Sense of Soul - Pistis Sophia and The Divine Spark Within

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Today on Sense of Soul Podcast we have with us Gnostic scholar, Daniel Craig Morse, he is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with over 20 years of practicing depth-oriented psycho-spiritual therapy in Northern California. He’s joining us today to share his book “The Divine Spark Within: Excavating the Mysteries of Sophia and the Deep Christ.” In this book, Daniel Craig Morse, presents a long-lost Creation Story featuring the tragic and heroic Goddess Sophia. According to an ancient portrayal of human origins, this heavenly emissary played a key role in seeding into us a Divine Inner Spark. Inspired by a lifelong exploration into the Sophianic mysteries, Morse draws from recently recovered ancient texts to excavate from the 1st-century CE a New Revelation of Wisdom. This revelation originated from a spiritual mystic he identifies as the Deep Christ, whose teachings and influence extend beyond the confines of how Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament. Visit Daniel’s website: www.sophiaproject.net Listen to Shanna personal mini series about Sophia, The Allegory of the Divine Goddess of Wisdom and an extended version of this episode on Sense of Soul Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul (Ad Free episodes? Join our Sense of Soul Patreon, our community of seekers and lightworkers. Also recieve 50% off of Shanna’s Soul Immersion experience as a Patreon member, monthly Sacred circles, Shanna and Mande’s personal mini series, Sense of Soul merch and more.) Visit Sense of Soul at www.mysenseofsoul.com Thank you to our Sponsor! KACHAVA: https://www.kachava.com/senseofsoul Use this link for 10% off

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Hey friends, if you're looking for ad-free Sense of Soul episodes, you can find them at Sense of Soul Patreon. Become a monthly member at any level. You will also have access to our monthly SOS Sacred Circles, our mini-series, merch, and much more. And it's a great way to help support our podcast so that we can continue to bring you inspiring episodes twice a week with our enlightened guests from all around the world.

Check out our Patreon. Today we have with us Daniel Morse. He is a psychotherapist and a Gnostic scholar. He has been researching Gnosticism and the esoteric traditions for nearly three decades. He's joining us today to talk about his new book, The Divine Spark Within, Excavating the Mysteries of Sophia and the Deep Christ, where in this book, he presents a long lost creation story featuring the tragic and heroic goddess Sophia. If you listen to Sense of Soul podcast, you know that I have a mini series on our Sense of Soul Patreon about Sophia.

So I am super excited to have this conversation with Daniel today. Thank you so much for joining me. Hi there, Shanna. Hi, how are you? I'm good. Thank you. How are you? I'm good. Well, I've read much of your book and yeah, I could not believe how many synchronicities. It's pretty cool. The track that you're on and the track that I'm also on here. Yes. Your book was just so comforting. Not a whole lot of people who are really on this track. Sophia, who is she? What's this about? Our listeners know that this is a subject that I've been wanting to talk about. So I finally get to, so I'm glad that you're joining me.

And just to start off, tell everybody who you are, what's your day job, and how you came into all of this Gnosis. Well, thank you, Shanna. And it's really great to be here and with the Sense of Soul community out there. So my day job, let's see, I am a psychotherapist in Northern California, and I have a private practice where I see couples and individuals and sometimes teenagers. And it's absolutely an incredible practice and just an honor to sit with people through their process of soul development, I think is really a best way of describing it. Working with the deep, you know, sort of inner sense of becoming and what is it that is blocking a person from being more who they can be. It's amazing saying it's my day job because I pinch myself thinking, you know, wow, how did I get here where I get to do this and be able to earn a living doing things that I love? Yeah, it's such a wonderful thing. And Carl Jung has been an influence for me.

And of course, Jung has a very strong connection with Sophia. That surprised me too, because Mandy and I are huge fans. All right. Yeah, he's a real master and kind of an anchor to this tradition in our modern era. His work with alchemy, which is really just a derivation of the earlier Gnosticism, he really, in a sense, almost single-handedly revived it and brought it forward in the culture, which then sort of preceded what later became a much bigger study into the field of Gnosticism in the late 70s and to our sort of current decades. Wow. Everything that we're into, there's Carl Jung. So I have to ask you, when you go to school to be a psychotherapist, do they touch on any of this?

Well, that's a really good question. I went to the Pacific Graduate Institute down in Santa Barbara or Carpinteria. And they have an emphasis in the depth tradition. And Jung is highly revered in that school. And that's partly why I went, because it's very much within the zeitgeist of that school. And my very first paper I wrote was on the story of Sophia. No way. And yes, because I had already been working it a lot. And so I had all of this sort of energy around the themes of Sophia and worked the themes within the story of Sophia as sort of archetypal themes that interwove with my own life. I could find meaning

to the various aspects of the story of Sophia. In fact, Sense of Soul podcast, I was struck with a couple of things that you say about it. The inner quest of discovering one's path and purpose. That is wonderful. Finding the light within. I know, and I didn't know anything about Sophia when I was writing those things. Okay. Yeah. This is sort of central organizing what focuses for this podcast and what you're doing here.

