TEN MORE FROM THOMAS – with a Bonus Saying
This post is a follow-up to the post for January 2019 – How Will Death Taste? – which was originally intended as a stand-alone piece based on selected sayings from Thomas’s Gospel of Jesus. The following are the first ten from the remaindered sayings. The introduction to be found in the January post also applies here (as does the conclusion).
Saying 3
Jesus said, “If your leaders tell you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they tell you, ‘It’s in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and outside of you.
“When you know yourselves, then you’ll be known, and you’ll realize that you’re the children of the living Father. But if you don’t know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”
Jesus speaks to them of the bright blue sky and the deep blue sea, neither of which were we born equipped to master save by serendipitous steps in human inventiveness. The Kingdom of Heaven is a different matter. Unseen and yet everywhere, it covers and embraces what lies without and within ourselves. It lives beyond the brain’s interpretive perceptions of what is and what is not and is even beyond that fast-chattering monkey, seated upon the brain, that we call the mind. And yet we can master our inner self enough to experience, for want of a better expression, an equal partnership with the All.
Here Jesus uses the expression ‘know yourself’, an early and vital part of all good transformations, to represent the entire process of ‘Enlightenment’.
Yes, the famous ‘Know Thyself’ is that important. Yet many are not 100% sure who they are, having been misled all their lives by peers and respected figures alike, and even those who feel secure in their identity and need not cling to external symbols to prove it will benefit from going inside to fully reveal the non-historic, non-affiliated, non-accidental ‘ID’ that they really are.
Please Note: the English language is inadequate for me to say all that I KNOW, especially those lackaday yet accepted meanings of words that represent the spiritual experience, and so I choose or borrow the nearest word or phrase in my communicative attempt.
We are born alone and die alone. Yet God lives, within us and without us. To avoid the taste of death, give birth to your new self in the here and now in a ‘living conjunction’ with the One whereby we feel ‘interrelated’ with the All and yet remain recognized individual beings, rather like children in a family but more so.
Jesus ends with a hint about absence of spiritual experience. It comes down to worldly cornucopia vs. the intransient richness of eternality and their being difficult-to-impossible to conflate. Yet how much $ gain is too much? Well, in the spiritual universe it is not only the financial arithmetic that compounds but also our motives and intentions and it seems that those who achieve great worldly progress do create a unique neediness in their self as a result of developing an invisible hump or two or three and will experience peculiar hardships by the cherishing of addictive non-nutrite inputs. Of course, such foods as cannot sate the appetite seem of sound value and good common sense solely within the topsy-turvy reversed topography of the materialist’s world.
Saying 7
Jesus said, “Blessed is the lion that’s eaten by a human and then becomes human, but how awful for the human who’s eaten by a lion, and the lion becomes human.”
The perhaps jocular point that Jesus is making here is not “You are what you eat”. It is that people are more important than animals and have a desirable, envy-making quality that separates them out completely from other species in this world – a coming together of holy spirit with an animal body and mind, a human and a monkey-form, like a fusion experiment with all the confusion that entails for both sides of the creation.
(Finding animal torment fascinating persists in the East. The Anglo-Saxon cultures, though, place animal grief at least on a par with child grief if not above it. Compare the regally-endorsed Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with the plain common National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Try writing an English newspaper item that claims children to be more important than pets and hate-mail will surely ensue.)
What we do not know is the original context in which this Saying should be taken. Greek philosophers offered that animals need not be recipients of the fruits of human morality being neither human nor moral. Before then there had been a cannibalistic belief that to consume your enemy or your dead relative was to take to yourself their best attributes – though not their failings, presumably.
(Same-species consumption persists today both in the wild and with human beings as ritual and criminal acts including war crimes.)
Here Jesus is speaking in similar terms but about the cross-specie devouring of a noble and an imagined-as-noble creature. Today this seems most arcane, a distant peasant wisdom or folklore perhaps? Not so to those living in the Roman Empire. Livy had written about lion fighting in Rome as early as 186 BC. Was such ‘sport’ quite everyday for much of His contemporary following? What kinds of folk was He addressing?
The Bible gospels are said to be written by simple men. Yet those who could write at that time were 10% of the city populations and a fraction of that in the country areas. Scribes and editors were literate by definition, of course, as were Pharisiacal priests. Jesus deeply disliked both groups, it seems.
