Anima Mundi - The soul of the Cosmos

"Sol mundi mens est."

"The sun is the mind of the universe."

 - From Macrobius, Saturnalia 1. 19. 9,  Iamblichus, Protrepticus 21, 115; Ammianus Marcellinus, 21. 1. 11.

"sūrya ātmā jaghatastasthuṣaśca || "

"The soul of all that moveth not or moveth, the Sun hath filled the air and earth and heaven."

- From Rig Veda, Book 1, Hymn 115 on Surya.

"ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ κατοικεῖ πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα τῆς θεότητος σωματικῶς"

"In Christ dwells all the pleroma of deity in bodily form."

- From Colossians 2:9, Saint Paul of Tarsus.

"...we must declare that this Cosmos has verily come into existence as a Living Creature endowed with soul and reason owing to the providence of God....For that Living Creature embraces and contains within itself all the intelligible Living Creatures, just as this Universe contains us and all the other visible living creatures."

- From Timaeus, Plato (30b-30c).

"It was quite amazing that the Aeons were in the Father and that they were able to emanate in as much as they were not able to perceive and recognize the one in whom they were."

- From Gospel of Truth, Valentinus, a Syrian Christian.

The soul of the cosmos has been identified by various cultures across different timelines through out the history of the human race as you can see above. It is the fundamental belief of the Vedic Aryans that Savitr, the golden tongued Sun god exists in every Pindanda (womb or living creature or microcosm) and as well in Brahmanda (cosmos or the universe). Vedantic scholars and followers have misled people from understanding the true philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanishads by making it appear more idealistic or solipsistic or subjective by using the words like "within", "inner cleansing" etc etc.

Molecular biology has shown that there is no god or soul with in us or inside us and we will not find anything not matter how much we dig deep with in ourselves. We have to abandon such subjective usage of terminologies in favor of Realism. When Vedic and Upanishadic seers use such words they are merely talking of a physically localized another platonic realm altogether. So in order to attain the truth we have to look above us or behind us and not with in us.

When the revelation of God occurs at your own place then it is in the microcosm where you will see the God because he exists behind every living creature and he is the one who is stimulating the intellect standing behind it. Now when the revelation of God occurs through an apocalypse like when Paul says in Corinthians that I know a man who was caught up in the third heaven with his body or without god knows or the ascension to heavens described in texts like Mithras Liturgy then it is in the macrocosm where you will see the same god. In this way God has entered into every living creature and contains with in himself all the living creatures like a ship.

How do we visualize such a grandiose design of the cosmos? One bad analogy would be to consider yourself or your bodily form as the all encompassing living creature. Now the individual hairs over your body will themselves be one whole Pleromas but each individual hair is blinded by its own small world and is not aware of in whom they actually exist (meaning your body). Moreover each individual hair thinks and believes that it has a separate distinct individuality of its own and believes that it acts according to its own will without realizing the fact that each one of them posses the entire blue print (genome) to generate the whole body which they themselves are part of.

In the actual solar world of Helios-Mithras his body is formed of divine light rays and one can retell the same analogy replacing "hairs" with "divine light rays". Each individual light ray on his body is a pleroma by itself and the Aeon which is the manifestation of the light ray is actually an anthropomorphic god but the Aeons do not actually know that they exist inside the Father. The Father replicated himself and entered inside each of these Aeons so that they can seek him at their own places at the time when they want to return to him out of love.

So the actual truth is that we all are just light rays who exist inside the body of God. Since we are trying to visualize the cosmos from the perspective of the God its getting difficult for us to imagine such an alternative view as we are so accustomed to view the world as it is constructively given to us by our minds.

The Holy Father and the Holy Mother generated the Aeons and the last of the Aeon named Sophia generated Achamoth and Achamoth in turn generated the souls (light rays) of human beings out of joy when she saw Christ descending from the above Pleroma to save Achamoth but these souls or light rays were immature and could not be part of the body of the Holy Father which constitutes the Pleroma and therefore Christ ordered Achamoth to bring forth the Demiurge Jehovah, the god of the Jews so that he can create the heavens and the earth and create a man and an woman in the image of the above Pleroma so that the man and the woman could commune and have intercourse in order to produce a house or a place for the souls of Achamoth to reside themselves and that house or place of residence is none other than the fetus which is growing inside the womb of every mother so that the soul can easily enter into the fetus of a mother for the sole purpose of maturing itself and finally return to the Pleroma.