Yeah, Sarah and I were a perfect fit. So then that means that you've been researching this for a long time then. Yeah, so maybe I can give a little bit of a big backstory or the big picture. There's Sophia, and then there's one's personal relationship to Sophia. And this is actually sort of know, sort of a conversation you and I have been having. There's the personal mythology, which is so important. You know, what is our story? How do we make meaning of our suffering, of our journey? And how can we use it for growth and for deepening our sense of who we are and our sense of wanting to be a

contribution in the world? There's that. And Sophia became a really important figure for me in my own personal mythology, in my own personal story. Then there is also Sophia, who is a very huge, you know, sort of meta-archetypal goddess figure who spans many traditions, just clarifying that there's these two aspects, the personal and sort of the meta-cosmological and the broader archetypal aspect of Sophia. So for me, personally, I write about it in the book, The Divine Spark Within, Excavating the Mysteries of Sophia and the Deep Christ. I share my personal story where it was a struggle of discovering my path, but really coming out of my childhood, going through adolescence and realizing I was experiencing a kind of loss of my childlike exuberance and that sense of light. You have

kids, you see it probably sometimes. And as I was entering adolescence and young adulthood, I could feel something was amiss. Like I shouldn't have to lose that sense of wonder, of curiosity, of ecstasy, really, that kids experience. So long story short, I just landed on the name Sophia as a emblematic commitment that I was making to myself to not lose touch with that inner sense of wonder and childlike, just exuberance. In your book, you mention a poem, Crushed. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was a tense poem about a high school student. Yeah, I was crying. Yeah, as I was aware of the, almost like a cloud beginning to sink over me with regards to entering into latter years of high school and after high school, just this feeling of what is wrong here. Of course, we all have that feeling at some point in our lives and

different, you know, but for me, it was in that period of time, the transition into young adulthood. So this is a little bit of a backstory to that poem. It's my personal mythology as it relates to Sophia. I took it upon myself to say, no, I am not going to let go of this. I am going to continue to try to pursue the maintaining of the inner spark, the inner light that I experienced. And part of that was advocating for the child within, essentially. This group out of Ann Arbor called Youth Liberation, they had these magazines and these materials. And when I was 16, 17, I got a hold of some of these materials

and I was just like sucking it up because it was such food for what I believed was my challenge. And in one of those publications was a poem I call a crush because it's a significant word that stands out in the poem. But it's just basically, it's probably an English guy who talks about being essentially put in a box of the public education and where his soul was literally put into a brown square box, you know, told to do like, you know, draw like the other boys. And he's speaking from the place of the child. He knows

the beauty of what was coming through him in his art and in the color. And yet the culture, you know, the teacher or the parents were saying, nope, got to do it this way. And he became dimmer and dimmer and dimmer until the very end where he just experienced, he just said, this is it. I'm crushed. And it was the high school student who wrote this poem. Two weeks after writing it, committed suicide. and it was a high school student who wrote this poem. Two weeks after writing it, committed suicide.

That got me. Yeah. And absolutely got me. When I was reading that, you know, and including it in the book, this is how serious all of this is. The maintaining of our sense of our inner light and how devastating it is for so many kids in so many situations where that is not possible parent, you know, dysfunctional homes or whatever it might be. So personal mythology. So for me, it was the name Sophia that I sort of coined in this term, the Sophia Project, you know, which was this commitment to not be crushed.

Literally, it was coming out of that period of time in my life where we said, I've got to follow my path here. So the Sophia Project was just this name that sort of identified this commitment. And it was my relationship to the word, the name Sophia, that did not know any context outside of just goddess of wisdom, you know. There's very little about the goddess of wisdom out there, really. But it was my familiarity with the name that then discovering the Gnostic texts and seeing within the Gnostic texts the story of Sophia. This figure Sophia was referred to in a number of these different texts as being kind of a youthful figure who just had a mind of her own and that led her into falling into this

ordeal of life in matter where her spark, her inner light was crushed. And she goes through this whole process of working to try to reclaim it. So it was very amazing for me. It was my personal relationship to the name of Sophia that led me into a deep dive into the Gnostic tradition in its unique way, because I was sort of following the trail of Sophia. What you said about being put in the box. And I mean, I say that so often, break that freaking box. Yes. One of my biggest messages. And so it's interesting that unknowingly, right, we both were led from a place of really seeking to be our free, authentic, childlike self before the world starts to eat you up. All the conditions start to weigh on you. Absolutely.

And you've shared a little bit of your story with me around your relationship to birds, and specifically the dove. I wanted to share a little story of something that happened to me very recently, and it relates to what you were just saying. So how are we being crushed in our modern day, in our modern world. And what I'm finding in my counseling is it's quite extraordinary how much internet screen addiction has impacted our culture. The algorithms having a very substantial impact on our ability to concentrate focus. And it's almost like it's stealing our attention. In fact, there's a book called Stolen Focus,

which really goes into this a lot. And so I was looking at my Facebook feed. They have these little short reels. I click it open and there is, it's basically, it's this sort of sexualized woman and these buff guys and this sort of sexy girl, you know, kind of slinks to the floor. She's overwhelmed with seeing these guys. You know, it's just basically it's kind of a sexualized impression.

