Finally, the truth that Jesus brings is knowledge of the true nature of the world and how to escape from it. The final condition is that the spiritual element in humanity reaches maturity in the acceptance of the truth. In this sense, baptism is the beginning of the resurrection, an enlightenment through which the spirit is prepared to escape the earthly. The knowledge through which the spirit puts aside the influence of passion and appetite enables it to escape the traps of the Demiurge and the demons at the time of death, thereby to ascend to the Pleroma. The religious life of the gnostic is a process of interior development in knowledge and rejection of all that belongs to the bodily realm.
Rituals are symbolic rather than effective of interior changes.
The psychic or emotional element reaches its fullness in that earthly kingdom which is promised in the Old Testament. The entire system is one of salvation from the misconception of the higher wisdom. The order and perfection is achieved in the Pleroma and the best outcome possible is achieved with the other elements, the psychic and material. These latter have to be excluded from the Pleroma but can reach a sort of stability in the lower world. There is, however, no transformation of the material or earthly world, no judgment of the living and the dead and resurrection of the flesh.