Positive mindset and a child-like understanding :
This is my individual perspective expressed as spiritual guidance. Feel free, of course, to blend input from your own spiritual experiences. We both need nothing less than Universal Truth.
My commentaries here are neither for entertainment purposes nor necessary for my material support, which comes to me in subtly guided ways thank you darling God.
To experience the same or similar, break whatever cycles do not serve your highest purpose and KNOW your Higher Self.
(I have tried to avoid using the word Ascend like spiritual soothsayers do because, really, there is no person on Earth higher or lower than any other. And the ascended do not ever stay that way on some impossible plateau somewhere, as religious fiction compilers would have us believe. But sometimes one of us may leave the world eternally and that is truest Ascension. Otherwise we are all on the same path out to or back from a curious aspect of God.
Everyday good or bad is a matter of emphasis and very important indeed until swept away on the approach to Enlightenment. If we do not return our gifted powers to Source, subsequently, then we must accept, like Jesus must have done, an awesome duty to work changes upon the world (although the Biblical Jesus did not go all the way insofar as He healed a leper with the same gentle effort that could have been used to remove the disease of leprosy from the world altogether). To go that further distance requires the wisdom of Great God and not for us humans, I think, and the newly-enlightened may well refuse to keep hold of the enormous power they have developed for lack of wisdom. Having laid down their powers they may come back down to an eventual normalcy and hide themselves away in the workaday world. Their take-away is that it is those who are powerless , and their manipulative demons, who will seek power and control while those who have attained it greatly, yet had never once sought after it, will not want to keep or use it.)
The way forward for most all people is to identify and eliminate the false and heal the lower self from unhealthy cycles, psycho-dependencies and any addictions especially those operating malevolently through sex, money and power.
The following extracts are based, in the main, on the Mark M. Mattison translation of THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS freely available in the public domain. The language preferences substituted by me, such as they are, should not alter these prima facie nor the intimations of internal parallel meanings nor any super-proverbial aspects of these sayings. They are taken from among “the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down”. Jesus was an innocent man, my guess is that that He was endowed as a man yet as pure as an infant in His heart , who said he would send an incarnation of Truth into the world perhaps because Earthly truth was not fully represented in Him. The human world embraces lying, cheating and those monkey follies that are to be found in each of us by degree, by minute, by second. The spirit of truth may well appear in one who is less shining bright than Jesus yet whose life has also been inclined towards humanity-embracing (Jupiter-like) more than punctual rule-making (Saturnian).
Saying 1 – the Incipit
And he said, “Whoever discovers the meaning of these sayings won’t taste death.”
Jesus knows how we may avoid the taste of death.
For some who reach Enlightentment (that attainment which will change our lower self into a higher dimensional Self the consequences of which might be described fitfully but can never be understood fully without KNOWING) it might seem strange to them that they did not die at that culmination point as others may well have done.
What are life and death but movement and rest? To the Enlightened or Attained, death seems unreal yet it is real, a Real Illusion and nothing to be afraid of: to the practical person of the world it is the ultimate reality and everybody must turn to dust sooner or later. So the former is ready to die at any time whilst the latter is terrified of ego-oblivion. Could there be available a finer death with lesser sensory disturbance that will release us from the troubles of this human-monkey life?
Death marks a figurative step from a tarnished silver sidewalk onto a pure and golden highway, commonly involving a stumbling slip into the gutter and a backward step to redress the error. How to avoid such a return? I only know what happened to me in 1984. (A clue: God, or whatever noun you choose to use for an infinitely loving and self-controlling universe, has an aspect that is unforgettable yet indescribable and is more intelligent than any world denizen will ever be capable of grasping).
So that you understand well how to undertake this journey – first, reject every supposed truth, especially about yourself, that you were taught by the worldly ones around you including family, friends, religion’s advocates, books, schoolteachers, media, society, politicians, social protagonists and antagonists. Ditch your personal history. Then journey inward, individually and not in congregation. (It may seem from the Bible that Jesus was upset personally by the material recasting of Judean religion away from the Hebrew Torah and toward the Pharisee Talmud – also by the monetary gainmaking prevalent in the Temple – but these may not have been ideological drives as such, just His super-humanity taking offence and expressing a moral preference for the old ways over the new ways that had followed upon the Judeans and some Benjamites becoming separated from the Israelite majority. His closest brush with a form of religious advocacy was to urge his devoted men to spread His words by travel, as Buddhist missionaries had already been doing for many years in the Middle East but then, at heart, Buddhism is not a religion but a system of demonstrable self-improvement yielding spiritual rewards.)