Followers like Luke and Matthew had been in literate occupations. Saul/Paul though is customarily described as a ‘tent maker’ yet the Hebrew noun employed could suggest equally ‘house maker’ or even ‘church maker’, which figuratively is what he obviously was.
(Jesus gave the people sound ideas and lofty feelings about high and true ideals but it was Paul and perhaps James who gave them their common mindset, the prescribed methods for both internalizing and externalizing these, so as to lay the foundation of the Christian church today – theoretically a borderless state yet bordered in practice by common expressions of common beliefs from a common origin.)
Jesus says that to eat dead matter returns it to life. True in a poetic sense, of course, but not as a material process as food is broken down physically and chemically in the digestive system, unless Jesus was confirming that all matter has a spirit, individually or collectively, that gets taken over into our own self or else takes a vampirical pleasure in drawing our spiritual energy into itself. There are ‘people’ who can do this, please be aware.
Though born as fully human, some people become possessed (theoretically easily reversible – I once spontaneously exorcised a demonic and the results were startling but I cannot know that matters did not revert later) or have killed and buried their shame- or guilt-ridden true selves to live out The Great Deceiver in a bubble-world empathic only to them (theoretically irreversible as the timeline for any humane treatment would be too long even if wanted, although all things are possible when done by God).
Which brings us to ‘Holy Communion’. The Roman version of this has considered the wine and wafer as mysteriously and truly transformed into blood and flesh. Protesters hold that this is equally nourishing when considered to be so symbolically.
This Saying bears out the possible belief, that it may follow was being implied during the ‘Last Supper’, that their drinking His actual blood and eating His actual flesh would have made His spirit enter into them. Actually, I find cannibalism abhorrent and drinking blood distasteful. Being qualified in youth by the Church of England to take Communion I used to do that but these days I do not and for the above reasons. This Saying, however, has given me pause for thought about disdain for Communion. Even so my ‘hero-worship’ of the real Jesus does not extend to ritual.
(Confucius – a famous advisor to kings across China – wrote that to understand ritual was to hold the world in your hand. Confucianism though is a very potent force for social stability, an inviolable family structure with a strict relationship code for each member, that has proven resistant to political reach inside families. In fact few family laws, if any, have existed in true Confucian societies with government then left a free hand to lord over all activities outside the family. A kind of trade-off. Moderniser Chairman Mao failed twice to abolish peasant Confucianism. There is a spiritual aspect to it yet it is not exclusive, no priests demanding that only one source of mores be observed. Ancestor remembrance, usually inside the family home, is its main otherworldly ritual – intended, perhaps, to keep the past bosses placated and distant now that their time has gone.)
Saying 8
He said, “The human being is like a wise fisher who cast a net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisher found a fine large fish and cast all the little fish back down into the sea, easily choosing the large fish. Anyone who has ears to hear should hear!”
Jesus seems to say, perhaps accidentally, that the biggest should die, the smallest should live. To the modern mind this makes a kind of sense. Governments control hole-sizes of nets and young fish below a certain size must be returned to the sea for breeding. However, our high-risk-taking fisherboat skippers could actually sell all of any catch upon safe return to port and would be happy to be allowed to do so. Chance-taking agents will bid for the whole catch, regardless, and batch it up into species, qualities and sizes to sell on to the appropriate markets. At the time of Jesus the outcome would have been closer to the latter than to the former. So what did He mean?
In the upside-down world of the unenlightened materialist this saying has little or no meaning without recalling the modern assumption “biggest is best” and that this particular big fish must obviously have some monetary value greater than the cumulative potential of the tiddlers.
Yet the final sentence clearly indicates that this saying is for those who KNOW. It is a pearl tossed for them alone to catch. As a result “human being” as “wise fisher” here probably implies fully humanized beings and not the spiritually oscillating, practical but prevaricating ‘monkey hybrid’ homo sapiens that have not yet realized the best version of their inner selves.
(Jesus said to ask God to provide for everything and on lacking all doubt it will be given to us. Providence. Wishing for greater wisdom, though, sometimes leads to surprising sorrows as it is only in personal experiences, usually of a harrowing nature, that we may learn from our mistakes and grow in emotional stability and character. Rather seek-out spiritual wisdom through your personal inner Enlightenment. It may happen, of course, that particular worldly awards will be earned but then discounted before we proceed on our inward path, i.e. take out all the hooks!)
