Descriptions:
Video Description
In 367 CE a bishop ordered these texts destroyed; someone buried them in the desert instead, and sixteen centuries later they were dug back up. This opening episode from the Conscious Radical channel introduces the Nag Hammadi library, a collection treated here not as fringe myths but as primary sources that scholars translate at Princeton and Claremont and house in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. It asks a simple question: what did early Christians believe before one version of the story won?
The video walks through the Gnostic view of where the world came from, who made it, and what that means for us. In that story, the maker of the material world is not the ultimate source; there is something higher, and the goal is remembering. It is the first of four parts, setting the foundation for everything else.
Full Video Transcript
Awaken those who arise and rouse those who sleep, for you embody vigorous understanding.
Those words were from Gnostic texts that were discovered in 1945, having been buried for 1600 years.
Now if they sound a little bit different, it’s because they are, and they contain so many wonderful teachings that have just remained hidden for so long.
and the reason why I like them particularly is because I think they really help shine a light
on the world that we’re experiencing today and for me personally just being able to dip into
old text and wisdom and spirituality can really help me process and understand what it means to
be human today why are we here what are we here to do and what are we supposed to achieve and if
you’ve ever watched the matrix and thought hang on this could actually be real and I think quite
few people sort of started waking up and thinking are we in a system that we didn’t design and are
we just slaves to it then i think listening or reading the gnostic text will really help you
shine a light onto the world that we’re experiencing right now and the other really
interesting thing about these texts is that you can put them into a psychological perspective
from a political lens and also from a convergence so you can say actually it’s not just about
spirituality it’s about life today the politics of today it’s about psychology how it impacts our
minds and when you bring all of that together it creates a better understanding for us to be able
to navigate the world that we’re in today so i’m claire welcome to the conscious radical and this
is a page where i like to explore all of these ideas now i’m not saying i know everything or
anything actually all i’m saying is that i like to read these things and try and put it into
perspective to help me process and understand the world that we’re living in when they were
discovered in 1945 they weren’t really looked at fully until 1977 but what’s really interesting
about them is that in these teachings it says that the god that we know from the old testament
is not the true god it is a lesser god and i will go into that in more detail shortly
so the texts themselves contain mystical secret teachings of Jesus and there were teachings that
were imparted to Philip to Judas to Mary of Magdalene there’s the gospel of truth in there
as well as many others but first let me take you back to December 1945 and I want you to picture
this a small place just on the outskirts of Nag Hammadi in Egypt and there was a farmer and the
farmer’s name was Muhammad Ali al-Sumun and he was digging for fertilizer and as he was digging
for fertilizer he struck something quite hard and what he uncovered was about a one and a half
meter tall sealed jar. Now he was a little bit suspicious and a little bit scared because he
thought by opening up the jar he would release a djinn or a genie but thankfully curiosity did
get the better of him and he decided to open the jar and inside the jar were 13 leather bound
papyrus texts and within that there’s around 50 different sets of teachings so what he did is he
took them home and unfortunately when he took them home his mother decided to use some of them as
kindling so some of them were set alight thankfully the others were sold and went to various antiquity
dealers with them ending up in Switzerland where they came to the attention of no person other than
Carl Jung now Carl Jung had always been really interested in the teachings of the Gnostics so
when he found them he did loads of research on them and there are quite a few books that he’s
written about the Gnostics and the teachings that he found within these texts and then after quite
a few years and a lot of political rigmarole the texts were actually returned to Cairo and they
ended up in the Coptic Museum in Cairo which is where they are today and you
can go and visit them and see them so who were the Gnostics anyway well they
weren’t fringe figures they were actually quite high up in the Christian
religion and Valentinus was a particular philosopher and leader of the Gnostic
teachings and he nearly became the Bishop of Rome but then for some reason
and I think it’s because the texts and the teachings include so many different
elements so for example they follow the teachings of christ they look at jewish mysticism they look
at platonic philosophy and they look at persian dualism and because that’s so wide and again i
find that really interesting i look at various parts of different religions and teachings and i
say that makes sense to me that makes sense to me that makes sense to me and i sort of pull them in
together because these teachings were so vast and so wide they actually couldn’t be contained
and for some reason the church then moved against them and said that anybody who believed in this
were heretics and so they sort of died out they went a little bit quiet but within these texts
they say that the true god is monad and he is an invisible spirit and unknowable not unknowable
because he’s distant but unknowable because we don’t have the words to be able to describe him
fully again find that really interesting because i think when we think about how we’ve been brought
up in in our environment and our conditioning we possibly don’t have any words to be able to
articulate something that is outside of our understanding outside of our remit outside of
of our system this unknowable god can’t be described monad created the pleroma and the
pleroma which means fullness or completeness meant it was all encompassing there was nothing
missing from it and within the pleroma there were emanations of the divine and these emanations of
the divine were called eons and the eons worked in pairs and so these pairs which you would think
were opposites were actually the same the same being on a different spectrum on the different
level of the spectrum for example you had depth and silence because you can’t know depth without
there being silence truth and mind and word and life and then one of the youngest of the eons was
called Sophia now Sophia means wisdom and she was the youngest so she was further out in the
she was sort of on the edges of the pleroma and what she did because she was always seeking
knowledge and understanding she did she made a mistake she didn’t make a mistake with any