Saying 2
Jesus said, “Whoever seeks shouldn’t stop until they find. When they find, they’ll be disturbed. When they’re disturbed, they’ll be amazed, and reign over the All.”
Unlike the Buddhists who seek a geometrical middle path through each lifetime, a simple straight line to inevitable Enlightenment on one far off day when the extremes of good and bad in successive lifetimes diminish to a point on that line and cancel each other out, Jesus urges you to go inside yourself now and walk those unlit corridors making choices at blind bifurcations purely by a kind of instinct, intuitively we would say. Success may be sponsored by sustaining effortless effort at meditations to zero mind as well as modifying unhelpful personal behaviours, both of which will ease one another forward incrementally and improve with practice almost suspiciously rapidly. The most favourable conditions for all this do go against the usual ape-like worldly inclinations. I’m sorry if that defeats a part of you but that is the way it is. An unimaginable and unexpected increase in personal powers will accompany an effortless progress together with an equal disdain at using any powers at all, even those we were born with or previously had acquired to make worldly progress possible.
Nevertheless this process of enlightening will reveal that, figuratively speaking, the whole wall is truly perfect despite some damaged brick or crumbled mortar here and there able to be seen only on very close inspection at which point we can no longer see the whole wall. Wonderfully some single objects in daily life may vividify spontaneously into their celestially-endowed natures in front of your very eyes.
Love of God comes naturally and a quiet influence over Earthly surroundings, due to a special intensity of imagination, seems limitless yet is mostly withheld by us unless we become obliged by painful empathy, much like an electric shock will suddenly move the limbs. We so do good works reluctantly, even at a distance, mainly to relieve our own empathic pain even though we will by then have risen above (by sticking, for the duration, to what feels universally right) those old paradigms of good and bad, recognizing that although they were once real to the relegated lower self, now they no longer exist for the revived higher self. With new wisdoms (such as modest restraint of power) and yet innocence (including seeing some people as dressed in comical adult disguises) you are returning to the Source.
Saying 4
Jesus said, “because many who are first become last, so an elder shall not hesitate to ask a little seven-day-old child about the vesting of life, and upon becoming one will live.”
Becoming one is a phrase evocative of the achievement of Enlightenment. The further suggestion that comes is that the taste of death will be avoided.
By then you may well have achieved the recognition that nobody is higher than anybody else and equally no person is lower than any other person, adult or child.
Saying 5
Jesus said, “Know what’s in front of your face, and what’s hidden from you will be revealed to you, for there is nothing hidden that won’t be revealed.”
Face up to the existential facts by avoiding all lies and liars including self-deceptions. Know that your hidden surveillances are always being invisibly surveilled and that whatever you do to others may well be done to you. Know yourself by stripping away whatever your life has taught you about the core of you, it is very probably not true. The core is small smooth and hard not battered, overblown and distorted.
At a level of self-development that may feel inconvenient sometimes (in worldly terms, there may be times when we would rather not know) you will find that you either KNOW the truth of the matter being scrutinized by you or that the inner truth of that matter will come to meet you somehow, sometime soon.
Saying 6
His disciples said to him, “Do you want us to fast? And how should we pray? Should we make donations? And what food should we avoid?”
Jesus said, “Don’t lie, and don’t do what you hate, because everything is revealed in the sight of heaven; for there’s nothing hidden that won’t be revealed, and nothing covered up that will stay secret.”
Fasting timetables, prayer routines, donation methods, dietary requirements. These belong to religions. Jesus ignores these questions because HE IS NOT ABOUT FOUNDING A RELIGION. Property-portfolio’d religions behave like one-way streets that lawfully prevent you reaching your higher destination.