Sidestepping Buddhism, which would hold that suffering or pain is illusional and not real to the inner self, James the Just felt driven to tell his followers to find the joy in such suffering for it is happening especially to benefit their selves, which may well be true yet, for most, that’s a bitter pill to swallow. This attitude was intended to enable perseverance, a great tool in battling the incorrigible parts of ourselves yet also the preeminent weapon of the mediocre.)
In a Bible gospel Jesus speaks of “fishers of men”. Be aware of intelligent discrimination as being the primary – but latterly the least important – step on the path towards personal Enlightenment.
(You know, an inner city teacher will attend to the needs of the disadvantaged learners in a group, leaving the quick to fend for theirselves, but the country dweller will ever put the top candidate first, naturally, be that the biggest in the catch or the most proliferous patch for fruiting.)
Saying 9
Jesus said, “Look, a sower went out, took a handful of seeds, and scattered them. Some fell on the roadside; the birds came and gathered them. Others fell on the rock; they didn’t take root in the soil and ears of grain didn’t rise toward heaven. Yet others fell on thorns; they choked the seeds and worms ate them. Finally, others fell on good soil; it produced fruit up toward heaven, some sixty times as much and some a hundred and twenty.”
Plants also need surroundings reflective of their natures. Those plants well-fitted to desert drought will drown easily. Mountain plants like restricted roots and slender diets, dying otherwise. Roses are gross consumers, greedy feeders, and produce champion blooms if a rotted bag from the Horse Of The Year Show is added to their plot. Some jungle canopy dwellers need full shade whilst woodlanders flourish in dappled sunshine. Likewise dormant seeds are triggered by predetermined factors like water or ice or fire (Californian Redwoods). If you broadcast seed regardless you may have start-to-finish successes or else good starters that give up early under stress or even non-starters that will not try to push upwards at all. Or all three at once – ‘good’ seeds and so-called ‘bad’ seeds in a mixed bag.
Jesus acutely observes that first the resources come down: then those suitably resourced rise up.
How curious that ‘up’ and ‘down’ seem to exist objectively. What are these forceful place-markers that exist all around the surface of our ball-shaped planet? And do they exist in Outer Space?
Einstein must have believed that. His relativity explanation of gravity suggests a flat mattress called Space that heavy planets sink into. In other words they sink somewhere we must call down so necessitating somewhere we call up that they just sank from or at least that we could observe as above if suitably located below.
This was either an IQ-testing thought reversal, explaining gravity as being the side-effect of a heavy weight rather than a heavy weight as being the side-effect of gravity, or a major advance on the Chinese of thousands of years ago who drew a straight line then pondered upon it, in effect initiating the philosophy we now call theoretical physics. The Chinese found their intuitions and intellects stirred by this straightening pursuit. The next stage was to posit that there must be something above the line and so something else below the line. Eventually somebody in ancient times decided that they were the same thing and the two became one or Heaven and Earth, apparently up and apparently down from the horizon, separate as concepts and yet forever in touch with each other.
In 1985-6 I found a very receptive listener who I spoke with for an hour or so each evening about the World as seen by me both from within and from without. I think I was among the first to use the approach “You don’t have to believe me, try for youself” which worked well. To my pleasant surprise their spirit nature grew and grew until, one day, as I noticed the ornament in between us to be glowing with a kind of life of its own – and without any word from me – they described the selfsame awesome sight. Well, there we were, seeing the same unexpected event, both in awe, until it returned to a mundane normalcy. We were in a coffee shop. Powerful things, coffee beans? No, this experience can occur anywhere, anytime – it once happened to me as I glanced at a desk telephone and became absorbed by its wonderfulness on some hitherto unencountered level – and links to a stage in development by which we uncover fitfully the divinity that had always been hidden there.
In subsequent years, under the influence of their best friend, they went into an occulted activity – that I had warned them was a false detour and ultimately debilitating and despite the proofs I had given. All my loving work in vain?
There is no guarantee of achieving Enlightenment. Some will know attainment this time around, some won’t quite make it this time but could in another time and place, others just refuse to try it seems. Yet the journey is its own reward and those rewards when they come are beyond mere beans to calculate. However, what goes up must come down. And vice versa.
Saying 11
Jesus said, “This heaven will disappear, and the one above it will disappear too. Those who are dead aren’t alive, and those who are living won’t die. In the days when you ate what was dead, you made it alive. When you’re in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one, you became divided. But when you become divided, what will you do?”