I'm looking at this and all of a sudden there's this bam. There was a bird that flew into the window in a really strong way. And it hit it really hard. This doesn't really happen. My windows have, you know, there's squares in it. So it's pretty clear that it's a window. So I immediately thought, wow, here it is. The message saying, don't go down there.

You know, look what's happening. You know, it's stealing your attention. And so actually the next day I went down and I found the bird. The bird had died. You know, look what's happening. You know, it's stealing your attention. And so actually the next day I went down and I found the bird. The bird had died. And it was this cute, oh my gosh, it was hard. But it was a beautiful little thrush, something called a Swainson's thrush. It's got this beautiful green on the back with speckled white on its chest. But the Latin name is Catharis ustulatus. Catharis ustulatus. Cathar, pure, catharas. Ustulatus, burn.

Ustulatus means burn. It comes from, you know, the color, a burnt color. The burning of the Cathars, which is a chapter in essentially Gnostic history or esoteric history of this culture in southern France that was working to not be crushed. Their souls were shining. Here's this bird. Basically, the decode is we are being burned by screens, by the algorithm, or at least that's what my mind is making of this. And it was a really good, strong wake-up call. How serious, you know, this risk is. Oh, my God. See, y'all, it doesn't just happen to me. Oh, that is unbelievable. risk is. Oh my God. See y'all, it doesn't just happen to me.

That is unbelievable. I just feel like we're almost hypnotized by it. Right. I mean, like time is, you know, shifty and weird to lose yourself. And I just, I can't do social media. And I know that I have to, I do it for, you know, I get on, I post for Sense of Soul, but you know, it's really terrible if people message me on there. I'm like, I'm so sorry. Cause I don't, I took off all the apps. So if I have to go on, I have to literally sign on. It's a pain in the butt and I still do it because I just don't want it so easily accessible there because you can easily get caught up in it. Yeah. I find that it's the work in progress for me that I've allowed, you know, it's media, you know, checking this site out, that site out. It takes me out of being in prayer and being dropped in to where I'm conscious of synchronicity that, you know.

Yes. And thank you for bringing up the story of the Cathars, because I think it's one that a lot of people don't know. So if you don't know about the Cathars, I definitely suggest, you know, people look that up and research it. I did a little bit of research on it in my mini series. And I was shocked that I didn't know the story of the Cathars. And basically, it's like the Holocaust. Yeah, the Cathars, like Mary Magdalene, is a whole huge subject. It's something that I

have not put a lot of focus on, as I have not put a lot of focus on Mary Magdalene. And I did not include a lot of material on Mary Magdalene, in part because I didn't want to give her a short shrift, so to speak. my mini series because you know we talked about that with simon which since i've talked to you last i did read the book when god had a wife wow i yeah well i listened to it boy that was a long i was like a whole day but um i and then reading your book i, okay, a lot to be said about Simon, but still really down that hole. So I'm glad that others have. Yeah. It's interesting how, if you are just leaning into where you're being led with this journey,

that seems like what both you and I have done. Cause I mean, the Pistis Sophia, which I've talked a lot about, like just said the name on her podcast, haven't really gone down too much of it. But that's a really hard one to tackle to begin with. Would you even suggest to people who are listening that they want to? Yeah, that's a really good question. The Gnostic tradition in itself has the bad rap and has had bad rap for000 years, you know, and yet it's a tremendous, beautiful mystical tradition. But it's also complex. And there's many, you know, aspects, many sects, sort of chapters in its history. The Nag Hammadi Library is a very core collection

of books that were discovered in the Egyptian desert. An amazing year, 1945, you know, the dawn of the nuclear age, discovery of a major cache of highly esoteric books that emerged out of second century, third century AD. In that collection that was the most popular at the time of the Gnostics is called the Secret Book of John. The Apocryphon of John also. The Apocryphon of John. And that is a good text to maybe step into to begin to get familiar with the Gnostic

tradition. Does it make any reference to John Who? That's a really good question. And frankly, I don't know. Who is this John? And is he related to the Gospel of John? You know, Elaine Pagel is one of the great investigators and scholars of the Gnostic tradition, who was part of the translating of the Gnostic text of the Nakamati Library. Her understanding or her theory is that the Gospel of John was written as a counter to the Gospel of Thomas. One of the Gospels that's in Nag Hammadi has a lot of sayings of Christ that a lot of people, you know, that's maybe the most popular of the Gnostic texts. A wonderful text. It's very rich. It does not include sort of the complex cosmology of Sophia.