It is hypocrisy – a prime face of, say, democratic politics – to do for public approval what you inwardly hate to do.
The most important information here is do not lie.
Human lies create a place that God, who is Truth, cannot enter because the illusion being inhabited does not exist. God is Love, Love is Real, the Real is True, Truth is God.
God is not present in any illusion, not even a Real Illusion (illusions that our ever-assumptive and routinely approximative human condition will take onboard as real including by social necessity alone) and so cannot protect or provide for you in that space created by your deceiver, often your own lower self.
Saying 10
Jesus said, “I’ve cast fire on the world, and look, I’m watching over it until it blazes.”
Christianity is a water-element religion that in Constantine’s time displaced a fire- element religion. Wondrous fires in the air gave place to inextinguishable water and will likely go lower to the dull dirt element beneath the surface of the land. A descending sequence of material elements of worship. That third religious materialism may come soon. Given underground cities, vast caves and stores and long routes to travel swiftly along well beneath the surface then the political elites will consider themselves shockproof and fireproof and the use of disgusting weapons of mass murder shall no longer be unthinkable to them. In fact, they will hold it out as a holy work in accordance with the odd god of their global bubble.
The Nostradamus Centuries make reference to conflagrations both local and global. We have a “global testament” of three Northerly powers that leads to the burning of the “Easterners”,
… Earthly existence of those three in hidden association who desire deaths, and insidiously set pitfalls for one another, and the renewed Triumvirate lasts seven years, such that the fame of that particular grouping will make its testaments global, and will uphold the offerings to its credited saints and immaculate host: and this will be at the time of the Lords two in number of the Northerly Regions; victorious over those Eastern ones, as hereunto so great a noise will be made, the bellicose roaring all as aforementioned.
The alarmed Easterners will be burned by those North-Westerly brothers already mentioned; brothers but not brothers.
(from A GENTLY ABRIDGED VERSION OF THE EPISTLE TO THE KING )
We also find reference to a complex geophysical end to the World including fiery stones hurled from the heavens and the Final Conflagration.
I found out that before the Final Conflagration this World will have had such floodings so high that there will be no locality with a soil that isn’t covered by water. It will be for such a long time that, save using geographic and mariner charts, there is no knowing what land is where. Also, before and after the floods, in several regions the rain will be scant and such an abundance of fire and fierce bright stones will fall from the skies that there will remain nothing there that is not consumed. This is for a brief time just before the Final Conflagration.
(from the PREFACE TO CESAR : A MORE COLLOQUIAL VERSION )
Saying 17
Jesus said, “I’ll give you what no eye has ever seen, no ear has ever heard, no hand has ever touched, and no human mind has ever thought.”
All human thoughts are non-original, not unique at all. They are remarshalled by us, sometimes very cleverly, into new trains made out of old units carrying swapped-out and re-weighted goods. Some trains ride the trenches that were dug into the mind whilst socially assembled ideas were being received by us in infancy and these are difficult to rip up. Others come with us as we grow, even as we are born, and form temporary trains that may be rearranged into a new utility at any time and their routes rearranged accordingly. But any truly new thought could only come from God Almighty from whom all of our unmarshalled thoughts were once received by our inalienable ancestors.
Jesus is giving clues here as to His own greater identity.
Saying 18
The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us about our end. How will it come?”
Jesus said, “Have you discovered the beginning so that you can look for the end? Because the end will be where the beginning is. Blessed is the one who will stand up in the beginning. They’ll know the end, and won’t taste death.”
The disciples were anticipating their own deaths. We do not know whether they felt that they would depart the Earth in sorrow or otherwise. Whichever, they wished for some divination, some advanced clarity, as we all should.
No-one can remember their own birth. Nor the months before and after. A kind of amnesia descends and most people say that they recall nothing much before their second or third year or even later.
Punctual time on Earth is the creation of the orbiting planets and the Sun and is like a blister on the smooth face of Eternity with a beginning and end, such is its nature. How can we say where this blistering starts? With all our arrows pointing one way it is easier for us to guess where it will end.
For their human points of view to best comprehend, Jesus describes a circle like the circle of fifths in Western music theory where we must end before the beginning.