This futuristic narrative reads that the sky or heaven will disappear and so will the sky or heaven above that! Well, today we call the lowest part of the atmosphere the Troposphere and separate this from the Stratosphere with the Tropopause. The upper atmosphere is then divided in two and all that is topped out by the Exosphere for good measure. Did Jesus mean that?
Alternatively the “one above” might be the One God of this Universe or else just the head leaseholder of this planet, the negatively influential local demonic – given to reversals – who may or may not exist (although it seems true to me that they once did and maybe have revived today).
Jesus has described some sort of ‘horizon event’ which seems to step beyond time itself as if planetary orbiting had stopped and all the clocks with it.
Again He speaks of a human ability that most were not aware of – to bring to life anew that which we eat. I am not sure about this revelation. It seems quite dark, not so light, a bit shocking. Have I missed something?
He goes on to speak of what must be a very special light, the embracing glow of God perhaps?
Contrast that with Genesis: the Earth existed void upon a deep darkness as the Spirit of God flutters on the face of the deep waters. Fiat lux! Then light gets called day and dark gets called night. An expanse is called the Heavens (the Milky Way?) that separates the waters above (that would later fall to Earth through opened ‘windows’ in the sky) and on Day 2 the dry land called the Earth and the watery Seas appeared. Seeing that it was good, the God manifests tender grass upon the Earth and although it is too thirsty for some climes today a mist rises up to keep everything fresh.
(Elsewhere in ancient times, Darkness was thought of as behaving like a snake, amoral, largely neutral and disinterested until challenged by the Light and then its evil emerges fighting for its very survival, viciously and calculatingly. Even quite recently in human history the dark was seen as the force that dispelled the light and not what must occur in the absence of light when all colours are replaced by black, i.e. the colours all come from white light and must move-on with it. Leonardo knew about this by observation. It’s amazing how many folk won’t observe what is in front of them if that goes against what they once were taught. We don’t see what we don’t expect to see?)
The challenge: Jesus queries how will you act upon entering the light? Clearly Jesus speaks about a special light, not normally seen. I think we all can imagine the subtle meaning of the phrase “To step into the light” but to experience that may be a different matter.
Does He or Thomas or some subsequent scribe-editor then seem to lose their way in the final sentence-pair? Became is past, become is future present. This seems out of sync somehow, like a doubling of division.
On the day when you were one, you became divided.
But when you become divided, what will you do?
Clearly this confirms that we were once at one with everything, virtually undifferentiated, and then we became divided into the dualism of this world as perceived by us daily and reinforced by the all-pervasive syndrome of cause-and-effect.
(First you take up your gender in the womb, then the Sun and the Moon give you day and night and so it goes on, dualistically. Then by constant repetitions you become averse to or blind to and so unable to register anything that is not cause-and-effect based.)
The challenge appears: how will you act upon being divided? Yes, but does that mean at around conception what will you do? Well, we know now that the single fertilized cell divides and continues to do so, doubling and redoubling. It’s curious that He might have meant that, nobody would have understood until very recently. Unless that’s part of a plan – which also seems doubtful to the modern mind.
Could Jesus have meant instead how would you behave after being reborn into the One but eventually sliding back into divisive worldly ways? Or should this be something like “But when you eventually become One, feeling deeply part of the universal meld, what will you do?”
The latter might suggest that there is a choice to be made by the Enlightened One, perhaps whether to progress again, after a period of bliss, or maybe to return slowly and painfully back into the world. Either no-one present would have comprehended this, or else everyone.
The website gnosticdoctrine.blogspot.com has a prosaic interpretation of the final sentence-pair – presumably by placing them at the moment that Jesus ordered them (the disciples on basic training) into pairs (of apostles on field operations) – by treating these last two sentences as part of, the introduction to, Saying 12.
Saying 12
The disciples said to Jesus, “We know you’re going to leave us. Who will lead us then?”
Jesus said to them, “Wherever you are, you’ll go to James the Just, for whom heaven and earth came into being.”
In a Bible gospel Jesus said He would prepare a place for them after His Departure/upon His Arrival … but here He tells them that wherever they are when He departs they must go and report to His brother James ‘for whom heaven and earth – everything in the material and the spiritual worlds? – came into being’.
Tentatively, I offer here 5 explanations of the extreme James description:
1.It’s my guess that by speaking like this Jesus might have been foreseeing the supernatural-papal type of glory that would surround all future rememberance of James.