Which is probably why it's the most popular. It's a little easier to grasp. So anyway, Elaine Pagel says that, you know, the Gospel of John was written as a way of steering the early Christian Orthodox tradition away from the Gnostic tradition. And so this John was sort of packaged in a certain way that was beautiful in many ways, but it's specifically designed to sort of move away from the complex Gnostic system. So who is John? I have no idea, but the secret book of John, there's an earlier part and then a later part. The earlier part is just the amazing descriptions and the deep, rich material that I am proposing in my book is coming from a figure called the Deep Christ, a Christ figure who is found within the monastic tradition, who's a little bit different from how he shows

up in the New Testament. And so, the Secret Book of John, you know, begins with this amazing descriptions of the cosmology. And this is so important in the Gnostic tradition. And I think it's one of the great contributions that it has is it's a vast, incredible, high level description of the origins of creation that are magnificent. And it goes on for paragraph after paragraph describing the ineffable. And really what is the high Sophia, also called Barbelow, you know, the great emanation of light that emerges out of this ineffable Godhead and is tremendous. And this emerging of an original duality, really a father God and a mother goddess, and comes a third, the Anthropos, the child, the offspring, the light, the Adam Kadmon, which would be in the Kabbalah system, which I know you're a little bit familiar with. They're talking at length about the Trinity, essentially.

What's very interesting to take note of is that in the Bible or in the New Testament, there's virtually no mention of the Trinity. There's one, I think, reference in the Gospel of Matthew to the Father and the Mother and the Holy Ghost. There's the Mother and the Father, and St. Paul has various things. But there's really virtually no real discussion around the Trinity. And yet the Trinity is a core concept in Christianity. Right. And so this is where, so but in the Gnostic text, in the Gnostic tradition,

which emerged essentially at the get-go, there is this incredible, elaborate descriptions of this, the origins of creation that involve a Trinitarian form. Right. Well, it's always mother, father, and a child. But somehow the mother just kind of got kicked out. And the reason why no one knows who Sophia is, she's been hidden, which I believe in plain sight, but she's been hidden all these Old Testament, you know, as wisdom. Of course, Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom, and the Hebrew version would be Chochmah. And in the Old Testament, there are, you know, there's the Book of Wisdom, and Psalms and Proverbs, you know, speak of wisdom, to some degree, as an attribute, you know, the quality of wisdom, something to cultivate.

And the book, When God Had a Wife, goes into this quite extensively. They couldn't suppress the feminine, the feminine aspect. So wisdom sort of emerged as a way in which the feminine could come into the picture, despite a pretty patriarchal Jewish religious system. So wisdom begins to take on, you know, sort of human attributes. And it's, you know, she says she's there from the beginning, and she was there with God. But in first century, I believe in first century, but we don't really see it until second century. There is this explosion of texts and a system that is referring to Sophia in a much more developed way, much more elaborate, much more involved. And I think this is kind of what we're talking about. I think it was this explosion of a wisdom tradition out of first century that involves a complex cosmology.

It involves this high Sophia, the Holy Spirit, sort of the mother goddess, original sort of womb source of all. And then there's this whole complex, you know, aeons and the unfolding of the Pleroma, the heavenly realm pairs of male and female sort of deities that are holding their position within this structure of the heavenly realm. So the lower Sophia, she's the last of the aeons. And this sort of daughter, younger, Pista Sophia is the name for this younger Sophia who goes through this ordeal where she falls from the heavenly realm, the Pleroma, down into matter and gets trapped by these lower gods. And one being sort of the main one, Yaldabaoth, you know, this deity. this whole very complex story that some say is just an absolute treasure of an insight into the bigger picture of what has happened historically. Overall and also individually. Yes, yes, yes. Overall, and the unfolding of creation, but then in the Who Are We as a Species,

it has a whole other read into the, you know, the Adam and Eve story. It's much different. A lot more than the first few sentences that they get. Exactly. That they blame the woman to begin with. But you know what's interesting is that I found in your book that from the allegory of the story of Pistisopia that Jesus taught, these are Jesus teachings. This is why they're recorded by his disciples and, you know, whoever John is, whoever's twin brother is or whatever, whoever.

But he taught the Pistisopia and it was an allegory. And I found what was interesting is that what you got from it was so beautiful. Like when I was reading the chapter, the bridal chamber, your take on that, I thought was so beautiful. And I found that it's alive. You know how they used to say the Bible was like a living scripture. I believe these are just as living, if not more full of light, the gnosis. It could be for an individual. It could be for the masses of the earth.