(See the Article CYCLES NUMBERS SYMBOLS CHAINS AND LINKS TO NOSTRADAMUS)
It could just as well be described as a journey out to there and back to here again, repeated perpetually. In the here and now we must meet our end but the taste or flavor, or whatever, of death is not for everybody to endure even one whose body must die. Especially fortunate are they who start their latest period of experiences by a rebirthing during their current lifetime, i.e. without physical rebirthing. Or the ones who were created upstanding and Enlightened at the very beginning of human time (and who must make their way back through groves of worldliness while the less enlightened make their individual advances towards their spiritual goals). At any moment there are multitudes journeying but fewer arriving or departing again.
Saying 19
Jesus said, “Blessed is the one who came into being before coming into being. If you become my disciples and listen to my message, these stones will become your servants; for there are five trees in paradise which don’t change in summer or winter, and their leaves don’t fall. Whoever knows them won’t taste death.”
It is difficult to gauge the method of speech being employed here. (Near the Equator, the seasons aren’t so noticeably different. The experienced eye may discern subtle seasonal changes and even evergreens may suffer a few leaves to colour and fall. These five trees of paradise are not, then, our Earthly trees. As such this word is used as an analogy.)
At the beginning of all, some walked their path from a KNOWING position while others did not, i.e. they started from a different point on their personal pathway to and from God. Seemingly the ones who were first to part from God would be the last to return to Him this time around, having had an entire path to go down and return upon.
Jesus says they should listen to Him and hear Him well. The stones on the Earth will helpfully obey commands, as if they were human servants, if all do as He tells them. (A monument contructor’s sublime solution.) I presume He speaks of individual Enlightenment and beyond although for some reason He omits to mention the God-like wisdom that seems necessary to that specific situation (See ADDENDUM TO ‘Nostradamus Quatrains 191 and VI 11 and V65 : 191 IS THE REAL 911’ ) excepting for that Enlighted One who accepts great power and obeys God directly and totally which communication would presume a special relationship. Even among the Enlightened only a heady few may have taken up that opportunity, perhaps countable on the fingers of one hand.
Saying 22
Jesus saw some little children nursing. He said to his disciples, “These nursing children can be compared to those who enter the kingdom.”
They said to him, “Then we’ll enter the kingdom as little children?”
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and so make the male and the female a single one so that the male won’t be male nor the female female; when you make eyes in the place of an eye, a hand in the place of a hand, a foot in the place of a foot, and a likeness
in the place of an image; then you’ll enter”
He is talking about rebirth during this lifetime as a result of coming to overbid duality and finding that all is one. Who is truly – and not figuratively or psychologically – reborn inside their self will feel like a blessed child among kind children. Bad people ever keep their distance during that duration. All is wonder.
The references to pieces of the body seem to me to be figurative language for the benefit of the audient(s).
Saying 28
Jesus said, “I stood in the middle of the world and appeared to them in the flesh. I found them all drunk; I didn’t find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the children of humanity, because they were blind in their hearts and couldn’t see. They came into the world empty and plan on leaving the world empty. Meanwhile, they’re drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they’ll change.”
A saying of Jesus that bears out His survival after mortal rejection by the Jews (which bad feeling continues strongly today, despite appearances) by which he gives a chemical reason, he blames ethyl alcohol. That is a simple allusion to understand though He may well have had something more complex in the back of His mind. He says that no person desired the gifts that he wanted them to accept. When this chemical-type effect is no longer influencing them His teachings will become clearer, perhaps even crystal clear, and they will respond to their true inevitability.
It has been noted both by social poets and intellectuals that there are times when the people are deeply asleep except for one or two isolated individuals. This passivity can reverse vigorously as the people awake to a new dawn and revolt against those who cheated them in their sleep.
(See VII 33 DECEPTIONS CALLED OUT)
Saying 31
Jesus said, “No prophet is welcome in their own village. No doctor heals those who know them.”
This means that we underestimate most the extended family sets of our youthful location. Having seen these folk fool with life and make bad blunders we feel that we know them so well and that persons we know cannot do great things. Our mistaken belief is that if we cannot do them then they, being like us, may not either. It is true that a physician in sorry health will turn to another physician for a cure because it is the inner confidence in another person’s outward abilities that heals most. Familiarity breeds contempt is a harsh truth. Avoid it, especially contempt for yourself.