2. James already had status in Jerusalem as a religious leader, an alternative to the imposed High Priest, with whom he might intercede on behalf of the people. Reputedly he was a miracle-worker also. He was so well-regarded by the people that Origen and others have recorded that the destruction of Jerusalem was held out by many as an act of God following the killing of James the Just and not following the killing of Jesus, as we might rather presume today.
3.This extraordinary statement attributed to Jesus about James the Just could also be taken to mean that James had attained Enlightenment, perhaps having been ‘chosen’ at the beginning of time as per Saying 49 of this, Thomas’s own Gospel of Jesus.
Yet in James 4:4 a dualistic James states,
“Adulterers and adulteresses! have ye not known that friendship of the world is enmity with God? whoever, then, may counsel to be a friend of the world, an enemy of God he is set.”
This is quite gnostic and purist, I get it, but it is hyper-critical and divisive so not delivered from the position of an Enlightened One at all, and is a very ragged version of the sublime “for what is a man profited if he may gain the whole world, but of his life suffer loss?” Jesus in Matthew 16:26
James was truly famous for his sense of justice and while the word ‘just’ is very important to law, religion, ethics and culture generally it has little real relevance to the Enlightened, justice being rooted in dualism like a two-edged sword or a pair of scales.
4.This odd qualification of James has been justified elsewhere by quoting Revelation (although seemingly not written at the time of the Thomas Gospel of Jesus) wherein God changes absolutely everything (so creating a new heaven and earth) and John envisions the new Jerusalem yet does not mention any Kingdom of James.
(Perhaps there is an over-fondness for ‘King James‘ in bible circles, causing some confusion? All my quotes are from Youngs Literal Translation Bible.)
5.Could this attribution be a weird editorial justification for spooky nepotism, as scribally inserted into the main narrative?
Some say that religion is an inspired cop-out and its records are forever flawed.
In contradistinction to that point of view, here is the holy James for whom the silvery rain falls and the ears of corn glisten …
James the Just was an Elder, a leading authority and one of the shared leadership of the early Jerusalem Church of the Apostolic Age, so-called, with which Paul was associated. He was a supposed brother to Jesus the Nazarene and lived out his life in Jerusalem. He was not an apostle and had not believed in the divinity of Jesus until after the material resurrection of Him.
Although some foreign converts to Judaism had joined in, plus pious folk from Ethiopia, which land housed what otherwise might be the earliest congregational Christianity, the majority of those attending meetings were Jewish convinced followers of Jesus.
These were early days for the belief in Jesus as being the longed-for Jewish Messiah, Jesus the Christ, a notion that has deeply offended a great many Jews even to this day. Paul, officially a Roman, nudged over toward the Gentiles (the non-Jews of the world) as being his Mission while James continued to refer to their meeting-place in Jerusalem as a synagogue.
James – who like Paul stressed the divinity of Jesus – appeared to have a differing message and style to that of Jesus, at least judging by his eponymous book that stresses obedience to the group and views misfortune as being not so much personal as systemic, rather Jewish points of view that would later be expressed by Marx.
Many millions have warmed to the theme of ‘group salvation’ with its exclusive ‘thou-shalt-not-enter-without-thy-church’s-goldcard’ and all the implications that poses.
Saying 13
Jesus said to his disciples, “If you were to compare me to someone, who would you say I’m like?”
Simon Peter said to him, “You’re like a just angel.”
Matthew said to him, “You’re like a wise philosopher.”
Thomas said to him, “Teacher, I’m completely unable to say whom you’re like.”
Jesus said, “I’m not your teacher. Because you’ve drunk, you’ve become intoxicated by the bubbling spring I’ve measured out.”
He took him aside and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked, “What did Jesus say to you?”
Thomas said to them, “If I tell you one of the things he said to me, you’ll pick up stones and cast them at me, and fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.”
Jesus challenges Simon Peter who resorts to mixture of the spiritual and the material to form an appropriate conjunction. Matthew seeks to hide within the reflected glow that may attach to compliments of rare human wisdom. Thomas tells the truth as he feels it to be. Even so Jesus seems to show irritation that the conventional social address upon speaking to any teacher is also being levelled at Him. (We do the same today with the automatic address ‘Doctor’ aimed at any level of physician.)
The Child Jesus grew up beyond all teachers and got fed up with being farmed out to these lesser beings by Joseph and ending up having to school them instead of them schooling Him.