Oh, it's so amazing. Yes. Maintaining our rootedness and our personal unfolding as we enter into the broader theme. Where is our attention bringing us? And you do very well in your mini-series. It's amazing what you're doing with that and who Sophia is and how she's sort of led you through this journey that's very unique. And yet you're navigating your way through complex history and theology. And it's similar with my book. In fact, at the very beginning,

I say, you know, this is sort of coming through me, ventured into this material through the subjective experience. And so reader, please, you know, honor your subjective experience and what speaks to you wonderful, or how does it come alive to you? That's what really matters most. So the book really, there's a lot, it's fairly dense. And yet, through the chapters, it spirals into this main, final culminating chapter called the bridal chamber. And it was interesting, I guess, the book copy you got, wanted to make sure that you read that chapter. Really amazing. I had already looked at the bridal chamber I'd already you know kind of like went through the book and skimmed a little bit the different chapters you mentioned I should

definitely check that one out and there was nothing wrong with that page at the time and then all of a sudden I'm reading the beginning of the book and I happened to see this little tiny page you know kind of like further out from the rest of the pages of the book so I'm like oh what is this you know so I kind of put my finger on it open it and it was separated clean separation it was the first page of the bridal chamber it was it blew me away, yeah. I was like, okay, I better start reading this one and skip over the whole beginning chapter that I was in. So, but yeah, so, but the bridal chamber chapter is a kind of a culmination to a lot of the themes around, you know, that I'm building up in the book. And if a reader just wants to read one chapter, absolutely, that would be the chapter. Okay. So at first you're here, bridal chamber, like, what the heck? This sounds like medieval, like, bullshit, like, what is this? Right? And it's not, it's beautiful. Can you

give just like maybe because this is from you, I mean, really, truly, beautifully given to you the way you've received it and laid it out. Love that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. The bridal chamber is referred to in the Gospel of Philip as being one of the baptismal rituals from the Gnostic Christ. It says in the Gospel of Philip, there's five different baptisms and the bridal chamber being the culmination of those five different rituals

of initiation or rituals of, you know, what kind of rituals are they? I mean, it's a mystery, really. We don't know a lot necessarily about what was going on with these rituals. But from what I've sort of unpacked and found in my research is that it's working with, it's a sacred marriage. So on one hand, it's a reunification of the Sophia with her consort, the Christ. That alone, there's a whole lot there. What is their relationship with Christ and Sophia? That relationship is huge. In the upper heavenly realms, they are considered consort, similar to how Jesus and Magdalene are consort in the earth plane. So there's that marriage, but then it has to do with how Sophia planted the divine spark within the human form at the inception, quote unquote, you know,

at the time of Adam and Eve, which is sort of mythology, you know, it's hard to, you know, what, Adam and Eve, is that literal? What happened to Darwin, you know? Most people believe Adam and Eve ate an apple. So yeah, we're good. We're good to follow another narrative on this. Yeah. John Lane Lash, you know, not in his image goes into all this. It's pretty amazing. The idea that, you know, there was essentially genetic engineering. There's one version of the story, the Archons, you know, created this form in his image, you know, from the Anthropos, the divine form. They tried to create something, but it was not quite right. Sophia tricked the Yaldabaoth into blowing the divine spark into man.

And that's what lit us up. That's when we became the divine beings that then the lower gods were threatened by and kicked us out of paradise. And it sort of goes on from there. So we have within us out of paradise. And it sort of goes on from there. So we have within us a divine spark. This is a motif that is woven through many of the texts. And it's a mystery. What is this divine spark? Is it a metaphor? Is it something, you know, we want to fulfill our purpose. Well, yes, that. But it seems to be more. There seems to be something. It is the light from source.

It is the highlight. They're very clear on this. So the bridal chamber essentially is a ritual of a reunification, a connection between the inner divine spark, which is a shard from the divine source, the marrying of that with the source light, with the great emanation, and the radiance that is so profoundly, ineffably existing to this day. And that this marriage then is what kind of opens the doors to us entering into a higher dimensional consciousness. And it's the resonance of the frequency. I really liked how you really got into the vibration and the frequency of the unification of the masculine

and the feminine energy. So those, so you being aligned, basically with the same frequency and energy, and you go through steps of it, it's like you have to first get there with yourself, and then with another person, and then with maybe the collective and then with source, like there is a process, like a, you know, know evolution maybe this is the way I was receiving because that's the way I connect with Sophia and her journey to the AIMSOLF which we should actually talk about because you know you may have people may have heard that before AIMSOLF and on our podcast JJ her talking his wife actually saying that for everybody, you know, and I've actually heard there's even a, was it an Indian or Hindu word that actually is the first thought

was called the soft. Wow. I know. So it's like, here you go. I did not know that. That is amazing because thought is the word in Greek, pronoia and protonoia, that is associated with the original divine emanation, which is feminine. So the mind is more masculine, sort of this passive masculine God source. And the emanation, the thought from mind is the Sophianic great mystery. Yeah. So, wow., so Hindu version of that. And then, so yes, vibration, coming into sympathetic resonance, it's a lot about vibration, energy, and harmony, as opposed to dissonance. And so the process of the ritual of preparing for the bridal chamber, so to speak, you know, is the alchemical process of shedding

dissonance within our system and within our relationship to the material world and the divine. And breaking out of that box, right? There we are. Yes. I love that so much. And that was her journey. That was Sophia's journey. She was, like Dan had said at the beginning, like she had found herself in this dark and she had to find her spark within. And so she goes through 13 repentances, which I see as like the evolution of each of us that we all have been in the dark at one point in our lives. I think that's part of