Saying 37
His disciples said, “When will you appear to us? When will we see you?”
Jesus said, “When you strip naked without being ashamed, and throw your clothes on the ground and stomp on them as little children would, then … see the Son of the Living One without fearing.”
Small children are oblivious to their own nudity and will pose any which way without shame. Jesus says that when they can do the same He will appear to them.
Certainly a Bible gospel speaks of a naked young man escaping into the bushes when Jesus was arrested in the garden by Rome’s soldiers. Was this child-like nudity, a reversion to innocence, at the very heart of Jesus’s teaching? It surely refers to an advanced stage in the stepping towards Enlightenment but is nudity a compulsory revelation? I don’t think that should necessarily be so but that step hopefully proves asexuality of a kind. There are no compulsions on the final steps to God, it seems voluntary other than when extreme empathy for another strikes one like lightning and forces saving action.
It might be worth mentioning, tentatively, that some political movements intending social revolutions have first broken down moral lore including advocating public nudity. That is not happening in this text, for sure, but it is a curious parallel.
The elephant in the room: the followers of Jesus want to see what he looks like. Yet why do they not already know? Are they believers in Jesus having two forms available to them at different stages, one being the real Jesus? Or did He hide away in robes, headgear and facemasks in front of His own clique so that no-one knew him, as was said of the leader of I.S.I.S./Daesh in recent times?
The Son of the Living One? Is this the Enlightened Self in relationship to the prior historical self? I think probably not. The Higher Self is the one who is most alive after having shaken-off his personal ego that was eating him alive.
Here is a mystery – and if Jesus is unique then it is a most unique mystery – as one life teases its emergence from another.
Some opine that properly seeing Jesus may have been the first prize after baptism by Him.
Alternatively the Living One is aspects of the whole universe, we would say the Great God Almighty, and Jesus was born from the Universal Godhead (as we all are).
Saying 39
Jesus said, “The Pharisees and the scholars have taken the keys of knowledge and hidden them. They haven’t entered, and haven’t let others enter who wanted to. So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
Knowledge belongs in books and lectures. KNOWING belongs to personal experience. During the time of captivity, the Saducees – the Temple priests – became obsolete and the Pharisees, despite reverting to the old Hebrew language, introduced new laws that were mostly of their own invention. For some Jews these accommodating rules have replaced the Torah. The return into Judah placed the Pharisees in religious control of the people while the Sadducees revived as Rome conformers. In general, Jesus and the Pharisees clashed badly.
This usurpation of the predominance of Torah is described by Jesus as hiding the keys of knowledge.
Possibly, wise as serpents may refer to Pharisees while, perhaps more improbably, gentle as doves may refer to Saducees.
Or else wise as serpents gentle as doves could refer to the experience-yet-innocence of Jesus and His nearest imitators.
Whatever, be impartial and rise above all discrepancies.
Saying 42
Jesus said, “Become passersby.”
Again, do not take sides in any dispute as housholders and property owners must sometimes do. Some religious congregations have failed to grasp that Jesus and a large group of followers – including young families who had sold up their homes – had left their occupations behind to travel nomadically together with Him. Whilst it was true that Jesus had no place to rest his head for the night, Judas the accountant (the only member of the original Twelve Apostles not of the tribe of Benjamin) would have had large leather satchels over each shoulder to receive and distribute the regular supply of donated monies. They moved most freely in the areas where the Roman army did not. On the Eve of Passover the central clique came quietly into the Temple city of Jerusalem yet were captured.
It seems likely that Jesus spoke gentle Aramaic in a noticeable country brogue at odds with the chic sophistication of Hellenized Jerusalem.
As with Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese supreme leader, each had possessed minimal personal belongings and yet they had a great resource at hand in their own supporters.
Saying 46
Jesus said, “From Adam to John the Baptizer, no one’s been born who’s so much greater than John the Baptizer that they shouldn’t avert their eyes. But I say that whoever among you will become a little child will know the kingdom and become greater than John.”