Every light ray constitutes the following elements earth, air, fire, water and space which forms the subtle body and the sense organs of the soul, a mind to perceive, a soul to experience the world, an intellect to reason and to search for truth and finally behind that intellect the replicated Holy Father himself. The soul which experiences the world as self consciousness is who we all are which is merely nothing but a light ray.

This is the grand design of our cosmos but where does Non-duality come into picture here? The replicated Holy Father or God is none other than our ego, God is the ego and it is he himself who is responsible for every event which is occurring in the cosmos. The spirited soul enslaved itself by matter is merely a puppet which sits and experiences the world played by the ego who is none other than God himself but unlike an evil demon trying to hoax us into believing in the reality of the world and keep us onto eternal slavery our God is a good god for he has given us freedom and immortality by showing us the truth that the soul of God is no different from the soul of each human being, the revelation which I had that the prana or the elan vital or the soul or myself is Jesus, Buddha, Mithras, Helios and just about everything and including nothing, the place of non-duality. We don't know this because we identify ourselves with the physical containers or with the cloth (bodies) en-covering the soul rather than identifying ourselves with the soul itself. We all are suffering from an identity crisis and it requires the gnosis of the Holy Father preached by Jesus Christ and his great apostle Saint Paul to get over it.

Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace slams atheistic Buddhists

Distorted Visions of Buddhism: Agnostic and Atheist

Vajrayana Buddhism is a slap on the faces of atheistic Buddhists because it recognizes the existence of anthropomorphic deities which contradicts with the view of atheistic Buddhism.

Hundred peaceful and wrathful deities.

 

Ptolemy's Letter to Flora is truly a gem of a work

Ptolemy's letter to Flora is a slap on those who believe that the Gnostics were not intellectuals and believed in some nonsensical mythical beliefs produced from their own little fantasies. 

Ptolemy's letter to Flora is a fine introduction to the unique thinking and attitude of the Valentinians which can be preached to all the masses irrespective of their psychic, pneumatic or hylic nature as it does not contain any esoteric stuff like in the other Valentinian texts like the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth.

Ptolemy's Letter to Flora

Some of the interesting and factual ideas that come out of this outstanding letter are:

The Torah Law and its commandments is quite alien to the nature and thought of the perfect Father of all.

The Holy Father who is above Jehovah in the above Pleroma is not a person who judges on humanity instead he unconditionally loves all of humanity by giving us unmerited grace and sows the spiritual seed in all of us. In fact he has pre-ordained this cosmos in order to provide salvation to all of humanity. Our salvation is inevitable no matter what sins we commit or what good things we achieve. It is only a matter of time that one receives salvation early and others receive it late. The perfect Holy Father does not condemn humanity by placing eternal damnation of sins on them. In fact we all are above sin because we are not responsible for the events which are occurring in this world because everything is working according to the will of the Father.

The Law giver Jehovah is not an evil god but a just one.

This is the unique belief of the Valentinians compared to the other gnostic sects like the Sethians who taught that the creator and the world to be evil. Ptolemy criticizes those who believe that the law giver and the creator of this world is the highest God and equally criticizes those who believe on contrary that he was the Devil.

The tripartite division on the just but incomplete Laws of Jehovah and the imperfect unjust Laws of Moses and the elders of the Jewish people.

Ptolemy teaches us that the Saviour approved the Torah (The laws of Jehovah) but rejected the Halakha (The Jewish interpretation of the Law by its elders). The historical Jesus on many different occasions broke many laws of the Old Testament like the Sabbath and defended his actions impeccably against his accusing Pharisees by explaining and providing the true purpose of those laws given by Jehovah and accused back at the Pharisees and silenced them in having not understood the true purpose of those laws and striving away from them by following the unjust laws established by the elders of the Jewish people.

The Saviour came to fulfill and complete the Laws of Jehovah and not to nullify it.

This is the idea which should receive much attention and I hope this perception at least stops all the Pauline hate that goes on among the Jewish Christian circles like the Ebionites, among atheists who try to seek contradictions in the bible and among Christians who doubt and hate Paul.

When people find what Jesus says in Matthew that he has not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it until the last stroke of every prophecy is fulfilled and when on the other hand they see Paul teaching that people are saved apart from the works of the Law and nullifies the Law, the Jewish Christians raise a huge tumult against Paul and accuse him as a false apostle and atheists in seeing these contradictions come to the hopeless conclusion that the bible was written by human goat herders lacking any kind of divine intervention and inspiration. Scholars doesn't do much to stop this misery and add their own stubborn prideful views.