the journey. And it's Jesus that actually helps her discover her divine spark within. Yeah, it's so vast. Yeah, the Epistisophia, the largest, the longest, I think, of the surviving Gnostic texts. And it is an extensive, or at least a big chunk of it is an extensive conversation that Christ is having with his disciples, and by far more communications with Mary Magdalene. I go into this a lot, like, who is this Christ in these Gnostic texts? He shows up very differently than we're familiar with. And I refer to him as the deep Christ because he involves depth that is not necessarily included in the Orthodox Christian tradition. So yeah, Sophia and Christ. So Christ comes from the higher

realms, descends through the regions of the archons. This is a very clear, a very distinct part of the story in order to rescue Sophia. And maybe for listeners, this can often be a point of contention. Oh, here's the dude, got to rescue the poor damsel in distress. And I go into my investigations of the Gnostic texts through the thread of Sophia helped me to come to a better sense of what's going on with this Gnostic Christ and Sophia. And that there is a book called The Second Treatise of the Great Seth that is a phenomenal text that describes Sophia having been a part of a plan to bring the seed, this divine light essence, and the anthropos, the divine form, down into this kind of region of the cosmos,

maybe specifically our solar system, but that this plan went awry. So Sophia was, she was sort of initiated. She was sort of the early first scout that went out as part of this, and she got captured. And Christ, in the second treatise of the great Seth, is saying that Sophia is innocent. Sophia did not do this out of folly. She sort of falls into captivity. But a lot of it is sort of she's blamed. And then, you know, they say that she created the archons. And, you know, who knows, this is a very, very vast creation cosmology. So, irregardless of how she gets to this fallen state, you know. She is captured by the archons, these lower gods. And in the Epistophia, there is this beautiful descriptions of these songs of Sophia, where she's

pleading and she's calling out for rescue. She's saying, save me from my tormentors. Why don't we hear about Sophia in the Christian tradition? The Roman Orthodox Christianity did everything they could do to essentially clean her out of the Christian tradition. And I think they cleaned Sophia out as well as the archons. This whole story of the fall of Sophia and the rescue from the archons, that whole theology has been completely expunged from what has become the Christian system. Sophia was replaced by the church, Ecclesia, who became the spouse of Christ. And you can see in some of the, a little bit later, Gnostic and Christian Gnostic texts, where it's no longer Sophia, but it's the church.

Assume that Shekinah. Yeah, so Shekinah is the Kabbalah's essentially version of Sophia. But in the Bible, they try to say that it's the church. I never really understood. No one ever talked about it. I'm like, how can we just skip over all these things in Sunday school? They're just assumed. Oh oh yes, of course, Christ will marry the church. I mean, that makes tons of sense. Okay, so some questions about the deep Christ. The deep Christ is after resurrection? The deep Christ is a term I'm using for a Christ that is not contained solely within the New Testament. The story of Jesus within the New Testament is we all, you know, it's familiar.

Okay, he was born in the, you know, the manger and the 33 years and, you know, the teachings and the parables and then the crucifixion. I mean, it's incredibly rich, incredibly valuable, you know, exhaustively, you know, so but in the Gnostic tradition, there's this whole other expression of this Christ figure. So the deep Christ is a term I'm using to sort of broaden Lisa a view of this Christ figure apart from just the New Testament that could include the Gnostic Christ. When I read the Gnostic gospels, I remember calling Andy and saying, dude, Jesus is way smarter than I thought he was. I was like, yeah. I was like, this is how I'm talking about it. And I was like, he literally is telling the story. And there's so much depth to the story. You know, I mean, I could go like 50,000 different directions with it. And I was like, this is, he was a genius.

This is amazing. And I was like, this isn't the simple teachings that we read in the New Testament. But it does say at the beginning of Pistis Sophia that this is 11 years after he was crucified. And he had like this, you know, amazing gnosis, you know, that was on a whole nother level. A fairly common understanding of all this is that Christ taught the mysteries that became incorporated into the Gnostic tradition. Okay. tradition. But if you look at that through the lens of Christian narrative history being written by the victors, Roman Catholic tradition won the narrative game that the mystery teachings are a sham, that the Gnostic tradition is a bastardization of a more pure, original Christian system. This is what we've been taught

for the last 1,700 years. And there's so much folded into the New Testament to support that, to help to define the secret teachings are lousy, and you don't want to touch them with a 10-foot pole. So how do we make sense of this? And so Robert Eisenman is a very valuable resource in all of this. He's an amazing scholar, worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls, has written thousands of pages, literally, of trying to unpack what happened. What's going on with this Christ figure? He, in a sense, sort of uncovers the playbook used by the early architects of Christian theology. There were these guys called heresiologists who wrote damning the heresies, saying, oh, this is bad. If they're talking

about five baptisms, no, no, no, no, better. No, we only have one baptism. Which heresy I heard also means thought. Yeah, heresy originally was a popular word. It was a common word and it had positive associations and it was associated with kind of breadth of awareness. You look at an issue and you see it from different angles. That would be heresy. And so the Christian orthodoxy, this is the orthodox,