Baptizer John was better known and more widely respected in his lifetime than Jesus was in His. Jesus speaks of him as effortlessly conjuring shame or inadequacy in others just by his presence. To become a little child once more steps must be taken. Reject all you have been taught and abandon your personal history which has created a false you not fully in control of all of your energies despite employing strategies to counter-command the influential others. Let it go. Relax. Effort may be quite unproductive much like when learning to float in water or first balancing on two wheels. Meditate to zero mindfulness, preferably in private. Try, increasingly, to damp down your sexuality. A plateau will be reached whereby you feel sexless most of the time but get taken aback by occasional outbursts of hormonal urges. The next stage is to reach sexlessness without those sometime outbursts. The world will change and we will meet and greet others with a zero physical awareness of their gender, for all of the time. A new normal: peace and joy without opposition.
Saying 48
Jesus said, “If two make peace with each other in a single house, they’ll say to the mountain, ‘Go away,’ and it will.”
The person who has made two into one within the self and then achieves Enlightenment is fully capable of miracles (but feels no urge to do so except through strong feelings of empathy). A Bible gospel records Jesus telling how the paradigm of cause-and-effect may be overcome. Maintain zero doubt that something must happen and so it must. As our sense of intent ripples into the socialized mindset, this lack of doubt is difficult for all people to maintain but not impossible. Jesus was like an Olympic champion of this, a hero athlete so to speak, making the deed look simple.
Here is a further mystery – why does God (who provides for and protects those who have absolutely no doubt that He will) not do so by miracles alone? Instead He finds ways to do these things while preserving cause-and-effect in the world. (If you ever trust in God to the hilt and you lose your living there is no need to fear, it was just a device for God to support you by and another such device will appear.) Did Jesus go too far in His love for humanity by divulging to unenlightened folk the secret of the seemingly supernatural overcoming of the cause-effect paradigm? (See SUPERNATURALIZATION )
Saying 49
Jesus said, “Blessed are those who are one – those who are chosen, because you’ll find the kingdom. You’ve come from there and will return there.”
Who is chosen? What is this award and what are the duties and responsibilities of such a one? Jesus says if you were Enlightened at the beginning it is sure you will be Enlightened at the end. (There will be an interim when you struggle to re-enter your base humanity tentatively or even give in to it entirely yet you will return to your best self again says Jesus.) Are we all on a kind of solo path that takes us alongside or through the deepest depravities to the highest goodness? And having served God as a clear camera or a positive mirror through which It/He/She can see Its/His/Her Self in Creation are we turned around to descend, so to speak, into increasingly negative ways again? When we hit rock bottom do we then turn ourselves around and restart the journey back to God? At any single moment are we all at different points along some ungraduated path, out to and back from this aspect of God? I guess that would explain why we are each no higher nor no lower than every other person and why Jesus said we should always forgive them. (However forgiveness may also cut negative ties and so is useful to worldly progress. That kind of forgiving does not necessarily mean forgetting, of course.)
Saying 50
Jesus said, “If they ask you, ‘Where do you come from?’ tell them, ‘We’ve come from the light, the place where light came into being by itself … and appeared in their image.’
The noun ‘image’, a type of presence or aspect, appears more than once in these sayings. Those who promote the hologramic universe could be tickled by this part of Saying 50.
“If they ask you, ‘Is it you?’ then say, ‘We are its children, and we’re chosen by our living Father.’
The living Father – is this the Living One of Saying 37? The Bible gospel holds that Jesus strolled out and recognized His followers one-by-one, seemingly knowing where to find them. Who did the actual choosing of them? Jesus the Son or God the Father?
“If they ask you, ‘What’s the sign of your Father in you?’ then say, ‘It’s movement and rest.'”
Buddha Gautama, Lao Tsu and Confucius (Kung Fu) all lived about 500 years before Jesus.
The latter two men took inspiration from the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes) which had been compiled/perfected by anonymous sages across the ages. It is designed to aid an Enlightened One on the way back from meeting the mind-modified (for otherwise that encounter could not be conscious) image of God’s presence. (Likely not a personification in our dimension.) It is a very painful and dangerously vulnerable long return back into worldly life.