(Read the Infancy Gospel of Thomas – too bizarre for me to attempt to interpret and yet, like Revelation and some OT books, most moving at some very deep level – to get a flavour of how this might have been)
He was not a teacher of spiritual matters in a material world. Probably He came to this mission because the world had seemed inside-out. When all was in place and the people in accord then He would guide them step-by-step.
He tried to be like an honourable servant and yet also the one you must look to for directions and commands in unaccustomed straits. He may actually have felt like a diplomatic office-holder who had arrived at a low location in an inappropriately gilded carriage that he rather needed to live down in order to raise up the support of the common people. Or sometimes like a distressed husband who despite being unused to such rough terrain needs must tread in every last corner searching for his lost wife. His followers saw Him as their leader and superior.
Note: I have met Christians who claim to have a personal and present relationship with Jesus Christ. I do not make such a claim. As an iconic figure of religious literature He has been analysed and written about as much as anyone else ever has been, perhaps more. There are so many opinionated points of view. Why should I not add mine? All I may deduce is that He lived two millennia ago, was wonderfully advanced at miracle-working, had a huge mobile following at a time when the Roman Cavalry routinely hunted and mowed down non-official religious meetings, spoke sentences that echoed down the centuries (many of them surviving verbatim despite all the odds – ask any journalist) was surrounded by a clique that viewed Him supernaturally and was forceful in His precepts but not doctrinal, referring them only to the story of Jonah in the whale so as to understand his upcoming demise and what would follow on from it. Jesus was actually a Greek name,very common in Jerusalem – a city that He loved – but more or less unheard of in Galilee where most of His mission took place. He tried to avoid His country family who at one point were trying to get Him ‘sectioned’ out of embarassment with the neighbours. There were few trees where He grew up and imported timbers were expensive. For that reason even small bridges were made of stone. Carpentry, the trade of Joseph, may have been restricted to load-bearing frames and cross-beams used, for instance, to support flat roofs. All armies also employed carpenters who travelled great distances with them. The invisible mortise and tenon joints skilfully crafted may have given rise to the exhortation to remember the beam in your own eye when criticizing others for the speck in theirs, i.e. their speck is visible, yes, but God knows you have a hidden artifice that is much greater than their impurity even if it has been made specially difficult to notice!
You are your only teacher in spirit apart from God Almighty – although on the way ‘up’ there are some very good guiding words available to the intuitively discriminating (yet very few indeed on the way ‘down’ again) – so proceed inside with Him alone and experience fully your personal progress through the dim corridors towards Enlightenment.
(Was Jesus angry because the World that He said He hated is indeed a kind of school, teaching us by our mistakes and upgrading us to even more difficult lessons by degrees? Who could be the Principal of that school and how will final graduation taste?)
There were three followers present and Jesus told Thomas three things. Thomas seems to have been tutored in how fire might be drawn from a stone, the inanimate suddenly impassioned in the worst way imaginable. We shall never know clearly the things that Jesus said to Thomas (much like the vital words of Jesus in His 40 days on Earth after His resurrection that are forever occulted from us) but a whiff of their unacceptability might possess that group and probably would with the Christians of today, too.
More than once Jesus referred to stones as being potentially animated despite appearing to be totally still like master meditators or sleeping monks .
Saying 14
Jesus said to them, “If you fast, you’ll bring guilt upon yourselves; and if you pray, you’ll be condemned; and if you make donations, you’ll harm your spirits.
In Saying 6 (see the website nostradamondo entry for January 2019 ) Jesus makes no reply to questions about fasting timetables, prayer routines, donation methods, dietary requirements, because HE IS NOT ABOUT FOUNDING A RELIGION.
Here though He brings attention to unexpected consequences that no member of any Judeo-Christian or Christianity-influenced country would even consider possible today after two thousand years of absorbing altering influences.
“If they welcome you when you enter any land and go around in the countryside, heal those who are sick among them and eat whatever they give you, because it’s not what goes into your mouth that will defile you. What comes out of your mouth is what will defile you.”
A wanderer needs acquire certain graces that will keep them safe wherever they go. Politeness is one that works even in impolite societies. Not deliberately setting yourself up for ridicule or offense is another (including guarding your tongue, which is the very thing that these advocates could not always do). Taking much care over those who serve you and accepting what is offered in good faith is correct, i.e. not doing these things will leave you unappreciated.
In parts of the East great hospitality is shown to travelling strangers even in places that dislike or distrust foreigners. It was probably once that way in the West also.