this is what has been accepted. This is what's carved in the Nicene Creed. It's locked into the Nicene Creed. But the heresies are these diverse heterodoxy, things that are just, oh, it's so crazy. Oh, it's everywhere. And yes, it was complex cosmology, crazy stories of Archons and Sophia. And so could early Christianity have been able to fully understand the Gnostic system? Probably not. And the rise of Christianity, you know, a Christian system that was more regimented and defined and regulated, helped to anchor it into the culture. You know, so there's the good and the bad. One of the Gnostic Gospels, actually, Jesus said, like, these are secret teachings. Yeah. I can't remember, but special teachings for those ears that could hear.

Exactly. Exactly. And so the Gnostic, so these mystery teachings have only really recently emerged from the incredible campaign of disinformation and burying it. You know, the late 1970s is when these texts really became, you know, published, you know, Pista Sophia, along with the Nag Hammadi, gradually becoming, you know, more available. So being able to look at these esoteric traditions, the Kabbalah and the Gnostic system and alchemy, it's incredibly exciting. And there are mysteries having to do with who we are, what our potential is, and how that potential has essentially been

dumbed down. And we've been led to believe that we're limited. Crushed. Crushed. Wow. What I think is really beautiful is that when you do read the story, I mean, the ultimate, the end goal here, or teleosis, teleology, yes, you know, is to be free, right? To be free, to escape all that, and ultimately find your divine spark within. There's a quote that I love. It's, you know, wisdom sent forth her children, I think is what it is. And in the Kabbalah system, there's the scattering of the shards of light, and in the Jewish system, as well as the Kabbalah. And then there's this theme of the

recollection, the return. Sophia has been rescued by the Christ from the archons, and yet she has seeded these divine sparks into humanity that are lying latent. She's calling us forth. She is inviting us. She's enticing us to return, to awaken to this divine essential nature. What does it mean to be fully awake, to be the body of light? There's that sort of mystery. What does that mean? These are great mysteries. And the story of Sophia is a tremendous gift of a map, of an overview that is pointing to that here now, that we are literally trying to fulfill an original attempt to seed this quarter of the quadrant of the universe with the divine beings, children of light. To reclaim them. Yes. The reclamation. Yes. The reclamation of the children of light to the original plant, you know, and that Sophia,

that she, once this happens, she can then return back to the pleroma. And there's that bridal chamber theme of the marriage of her and Christ that can then go back to her original position. What do you believe? Believe in a Godhead? Wow. Absolutely. I mean, I feel it. I had an experience the other day where I use a kind of like a Hurtak style mantra. And part of that includes Ein Sof. Ein Sof and Shakina. Yeah. those powerful. Yeah, absolutely powerful. And that when I spoke that, literally, the scope of my vision completely opened up and came into great

focus in the horizon that I was looking out at. I think, you know, your question is such a huge question. What do you believe? But I think that i believe that we're grappling with the relationship between living in third dimension in you know in bodies in this world raising kids having a job making our way through like trying to find our purpose trying to work it out you know here and that there's also something going on with regards to the higher divine realm or fifth dimension if you will it's very exciting because this you know is are we entering potentials where this could become more available to us whatever this mystery is the sages can you know have referred to and i just think it's kind of funny i mean i've always been like a detective

i've always said like i'm really good at that and so the seeking and the mysteries and all that was right up my alley unknowingly did i know that there was also just well of course what's in the end is divine wisdom right that's what it is and that's all I could say is that, you know, why have I been led on this journey? What did I get out of it? Well, I got a lot of wisdom out of it, like real true, universal, like divine wisdom. So maybe, you know, I can use that as a stepping stone to just say, you know, I've, I've listened to some of your miniseries, not all of it. I think it is phenomenal what you're researching, what you've put together in, you know, very complex material, delving into it using your intuition and, you know, what's meaning, what rings true for you

as you delve into dark corners and strange texts and, you know, and so anyway, I really highly recommend it as a boy, it's quite a navigation through some wonderful material. And it was a journey. But you know, I have to say also that before I even knew who you were, I was already on your website, Sophia project. I aligned most with your website when it came to the research that you have done. You found Pista Sophia on the Gothic cathedrals in France. I mean, that's real. Obviously, it was important enough to somebody. Which church was that again? So what you're talking about is something I'm continuing to work on developing, but it's this, yeah, it's Chartres Cathedral.

There was a handful of early Gothic, French Gothic cathedrals. The earliest of the Gothic cathedrals sprung up in early 12th century, that there are some images that seem to correlate to stories within the Pistis Sophia. So the left-west portal is a picture of Christ's ascension, essentially, that I think corresponds to the ascension story of Christ in the Pistis Sophia. So otherwise, if you didn't read that part in the Pistis Sophia and you just saw this thing, I mean, I actually asked my mom that, actually showed her the picture, and I said, well, what do you think this would be in a church for?

