26 No love without openness to all that is

LG26

Jesus said:
You do see the splinter in the eye of your brother
but you don’t see the beam in your own eye.
If you remove the beam from your own eye,
then you will see clearly enough
to remove the splinter from the eye of your brother.

You can look at a fellow man with eyes of love. They invite the other person to come out, to show themselves.

You can also look at a fellow human being with a judgmental look. Is that one of us? Does it behave according to our own norms and values? Has it adjusted properly?

Love is: allowing a fellow person to be different from yourself. If you are not prepared to do this, you cannot see the human being in the other, nor can there be charity.

Love can only flourish in total openness to all that is. Only someone who makes peace with himself, stops fighting himself, can achieve this openness. That means in the practice of life that one disarms oneself, puts down one’s armor, and is prepared to be touched, also by pain and sorrow. In the free space that this openness creates, love will present itself as the ground of existence for itself and for other people.

We can experience a meeting with a fellow man on two different levels. The one level is that of the description of reality, within which all kinds of dogmas and rules tell how to behave in certain circumstances.

An example:

The Jewish and Palestinian women from Logion 5 are each other’s enemies at the level of the description. But the grief of a Palestinian mother who loses a child in that struggle is the same as the grief of a Jewish mother who loses a child. That is the other level, that of the soul. Whoever chooses the level of the soul sees the human in the sorrow of both mothers. By daring to see that and putting it above the doctrine, you yourself become human.

Another example:

Children who have died without baptism should not be buried in sacred earth, as explained in the explanation to Logion 6. If you look at your fellow man with that norm in mind, then that judgment is the bar in your own eye.

You see that those fellow people have failed because they did not baptise their child. You supposedly see the splinter in the eye of your brother. But you don’t see that it is a splinter from the bar in your own eye.

‘See the human being’ was said earlier in logion 5. Not the human being as he is according to the agreed images and norms, but the human being that you see if you dare to open the windows of your soul. If you can look at it that way, your soul will be moved by what you see. If you then act from that compassion, your actions will be an expression of true love.

At the level of the doctrine the Jewish and Palestinian women are each other’s enemies, and according to the doctrine the baptised child may not be buried in sacred earth. But the two women and the pastor put the touch of their heart above all agreements. They then act as a human being towards a fellow human being.

They have removed the beam in their eye.

And as a result, that alleged splinter suddenly disappeared in the eye of the other.

35 The betrayal of your own heart

LG35

Jesus said:
No one is able to house a strong man to invade and overpower,
unless he binds his hands,
then he will plunder the house.

Total ‘freeness’ reigns in your inner world. If you attach yourself to something in the world, you do it yourself. Attached or detached, to what is and what is not, you decide for yourself. That is your freeness, the freeness that is the hallmark of everyone’s inner world.

That is the starting point for understanding this logion.

Because it’s about attaching. And detach.

Incidentally, it is not necessarily wrong to attach yourself to something. Why should you not attach yourself to your loved one? There is nothing wrong with it when children attach themselves to their parents and parents to their children. You can even connect with freedom in moral values ​​and stand for that in the world. Attaching is part of life.

And of course, you can detach yourself again and we all know that this can be a very painful process, for example if you lose a loved one. That is why you may come across the view that it is better to never attach yourself to anything again. When you are completely detached, you know for sure that you will never suffer pain again. At least that’s what you think. But you have to pay a high price for that untouchability. You must stop your heart. And that has major consequences. Because you can’t love anymore.

Pain is the other side of love. There is pain because of the loss of a loved one, because that fellow person, yes, exactly, was a loved one. If you love someone you can suffer pain if you lose your fellow man. If you do not love someone, you will not suffer any pain if that person disappears from your life.

Do you want your life to be supported by love? Then be prepared to suffer pain.

Do you want a painless life, completely detached? Then make your heart cold so that you will never again run the risk of loving.

But whoever does that also loses his inner compass. A life without love is directionless. You must then surrender to an outer authority, which tells you what to do, so a Führer. And there are a lot of them, in shapes and sizes. They stand around you with impatience to take control of your life from you.