In fact, even the poorest people will enjoy giving as generously as their hearts dictate and you will gain love and respect if you speak just a few of their local phrases and eat well no matter what oddity is placed before you. (Excepting rare instances when a culture forbids hearty displays.) To take good care of a travelling stranger was a widespread cultural tradition once upheld as most worthy.
(Immediately after WWI in Britain some destitute ex-soldiers found that they could walk the land much like tramps yet always finding free food and beer and friendly company in the grateful rural villages.)
Doctors, like teachers, are in short supply in rural areas as they earn the least while there and are far from influencing any sort of career path. Some may be bad doctors even, unwanted in the cities, and yet they are accorded the highest respect by locals, regardless. Absolutely any person believed able to heal others – and Jesus does not doubt that His advocates shall be – will find themselves equally well-regarded and may advance their own cause unhindered (other than by the State when it feels like interfering).
We can find in Thomas’s Gospel of Jesus possible roots of a later Christian Gnosticism in Southern France, eventually defeated by envy and greed, which totally divided the physical world from its spiritual counterpart. Jesus holds that the transient condition of the physical stomach is unworthy of worry whilst our strangely enduring invisible utterances give Him deep pause for concern.
In this He was followed by His brother James, one of the earliest pillars of the church, in his eponymous book, chapter 3:8
For every nature, both of beasts and of fowls, both of creeping things and things of the sea, is subdued, and hath been subdued, by the human nature, and the tongue no one of men is able to subdue, being an unruly evil, full of deadly poison
Now I turn to the most profound aspect of the second part of this Saying from my personal perspective. There is a striking parallel between what Jesus says about the undesirable going in or out of your mouth externally and whatever is going in or out of your mind internally.
Meditation to zero mind (my expression for the total absence of thoughts, music and pictures) requires first being silent with the eyes closed. It is not so important what distractions are occurring outside as they register no more than does the everyday traffic outside a closed window. What is important is to guard against/dismiss absolutely every internally generated mental filler – the mind will throw constant distraction at you even or especially after you have ceased to want to think, including spontaneous and intrusive thoughts about your shutting it down, inner musical sounds and unsummoned scenes.
(Some theorists say that emptying the mind of all internally-generated sound and vision is impossible but I not only KNOW that to be wrong, I also KNOW that zeroing the mind is essential for me. One has only to get right in order to do it – which may involve prior personal behavioural changes and intuitive directional insights – although this does require undaunted discipline as you try to silence the mind, in my experience. Then it comes, sooner or later, simply and effortlessly like finding oneself in perfect balance. A still and divine Oneness with the Universe.)
Saying 15
Jesus said, “When you see the one who wasn’t born of a woman, fall down on your face and worship that person. That’s your Father.”
Awkwardly – and beyond all colleges to explain despite the sub-scientific theory of evolution – a knowing of the source of the all, ‘Ab Initio’, is not only a clear defeat for ‘A.I.’ but it is also proving impossible for the science of synthetic organic chemistry to nail.
Another one who is not born of woman is that person who has rebirthed themselves during their lifetime by success at unpeeling their historic lower self and nurturing the emergence of their Higher Self in its stead.
For myself, I have noticed that cultural ways are the most difficult ways of all to slough off. Also that how we present ourselves to the daily traffic of human discourse – our presentation to others by charm of voice, humour, occasional forcefullness – that we have developed over the years, our ways of persuasion or of reinforcing personal barriers or of subtle coercion or self-defence, etc., are likely to remain after rebirthing ourselves if only because these things took a lifetime to perfect slowly, gradually. It follows that we may eventually give up the effort to grow them anew and continue with our old proven methods of interaction with others despite having become a very different person on the inside. Always look past the surface, the superficial facial recognition, the pat projections of personality, etc.
Saying 16
Jesus said, “Maybe people think that I’ve come to cast peace on the world, and they don’t know that I’ve come to cast divisions on the earth: fire, sword, and war. Where there are five in a house, there’ll be three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father. They’ll stand up and be one.”
A very powerful statement. Can it be taken seriously? Isn’t this the gentle Lamb of Christianity? In Saying 10 He said He was come to cast fires and watch the world burn. Violent, no?
Perhaps because He usually presents as very balanced and stable, others then expect Him to bring those same qualities into their own lives? Yet in the surviving childhood gospels He murders child enemies at will (He also reverses a child’s death at will though seemingly not from compassion) and blinds one teacher. Joseph is implored by grieving parents to send Him away from His home village.
