Student: Rinpoche, when you talked about the Gods coming down at different times during the month to check up on human beings and their actions, did you mean that literally?

Rinpoche: This is meant literally. These particular Gods, such as the four great kings, their retinues, and so forth, come to this world because they are virtuous and therefore they have the supercognition and miraculous abilities to do so, and as a result they are concerned with the state of human affairs. Especially their concern derives from the fact that when human beings behave virtuously, the Gods become more powerful and the Asuras less so, and therefore during that time the Gods are victorious in their perennial war with the asuras. Conversely, when human beings behave unvirtuously the Asuras gain power and the Gods lose it. In order to determine these events, the Gods come to this world to see what we are doing.

Student: I do not understand how the actions of human being swould determine the victory over the Asuras of those particular Gods.

Rinpoche: The Gods are encouraged by human virtue, and this causes everything in their realm to improve. This is the same as when you build a fire to heat a room, the room gets hotter. Do not forget it says that rejoicing in a virtuous or a negative action causes you to achieve the same amount of virtue or negativity as the person w ho performed the action. Rejoicing in our virtue is the way the Gods enjoy the benefits of our virtue.

Most of these statements come from the authority of the vinaya. It is not that many people have directly witnessed such things since then, but it is still very much a part of our tradition. For example, when His Holiness the Dalai Lama performs the hair-cutting ceremony, he gestures with the hair that has been cut off and says, "May the offering of this hair cutting please all the virtuous Devas." The reason for this is that whenever people receive the hair-cutting ceremony, take refuge, or receive ordination, it plants the seed of their certain future liberation, which is a source of great joy and pleasure to the virtuous Devas.

“And Adam was a laughingstock, and Abraham, and Jacob, and David, and Solomon, and the Twelve Prophets, and Moses, and John the Baptist…None of them knew me, the Revealer, nor my brethren in the Mysteries…They never knew truth, nor will they know it, for there is a great deception upon their soul, and they cannot ever find the mind of freedom, in order to know themselves, in true humanity."
-The Second Treaty,NHC

Notes: In order for Christianity to triumph, its adherents not only silenced the Gnostics but also destroy the networks of the Mysteries and eliminate all evidence it had ever existed. Gnostic scholar K.W Troger estimates that one-third of the Coptic corpus is anti-Judaic. The 2nd Treatise is exemplary of the Gnostic protest against salvationism. It contains page upon page of scathing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs and customs. It ridicules the biblical forefathers and castigates those who follow patriarchal religion, unable to see how it corrupts their very sense of humanity.

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Jordan Peterson?

YES

Fake Nous and the Prison Planet Meme Part 1

Much of our understanding of Gnosticism until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codexes in 1945 came from the Early Church Fathers particularly the writings of Irenaeus in his book ‘Against Heresies’ from 180AD. Therefore this information comes from the case of the prosecutors who hated the Gnostics and sought to destroy them and their teachings in order for Christianity to be triumphant.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of information produced about Gnosticism in the current era ascribes to them the beliefs that came from this disinformation campaign rather than their actual teachings.

The Early Church Fathers condemned the Gnostics as heretics declaring that Gnostics taught that the material world was created by a demonic entity rather than the true Creator. They ascribed to Gnostics the spirit of "anti-cosmic dualism," meaning that Gnostics condemned the physical world as the evil production of a demonic being, due to their perverse insistence on two creators, one evil or archontic and one good or divine. However Irenaeus in ‘Against Heresies’ says in Book 1, Chapter 5 “They go on to say that the Demiurge imagined that he created all these things of himself.” The Gnostic texts state plainly that Yaldabaoth is insane, a demented god, or an imposter deity. The Demiurge is indeed a sort of god, a cosmic entity in his own right, but he is not a Pleromic Aeon. He is a self-deified inorganic phantom deluded about his own identity as the creator of all that he beholds.

"Lo, I have no need of anyone else, no other gods…It is I who am god, and no others exist apart from me.”
― On the Origin of the World,103.1-15, NHC)

In their own words, The Gnostics warned that we coexist in a planetary system with a demented entity who can access our world through our minds. The Gnostics taught that the Demiurge can not really create anything because he lacks the power of intention proceeding from the Pleroma (The realm of the Aeons). Archons cannot originate anything, but they can imitate, copy or duplicate. Their mimetic capacity is called phantasia to distinguish it from the real-life, animating power of the Aeons, called ennoia. Yaldabaoth is called "the counterfeiting spirit" in the Apocryphon of John and other Gnostic cosmological texts.

"Further, what you meditate on with the wisdom arisen from meditation is just that which you know with the wisdom that has arisen from study and reflection. You do not meditate on something else. This is similar to how you show a horse a racetrack, and then race it there."

Kamalasila