Ptolemy teaches us that the Saviour not only came to fulfill the Law but to complete it and it was this completion and perfection of the Old Testament Law which was the good news preached by Paul in his Gospel and people often misunderstand Paul as contradicting and not giving any credit to the historical Jesus in his writings, on the contrary Paul was the only one who truly understood the mind and the thought of the Saviour. This is the reason the Valentinians revered and respected him so much.

15 “Go!” said the Lord. “This man (Paul of Tarsus) is My chosen instrument to carry My name before the Gentiles and their kings, and before the people of Israel. 16 I will show him how much he must suffer for My name.” 17 So Ananias went to the house, and when he arrived, he placed his hands on Saul. “Brother Saul,” he said, “the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here, has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 9:15-17)

Catholicism was constructed as a defense against Marcion

What a load of shitty speculation right over there! The claim that Marcion and his followers namely the marcionites wrote the Pauline corpus is very absurd. Marcion was the man who believed that only Paul understood the true message of Christ and rejected the Old Testament and its Jewish god Jehovah completely. So for Marcion, a ship owner of Pontus to convert and arrive at the conclusion of Marcionism the Pauline Epistles must already have been in existence for him to get influenced by Paul and his teachings. Robert Price knows that this version of his view is actually a chicken and the egg problem. Marcion wrote the Pauline letters but for Marcion to get influenced in order to write the Pauline letters the Pauline corpus must have been in existent before Marcion became active.

To tackle this problem he makes an even more absurd claim that Simon Magus was actually Saint Paul of Tarsus. We cannot rely on the information of Simonism from Irenaeus because in a hurry to refute the heretics he took whatever sources that was available to him without checking there credibility and therefore his works are very unreliable. In fact the Gnostic systems which he attributed to Valentinus was not the actual system which Valentinus himself believed in instead his accusations were directed to the later modified systems of Valentinian followers like Heracleon and Ptolemy. So are the clementine homilies which cannot be trusted.

Secondly, one of the other argument of Robert Price is that there are contradictions with in the Pauline Corpus for example comparing Corinthians and Galatians where Paul says that he received his wisdom of Christ while talking with the elders of Jerusalem and on the other hand in Galatians he says that his teachings were mainly derived from his personal revelations of divine and not taught by any human or angel. Robert Price thinks that such contradictions shouldn't be there in a corpus if it was claimed to be written by only one man so he concludes that Marcion wrote Galatians.

What I believe is that instead of Marcion writing Galatians it is more likely that the sentinels of the Catholic church edited Corinthians to make it appear more mainstream and made it leaning towards their own dogmatic beliefs. Suppressing the truth that the relationship between Paul and the church at Jeruasalem was not smooth and suppressing the portrayal of a zeolot anti-Semitic Paul who used to accuse them straight on their faces.

The last idea of Paul being Simon Magus is ridiculous because:

• Paul was a tent maker while Simon was a sorcerer.
• Paul was born and brought up in Tarsus while Simon was from Gitta, a village in Samaria.
• Paul loved the Gentiles and his mission was directed towards the Gentiles but we have no evidence to prove that Simon had any interests in converting and persuading the Gentiles to the ministry of Jesus. Paul's division of teaching one thing to the Jews and another to the Gentiles appears as early as in Romans.
• Paul displayed sensitivity towards a wide range of complex issues but Simon lacked any such sensitivity.
• It was Saul who was under the tutelage of the great Gamaliel and not Simon.
• It was Saul who was struck blind fold on his road to Damascus and not Simon.
• It was Paul who held a Roman citizenship and could fluently read and write Greek and not Simon.

Marcion may have indeed been the first person to collect the different Pauline letters and showed the value of them to the world and his polemic indeed triggered his rivals to establish a different canon of their own by editing and adding verses and by forging new Gospels in the name of Paul which suited to their own agendas. Well if not Marcion I am damn sure Valentinians would have collected and compiled the Pauline Corpus irrespective of whether Marcion collected it or not because no one on earth loved Paul so much other than the Valentinians. Even the Gospel of John has gone through a series of successive editions before making it to the biblical canon of the Catholics because there are many verses in them which are offensive to the Gnostics and equally there are anti-Semitic verses in it which goes to the extreme supporting Gnosticism in full force. All this shows that the New Testament as we have today is not the same version as people saw it two thousand years ago.