What do you think this would be? What story do you know? You know? Right on. And she's like, well, I don't know what that is. Exactly. Yeah, because it's not many books that you've ever read. Yeah.

Falling Angels and Ten Guys Looking either one way or the other way. Right. It's just this famous thing. There also was another one I found shocking that you had in your book, like Sophia with the snake around her statue. And it's just, and I actually showed my mom that too. Okay. My mom being the guinea pig of all of my Sophia stuff. She heard

all of it. Okay. She's the only, like one of the only that will listen to me. Cause she's your mom. Also very Catholic, right? Okay. Yeah. She, she really believes me. I mean, she really, truly, you know, I've talked to her through all of this and she's like, I really think it's amazing that, you know, you've received this. Well, yeah. And that's a good, maybe a little microcosm of that.

We don't have to throw out Catholicism or Christianity or Judaism or, you know, any of the other religions and mainstream religions. You know, they can be carrying images that suggest a deeper tradition and deeper significance. Well, it's not a religion. I mean, from what I understand, it was more of just a theology. It was an early tradition that was diverse. So that eventually got codified into a religious system. Yes, I believe. Otherwise, it was just people like you and I talking about what Jesus just said.

Yeah. Meeting in small groups. I heard a story of Quispel, who was one of the early pioneers of recovering the Gnostic texts, saying, you know, the Gnostics, man, they were just hanging out in each other's houses and hanging out and talking and having little rituals. But, you know, back to Catholicism and Gnosticism, or, you know, the esoteric and the exoteric, you know, Mary, Mother Mary has been a holder of the Sophianic. She is a image that is carrying the archetype of Sophia, and we don't need to throw that all away. When I think about Sophia, I think about many women throughout time. Yeah, she's an archetype, or a meta-archetype that appears in Kuan Yin, certainly Mary Magdalene, and Helen of Troy was believed to have been a Sophianic

embodiment. I think this is where it gets a little tricky. Is Sophia, does she only appear in individual incarnations? That is an open question. I don't know. That may be what you were just saying. I was thinking about how people have often compared Jesus to like the Buddha, or, you know, to Hindu gods, or, you know, to Hindu gods or, you know, the many different masters who have spoke the same. I think that we're at a period in our history where it's not about the individual. It's not about the individual savior or the individual teacher. It's about that essence within each of us awakening. And so it's the Sophia within you and me. It's the Christ within you and me. It's the higher nature that Well, thank you so much. At the beginning of this, I was so confused and just like, aha, which is why I did the mini series.

And I can't tell you, I mean, I would highly, highly suggest your book to anybody who wants to just get an idea of who Sophia is and some beautiful, beautiful teachings and things that you've received, like the meditations and your suggestions, and just all the work that you've done. I mean, just as I mean, so appreciated. It's just it's a gift to all of us what you have done. So thank you so much. Well, thank you, Shanna, for for your appreciation and for your openness to delving into all of this. And yeah, Seeing the jewels within all of this. Yes. And now it's time for break that shit down. Wherever you are in life, you're stuck in that hard job, you know,

or you're struggling with trying to pay rent, or you're wondering how come you can't make it, you know, or be able to live the life that you want to live. Wherever you're at, just on the outer edge of who you are, there is phenomenon, there's synchronicity, there's your history, there's your consciousness, that is one next step closer to moving towards a fulfillment of who we all are, no matter where we're at. Some people have great revelations, they're super turned on, they're super high. Don't feel jealous of that. I've had to really grapple with that because I don't necessarily see great visions. I've had to just work with the sort of the ground of where I'm at in life. And I've had to trust that the little piece, the little next little aha is just

part of the unfolding. So to trust that and to just know that the love for you as you're unfolding is so powerful and to really let that in. That was so good. You're so right, Dan. And I find that what you wrote and the depth of it, I mean, there were so many times where I got very teary. You brought me to a place, you know, I was having a lot of visuals. So maybe that's part of the gift, right? That you are giving to us, that vision.

Yeah, I definitely could draw it for you. I could do the art. Okay, yay. Really did. There was just many parts where I was reading about Sophia that I just was feeling it all over. My heart really was really in it because I could tell how much your heart was in it.

So tell everybody where they could get your book and also your amazing website. So The Divine Spark Within, Excavating the Mysteries of Sophia and the Deep Christ is available on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles. You can find links to it on my website, sophiaproject.net. The website includes many articles and materials that are sort of support materials for the book, including all the links to the sacred texts that are referred to in

the book. So there's a lot there in the website alone. Yeah, you could definitely go excavating on his website. Yeah. But I'm so grateful that you wrote this book because it really, truly did. It made me feel like, well, maybe the stuff that I've received actually might be real. Yeah.

That's amazing. Yes. I love everything about it. So thank you so much. If you'd like to hear my mini series, you can search Sense of Soul Patreon or find the link in the show notes. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you will come back next week.

If you like what you hear, don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe. Thank you. We rise to lift you up. Thanks for listening.