The I Ching gives a specific insight into movement and rest. It writes of rest as being an integral aspect of movement. Each always leads to the other.
Saying 51
His disciples said to him, “When will the dead have rest, and when will the new world come?”
In the Jewish world, among other faiths, the dead were considered shelved until a mass Judgement time. If they died abroad their dead bodies must roll underground back to Judah. In other words, death did not complete life insofar as there was further work yet to do, albeit away in the future.
He said to them, “What you’re looking for has already come, but you don’t know it.”
In ancient China the number 1 represented Heaven, the number 2 represented the Earth, and the number 3 was the Earth in Heaven’s permanent embrace and therefore indivisible.
Saying 59
Jesus said, “Look for the Living One while you’re still alive. If you die and then try to look for him, you won’t be able to.”
I know not what may happen to you personally after your death. Perhaps, despite your ignoble love of life, you will study goodness impressively well and earn a white dress. Perhaps, because you gave up your Human Self for a false persona (now known in the world as Narcissistic Personality Disorder) you will be sewn into a black sack where you can do neither more selfish good nor more selfish harm to the living. Who can say? Jesus says to the disciples that He is right here for them in punctual time where they can reach Him now. His statement seems to say he will not be available to them in the afterlife/the next life.
Saying 60
They saw a Samaritan carrying a lamb to Judea. He said to his disciples, “What do you think he’s going to do with that lamb?”
They said to him, “He’s going to kill it and eat it.”
He said to them, “While it’s living, he won’t eat it, but only after he kills it and it becomes a corpse.”
They said, “He can’t do it any other way.”
He said to them, “You, too, look for a safe retreat, so that you won’t become a corpse and be eaten.”
It strikes me by the way it reads that this saying is too material, too physical to ring true. Although the scribe-editor is trying to say the same as in Saying 59 he seems coming from a non-spiritual direction and a darker energy.
Saying 66
Jesus said, “Show me the stone the builders rejected; that’s the cornerstone.”
Truly advanced wisdom. We have set up educated systems and admire most those who have scored highly by repeating what their teachers taught them and their teachers teachers had taught them before. Such people show a type of modesty, a degree of grace, but must not be trusted to make the most important decisions. The oddball or square peg who is not the typical successful sort, not the typical first-place degree holder, is a better bet as the arch-stone than the spotless conformist who is too narrow to fill all the spaces or take all the strains necessary to hold everything together. (Einstein was an educated example, most who have led us into fresh ways or rearranged our progress maps were not so highly educated. Misfits, in fact, as all great theorists are.)
Saying 67
Jesus said, “Whoever knows everything, but is personally lacking, lacks everything.”
KNOWING and Enlightenment are spiritual twins, partners of a lofty order. But if, on the way back down, that personality becomes dystopically disordered, for instance, or corrupted, then all that was earned is lost says Jesus. The situation is more remediable than that, I sincerely hope.
Saying 70
Jesus said, “If you give birth to what’s within you, what you have within you will save you. If you don’t have that within … what you don’t have within you … kill you.”
What you have within you is a small hard dot that you were born as. Strip the superfluous tar and fluff away and get back to that, there at the heart of you.
Some disordered people have buried their living selves to play as a lost cypher in a bubble-land of their own creation. Appearing lovely as they wish, they can do enormous harm to family, friends and to all humanity.(See the Archives for April and May 2018.)
Saying 95
“If you have money, don’t lend it at interest. Instead, give … someone from whom you won’t get it back.”
One day a girl called on me who said she was a friend of a friend and knew of my social endeavours at that time. She gave me a sad story and asked to borrow money. I told her that I never lend money but in these circumstances I would give it to her in full, no strings attached. She refused this and was adamant that she wanted an interest-charged loan for a week and not a gift. She seemed so offended that I gave it to her on her terms but I never saw her again. I mentioned the encounter to our mutual friend who turned out to be her best friend and berated me for helping her at all rather than show any concern over what transpired. So it is, emotionally, when loans are made and not repaid. Better we all had become friendly acquaintances, perhaps able to help each other.
Give rather than lend if you want to keep a friend.