malice or anything but it was literally just as exploration and she acted on her own without her
consort and she acted without the permission of the monad and what she did is she created this
being and this being it said her offspring is said to have had a face of a lion a body of a serpent
and eyes of fire now when she saw this what she had created she was horrified and she was so
horrified that she cast it into the void out of the pleroma and into the void into nothingness
now this being was called the Yaldabaoth and the Yaldabaoth in the void knew it was on its own
and it couldn’t see the Pleroma and it couldn’t see anything below it so it assumed it must be a
god without realizing it was actually a lesser god and so it created the archons now the archons
are rulers there’s either seven or twelve depending on the text that you read but they
were rulers with the Yaldabaoth it created the material world that we’re in now and then they
decided right well we’re going to create some human beings because we need something that we
can rule over so they started by building adam now they created adam but adam didn’t animate
until suddenly this divine pneuma this breath this spirit came from the pleroma and entered
in to Adam and with the words of I make this human live and the archons were a bit like what
where did that come from because it didn’t realize there was anything else other than what it what
they had created and then they looked at Adam and they were like hang on a minute he’s shining
bright he’s shining really bright and he was shining bright because he had the divine spark
inside him and the archons were like no no no we can’t be having this so they decided that they
would cover Adam with the lethe which means forgetfulness now the lethe is actually also
the name of a Greek river that takes people to death they covered him in this layer of
forgetfulness so think of that as a divine human being with a divine spark being covered with a
layer of forgetfulness so forgetting where you came from forgetting your connection with source
when they did this the monad said actually i’m going to send another counter system down
a counter program called epinoia now epinoia was this amazing beautiful inner knowing this
inner knowledge and it was sent down and went into adam and couldn’t be reached by the archons
again adam was bright and filled and luminous because the epinoia was luminous epinoia
she was bright and luminous and inside of Adam and this is where we start to look at
the bible and say okay so Eve was made from Adam’s rib so it’s the extraction
and this is where it gets a bit similar so the archons tried to extract the epinoia from Adam
and as they did as they extracted this beautiful knowing from Adam it created a new form which was
eve the archons feel like they they’d dampened adam down again and again adam had sort of forgotten
his connection to source and the epinoia which was now eve tried to wake him and woke him up
and stirred him and said arise and when adam woke up and looked at epinoia now eve he says it is you
who have given me life but then the archons were like right we now need to capture eve so they
basically tried to chase her but she managed to send her spirits her luminousness into a tree
and so what the archons did actually capture was her material essence of eve it’s sort of showing
us that we’ve got this divine spark we’ve got this forgetfulness of who we are and we have this
inner knowing but they’re both present but separated from each other as a result of the
archons and i sort of feel that this describes where we are that the actual natural side of us
the real us is always slightly ahead of the things that try to contain us and the gnostics believe
that this awakening when we do wake up to this knowing the gnosis the knowing that actually that
is our true nature and it’s almost as though that we’ve woken from a nightmare so when we wake from
nightmare and we realize that we’re safe that we’re in our bed that we’re nice and cozy it doesn’t
mean that the nightmare was real but we still have an experience of it so we can still experience it
what we felt within our dream within our nightmare that running that fighting feels very real but
then we wake up and go oh okay it’s all right we’re safe when we do wake up when our consciousness
wakes up it doesn’t mean that the world around us disappears it just means that we have a different
relationship with it we have a different perception of what was really real after all so why were
these texts excluded in the first place well there are three reasons the first reason is that it
bypassed the church and the priests now that’s not going to be good for any of our modern religions
we always had to have a mediation point between ourselves and source and the gnostic texts
removed that they said no no you don’t need a church you don’t need a priest you have got a
direct relationship to source the second reason was that it described the god in the old testament
as lesser or false or not the real god and of course that would have created a bit of a stir
it would create a stir now too to be honest and then thirdly when the new testament as we know
it which contains 27 books was created it was being created by the bishop of alexandria athenius
and he said right this is what i’ve decided goes into the new testament anything else needs to be
destroyed get rid of it so a lot of scriptures that are now lost to us were destroyed as a result
of that as a result of somebody saying i’m deciding what goes into the bible or the new
testament and what doesn’t and thankfully thankfully some monks or priests or scholars
whoever they were decided they weren’t going to do that and they buried the text and they were
buried for 1600 years and i am so grateful that they disobeyed athenius and that we were able to
find these texts because i think they share something really beautiful for us for us all
to take something from regardless of whether you believe in source or god or or whatever it is that
you believe in that the teachings themselves are saying however you were created you have a direct
connection to that and nothing can come in between that but you have to remember you have to remember
that inner knowledge that inner knowing of who you are that divine spark to reignite and to awaken
to your connection to the source and that is beautiful so in the next episode i’m going to
be looking through a psychological lens of the gnostic text and how that impacts modern psychology
so i think modern psychology is almost just about catching up to some of the ancient wisdom and
teachings and then i’m going to be going on to a political perspective and i want you to start
thinking about the archons or the rulers and how they might be present in today’s world anyway i’m
really grateful that you found me if this is of interest to you if it resonated with you or if you
think it will resonate with someone else please do share it with them and i will be really excited to
see you on the next one. In the meantime, thank you so much for taking the time and joining me today.
Source: The Conscious Radical