At different periods the Jews were expecting either two Messiahs (Christ is merely the Greek for Messiah) or one with the characteristics of both. These were imagined as quite worldly types, one being a priestly figure and the other a military leader. The idea was that the lengthy Roman occupation would be wrapped-up by a mixture of martial force and guidance from above. The desert-based Essenes (remote and seemingly never hassled by the Romans) were in constant training, we may read, to join with an army of angels to do that same job. Fire, sword and war were indeed what happened to the Jews when the Romans expelled the Jews from “the Holy Land”, as prophesied or as cursed by Jesus under the duress of protracted humiliation and execution. Who can blame Him? He was being severely and unfairly rejected. Wouldn’t you curse them if you were in that position? (But John the Baptist and James the Just were also killed unfairly and so even if there were some kind of holy curse on Israel/Jerusalem we can’t be sure which, if any, of this power trio placed it.)
It is tempting to separate the first half of Saying 16 from the second. We can then explain this latter part as the splitting away of the enlightenment seekers from their base groups, their families. This seems a correct enough, if unpopular, course as it clears the path to individual Enlightenment.
Everything that may be modelled in thought experiments or on laboratory benches is, in truth, a mixture of reality and imagination.
The latter is a very profound human asset, far beyond the secondary status accorded to it by the Age of Reason. Paradoxically it is imagination that powers the very scientists who would downgrade it as inferior to the factual.
The fact of the matter here is that the whole of this Saying is intended to stand united, like its positive ending. Undoubtedly the Apostles were slow to comprehend Jesus and each stuck too long with preconceptions of Him: the Priest Messiah (flickeringly representing the spiritual dimension) being the same personification as the Commander Messiah (forcefully representing the desired conflict) according to the Judean mindset at the time of the Roman occupation.
Prophet Mohammed PBUH (who started Islam from a cave) had three definable ‘careers’ – as a successful businessman, as a great Prophet and as a conquering warlord, in that order, and no good Moslem would query that procession as being in any way anomalous. In truth, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are and have been or can be both of peace and of violence.
A BONUS SAYING:
Saying 20
The disciples asked Jesus, “Tell us, what can the kingdom of heaven be compared to?”
He said to them, “It can be compared to a mustard seed. Though it’s the smallest of all the seeds, when it falls on tilled soil it makes a plant so large that it shelters the birds of heaven.”
Another good seed story. It is true that a seed contains the recipe and the ingredients for the whole plant to grow up into something impressive (with some chemicals being so concentrated in some seeds that they are poisonous to us). Jesus picks on the diminutive mustard seed for His example. He also chooses for His illustration a tilled field, a prepared site. Here the seed will ‘take’ and grow to a size where it fulfills its part in the natural scheme of things, proving useful and helpful.
Of help to the anti-Creationists is that although the human body, for example, is a stunning piece of work there are some design faults – weak spots and eminently improvable systems – that seem inexplicable unless chance had been at work at least part of the time. So it is that some essential dietary requirements are both rare in the wild and yet not produced by the body itself. As it happens, mustard has two of those. By my intuition, it seems possible only that God was the Creator and Inceptor of the physical world yet could He not have created something like evolution as well so as to build some surprises into developments upon that first foundation? Truly I know of no complete answer to the broad question of originations – who or what created everything from nothing, including originating the ideas of foundation, development, surprise and intuition – except that there must have been God to have an ‘In the beginning’ – that conceit or incept being another conception-inception that He must also have created ‘ab initio’.
Where is our Universe expanding towards exactly? As a toddler I watched a drip suspending itself from our big scullery tap. It was tear-shaped and weighing itself down. Sooner or later it would fall and disintegrate against the bottom of the deep stone sink. I thought it to be made of the atoms and molecules that I had heard about, just as the Universe is made of stars and planetary systems. I saw that the fate of the universe was to grow fatter at one end and thin at the other until it slipped from the grip of an alien scullery tap. I remember the thought “Is that it? Are we an insignificant droplet in some other world, doomed under our own weight?”
So where did we come from? In Saying 50 (see the website nostradamondo entry for January 2019 ) Jesus is claimed by Thomas to have said to them that the light came into being from itself (no dual nor binary cause for the brilliant effect) and that they were like images or presences or aspects, perhaps even projections, of it. The present Age of Worldly Reason holds that light exudes from matter, otherwise we have no idea where it starts from. What will the next Age have to say about that?
NigelRaymondOfford (C) September 2019
Nostradamondo 