them forced themselves on
wisdom on Sophia and out of that came fate the last and worst kind of prison fate is unpredictable
and comes in as many varieties as the demons do fate is hard fate is stronger than the gods the
authorities the demons and all the generations of people caught in it out of fate came sinfulness
violence blasphemy forgetfulness ignorance crushing rules heavy guilt and raw fear
that’s how the whole of creation went blind unaware of the god above everything locked up
in forgetfulness people can’t even see what they’re doing wrong they’re bound to clocks and
calendars and seasons ruled by fate who is lord of the lot so red is now fate is the belief that
nothing can change, there’s no alternative, the system is just too big, every party is bought and
your vote is just theatre. The text calls faith the strongest prison of all and it’s stronger than
the gods and says what pours out of it is fear and the sense of being bound. By believing this
you’ll believe that the outcome is fixed regardless and then you’ll just give up and accept and that
is the whole objective. When you feel despair, when you think there is no alternative, you’ll just
give up and that is what the machine wants you to do. The flood and the making of the counterfeit
spirit. Eventually Yadav came to regret the whole of creation and decided to wipe it out with the
flood. But the great light of providence warned Noah. Noah preached to everyone but the ones who
were strangers to the light didn’t listen it wasn’t the way moses told it hiding in an ark
they hid in a special place noah and many others from the immovable race taking cover inside a
cloud of light noah knew his own authority even as the chief ruler poured darkness over the whole
world then the chief ruler and his powers tried another strategy they sent their demons to human
daughters meaning to father children on them but that failed so they made another plan they
manufactured a counterfeit spirit a knockoff of the real spirit that had descended and to breed
it into people they disguised the demons as the woman’s own husbands and filled the woman with
that spirit of darkness and they brought money into the world gold and silver coins and cash
iron and every metal of that kind the people pulled towards it were led into trouble and
thoroughly misled they grew old getting no real pleasure and died having found no truth
never knowing the true god this is how they enslaved the whole of creation from the foundation
of the world right up to now they fathered children of darkness and some of the women and
those people shut their hearts and hardened themselves in the hardness of the counterfeit
spirit and it’s gone on like that to the present day so if you were to read that as now the
counterfeit spirit this answers the question john had asked they built it on purpose modeled on the
real thing to lead people astray now i want you to think of manufactured desire so in 1928 edward
bernays which was for his nephew published a book called propaganda and he wrote that the deliberate
manipulation of the public’s habit was an invisible government run by people that no one elected
he had been hired to make women smoke back when a woman with a cigarette in the street was an
absolute scandal so he staged a parade he handed cigarettes to models he briefed the papers to
call them torches of freedom and a generation picked up a habit and felt it as they were being
liberated that is the counterfeit spirit the gnostics named the mechanism 18 centuries before
he even used it so notice how many of your wants have been generated by someone else or something
else with regard to the metals in the same breath the book lists gold silver money and coins among
the tools of capture and says that the people who were drawn to them grew old finding no pleasure
and died finding no truth now it links to containment a distraction that keeps the want
running so it never turns toward the thing that would end it the wanting doesn’t ever appear to
end you think that obtaining the latest thing will satisfy you but it doesn’t because it is never
enough the providence him i am the providence of everything i became like my own human children
i existed from the very first i walked down every road there is i am the wealth of light i am the
memory of the fullness i walked into the place of deepest darkness and kept going down i entered the
central part of the prison the foundations of chaos shook i hid because of their evil they
didn’t recognize me i came down a second time carrying on i entered the middle of the darkness
the inner part of the underworld to carry out my mission the foundations of chaos shook threatening
to collapse on everyone there so i rose back up to my roots in the light so as not to destroy them
all just yet i came down a third time i am light i live in light i am the memory of providence i
entered the thick of the darkness i reached the deepest part of the underworld i let my face light
up and i entered their prison the body is that prison i cried out anyone who hears me rise up
out of your deep sleep and asleep awoke and wept wiping away bitter tears asking who’s calling me
where has this hope come from down here where i’m lying in the depths of this prison i am the
providence of pure light, I told him. I am the thought of the virgin spirit. Get up. Remember
what you’ve heard. Trace your roots back to me, the merciful one. Guard against the demons of
poverty. Guard against the demons of chaos. Guard against everything that would bind you. Wake up.
Stay awake. Rise up out of the depths of the underworld. I raised him up. I sealed him with
the light and water of the five seals and death had no power over him ever again then i ascended
back to the perfect realm i finished all of it and you’ve heard the whole account so a quick note
the book names the prison the body is that prison which is as close as this text ever comes to
stating its whole thesis in one line the five seals is a sethian baptism image a ceiling that
claims and protects the one who’s been woken so you don’t need the ritual detail to feel it
the light goes all the way down finds the sleeper and marks him as no longer available to the
machine the number five recurs across this family of texts as a marker of the divine realm and it’s
a saving structure so it’s less about designing a new tattoo and much more about a person waking
in the dark the light being names them and marks them five times and wraps them in brightness and
lifts them marking them makes them unrecoverable so the counterfeit will try to recapture them
but finds that they’ve already been claimed so death had no power over him ever again so staying
is the practice because recapture is the default setting and forgetting comes back every morning
with the light of our phones. The book also contains a warning about itself. When you tell
someone the world is a prison and that their real self doesn’t belong here, they could just stop
caring and just wait until it all ends. And the power structure would be really happy with that
because someone who is awake but then just checks out is an absolute win for the system. The
conclusion. I’ve told you all of this so you can write it down and share it with your fellow
spirits in confidence because this is the mystery of the immovable race the saviour handed it all
to john to write down and keep safe and said anyone who trades this away for a gift or for
food or drink or clothing or anything of that sort will be cursed all of this came to john as
a revelation and the moment it was done the saviour vanished john went back to the other
disciples and told them everything the saviour had said to him jesus the christ amen this text
had been buried in the sand for centuries it describes a world that we live in today
those that wrote it could never have pictured a device built to do the exact thing that they
were warning about and it still explains the way out to anybody who wants to hear it
Source: The Conscious Radical