The real historical Paul was never really like the Paul of the Catholics as we know today. He was a zealot anti-Semite and more of a Valentinian than a Catholic.

Revering emperor Julian and Saint Paul together

     Julian the Emperor and Saint Paul of Tarsus, the two most charismatic influential figures in the history of the western world. There can be no other joy in the world when you have these two personas standing beside you. Julian representing Helios-Mithras was an initiate of Mithraism and Saint Paul of Tarsus representing Christ was the second founder of Christianity who wrote some of the fantastic passages in all of Bible.

Saint Paul predated Julian but Julian who was raised under the tutelage of Christian teachers was very much aware of Saint Paul's writings. Julian being a Gentile was very much disinterested and irritated by the dogmatic exoteric interpretation of the Bible which his Christian teachers were shoving onto his throat. Unfortunately, Julian never encountered the esoteric Gnostic Paul in his studies of Christian scriptural texts and held a negative view on Paul due to his dogmatic orthodox Christian upbringing who portrayed Paul in a rather uninteresting way to him. Had if Julian encountered the Gnostic Paul the relationship between Julian and Paul would be something completely different.

Mithraism and Christianity the two rival religions competing for the world dominion could never ever have gone together hand in hand because each of these two religions claimed two entirely different divinities, Mithras and Jesus respectively as the sole path for the salvation and immortality of the human race. Christians could never ever accept Mithras and delineate from Jesus and Gentiles could never ever accept the exclusive worship of Jehovah, the God of the Jews as their heavenly holy father. So these two faiths were mutually exclusive either there has to be one or the other. As usual Christian church fathers being threatened by Mithraism charged them with devil worship since they do not know anything else other than to show such cheap shallow display of ignorance which many Christian pastors often do till this day. Similarly Julian rejected Christianity by claiming Jehovah as one of the terrestrial gods out of many and denied him as the supreme god of the Cosmos.

If Julian's reign had continued the western world would have worshiped Mithras and instead of a church across their streets there would have been mithraeums erected with tauroctony depicted on its walls. The chaldean oracles would have been the canonical scripture of their daily prayers. As it turned out as we all know Julian died and the dogmatic orthodox Christianity triumphed.

So how can the relationship between these two representatives of a rival faith be strengthened, pacified and changed from being rival enemies to friends. Julian and the Paul of orthodox Christianity would continue to remain as rivals and they never like to see each other faces in future but Julian and the Gnostic Paul will embark on a new journey of friendship which is everlasting due to the sincere efforts of a pious 2nd century, Syrian Christian mystic named, Valentinus.

Mithraism and Valentinian Gnostic Christianity can indeed be reconciled into a single common faith destroying every other faith in the world including secularism. One can imagine the power of Jesus and Mithras combined into one producing a new generation of pneumatic Pagan Gnostic Valentinian Christians. Its a irony that the followers of Julian and Paul worshiped the same heavenly father and yet remained as rivals throughout the ages most probably because they didn't had the technology and information which we have now compared to the past.

I want to serve Christ for the rest of my life

I don't think I would have been alive if I had not acquainted with Valentinianism. Christ, the Savior not only saved me in fact he raised me above everyone else in this world. All my sorrows go away whenever I read the first line of Gospel of Truth, it brings a smile on my face every time I read, "Gospel of Truth is a joy to those who have received from the Father of Truth the gift of knowing him." it is indeed a joy, a good news because we know it is a message of hope sent by our Father to the pneumatics.

I encountered Gnosticism at the age of 16 while watching the Gospel of Judas series hosted by the National Geographic Channel casting Meyer Marvin, Elaine Pagels and others. I did not concentrated too much on Gnosticism after that because I didn't had a clear picture at that time. I used to read articles on Gnosticism here and there but none of them caught my attention very much. It was only after studying Valentinianism that I began to see a complete picture and built my confidence and faith in Gnosticism. After knowing that Valentinus, the leader of Valentinianism, was an adherent disciple of Saint Paul of Tarsus and loved Gospel of John my faith in that tradition increased even more.

I completely believe in the mythology and cosmogony of the Valentinians with the only change being they didn't gave a name to their Holy Father but I do give their Father a name, its Helios-Mithras. The ontology of their Holy Father is none other than the ontology of Helios-Mithras.

Christ showed me the way, he healed me, he showed me why this world is full of evil and why people behave the way they do. He made me a Pagan Gnostic Christian and brought me alive:

"Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world. The world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God remains forever." (Gospel of John)