Saying 106
Jesus said, “When you make the two into one, you’ll become Children of Humanity, and if you say ‘Mountain, go away!’, it’ll go.”
To be literally child-like and effortlessly humane is to be fully capable of time- and space-distorting miracles. The innocence present in lack of doubt will move mountains. (The opposite of belief is not doubt. The opposite of doubt is certainly KNOWING.)
Saying 111
Jesus said, “The heavens and the earth will roll up in front of you, and whoever lives from the Living One won’t see death.”
Whosoever accepts Truth and Love as Reality and trusts in God completely will never see death. A sensory change – in this Saying it is not tasting but seeing that is referenced. So was Jesus being merely figurative after all? Or at death do all the severed senses remain in play awhile for some?
Death is a process that the law has not yet taken on board. There is no moment of death as such, just a moment among other telling moments, convenient enough to be used on a medical-legal record. There are several paths into death including war, water and food starvation, accident, illness, abortion, murder, burning, drowning and the life-force striving to evacuate as a death-force passes through.
Our normal condition is hope and a wish to avoid paining the ones we love. This hope is largely illogical given the facts of life and death yet prevails over all making us unreasonably buoyant. In clinical depression we attitudinally reconcile to the bleak hopelessness of life, reject tomorrow and feel, wrongly, that those we love will not miss us.
The afterthought to Saying 111
Doesn’t Jesus say, “Whoever finds themselves, of them the world isn’t worthy”?
In an empire that systematized buying-and-selling, work-for-wages, half-human slave status and routine wealth-and-power transferances to a rich minority, Jesus sought to lift up His followers self-appraisals of their comparatively disadvantaged selves. Others may embrace the materialist system whereby everybody is serving somebody somehow and feeling good about successes at it or feeling bad about failings yet there is a better perspective to hand. Although you may be low down the social list (Dicken’s A Christmas Carol was a deliberate repudiation of contemporary Malthusianism) you can enjoy knowing that you have overcome this material world and are therefore, Jesus says, not inferior to all of its scurrying denizens in the sense that they should admire your freedoms. But they will not unless you yourselves feign squeaky blamelessness and demonstrate money nous. (Like the fictitious miser Scrooge who had screwed legally everybody that he could and saw nothing wrong with that as he thought it just.)
(See ADDENDUM AU SUJET DE L’HOMME NICE: the Malamatiyya)
Well-off clergyman Thomas Malthus published in the early Nineteenth Century his Essay on the Principles of Population. This inhuman bubble-dweller contended that
“A man who is born into a world possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on which he has a just demand, and if society do not want his labour, has no claim of right of the smallest portion of food, and in fact, has no business to be where he is. At Nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone” as “the populations of the world would increase in geometric proportions” and yet “the food resources available for them would increase only in arithmetic proportions”.
(Subsequently he offered his pet schedules which proved totally incorrect.)
This was the response of a religious professional, with social authority, to the overcrowding of cities and lack of employment in the new machine-age. The effects of the proposed age of artificial intelligence are as yet unknown – mass overcrowding in narrowed cities with enormous expansions of those largely untrod domains of traditional landowners? Neo-communitization by and for the elite who own automatic production and distribution?
But if we see the increase of heart over head that must come if the many journey inside their selves, willingly, then we might well find
“Man free, man working for himself, with choice
Of time and place, and object; by his wants,
His comforts, native occupations, cares,
Conducted on to individual ends
Or social, and still followed by a train,
Unwooed, unthought-of even: simplicity,
And beauty, and inevitable grace. “
Wordsworth, The Prelude VIII.152-8
Thank you for reading this far. The Gospel of Thomas is one of the earliest known accounts of Jesus the Nazarene yet as a text is only bookish knowledge and we cannot say for sure that these sayings of Jesus, perhaps whilst in India, are all truly His. I can say that my comments are my own. Some things I certainly KNOW to be true. Other matters I deduce to be so in the light of what I KNOW but I will not say that I inarguably KNOW them to be true. KNOW yourself and KNOW for yourself.
Time to go inside.
Nigel Raymond Offord (C)January 2019
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Gospel of Thomas, spiritual enlightenment, Universal Truth