But how do Führers succeed in attaching people to him, apparently outside their will? No, they don’t do that outside of the will of those people. They entice those people to attach themselves to them and betray their own inner compass of love. How do they do that?

To this end, the Führer must first “tie hands” with those people, says this logion.

What do they do then, the Führer, to persuade a person to give up their inner compass and become a will-less tool in someone else’s hands?

This requires a ‘higher case’.

Let me give an example.

In the year 2003 there was an interview on television with the Hitler secretary. The interviewer asked her: “But didn’t you feel sorry for all those Jewish people?”

Her answer was surprising: “Yes, of course,” she said, “but I thought I should sacrifice pity for a higher cause.”

Another example.

Adolf Eichmann, the cold organizer of the Jewish “Endlösung,” told a journalist how he had once been looking at a concentration camp. There, a Jewish mother had lifted her child behind an iron fence to show it to Eichmann in a demonstrative way. Eichmann told how he started shaking all over his body and almost collapsed. He decided never to watch again and continued to do his executioner remotely, loyal to his Führer.

It is therefore special that these two people were touched in their hearts by the fate of their fellow human beings.
In this way we are all constantly called by our own heart. What are you doing then? The secretary and Eichmann, decided to betray that concern and “sacrifice” it to “a higher cause.” They had their hands tied.
Yes, then your house will be looted, says this logion, so that all your talents will be in the service of that supposed “higher cause.” You have become an impersonal, literally unloving tool in the hands of a Führer.
In this way, even in the service of an institution that preaches love, you can become an inquisitor who puts fellow people on the stake. Because the preached love of an institution is not the love of the heart.
So that’s how you can seduce someone into betraying their own heart. By holding out to them an illusion of a “higher cause” and thus moving them freely to extinguish the fire of love in their own hearts, thus detaching themselves from their own compassion. Yes, that will make you ice cold. Then you can commit the most heinous atrocities.
And don’t think that such a thing only happened in Nazi Germany. Where else then? This is what the next logion is about.

[mva_r] free and dome seem to contradict eachother

36 The willingness to be touched in your heart

LG36

Jesus said:
do not worry
from the morning to the evening
and from the evening to the morning
with which you will dress.

This logion is about a very special attitude to life. What is it like?

First there is the judgmentless seeing, without all kinds of fixed thoughts about good and evil, about us and them.

Then there is the willingness to be touched in your heart.

Your actions in the world result from that concern.

If you are that way in life, and even if you only intend to be that way in life, a loving power will present itself to you. But above all you will gain the experience of ‘fullness’, as it is called in Gnostics, the feeling of leading a fulfilled life. The meaning of existence is not a thought. Life makes sense for you when your actions in the world go together with the experience of meaning. Or, to put it briefly: Life makes sense if you feel like it.

But suppose you acted today from the touch of your heart. You have given meaning to your life. Then there is the danger, and that is what this logion is about, that you think: Now I know what the meaning of my life is, namely that I always ……. (fill in as you please). And then tomorrow you will try to repeat the meaning of today by acting exactly the same way. But then your heart is no longer your inner compass, but your memory.

And that is exactly the same soul movement as when you turn yourself in to an external authority, as discussed in the previous logion. You only surrender to the truth of yesterday.

If you want to live in a way that rewards you with the inner experience of meaning, be prepared to open the windows of your soul every day. If you live like that, your intended attitude to life, you will be able to experience that the power in you that we spoke about earlier is not only becoming more loving, but also very creative. Then, as your actions in the world result from the touch of your heart, and thus from the connection with the source within yourself, you co-creator of life on earth, again and again.

Tomorrow another day awaits, a new heaven, a new earth. But above all: a new heart. At least if you are willing to open the windows of your soul every morning.

22 Make the two one

LG22

The eyes of Jesus fell on children who were fed.
He said to his students:
These children who are being suckled
are like those who enter the kingdom.

They said to him:
Should we be like these children,
to enter into the kingdom?

Jesus said to them:
When you have made the two one,
when you make the inside as the outside
and the outside as the inside
and the top and bottom,
and when you make the male and the female one,
so that the masculine is no longer masculine
and the feminine not feminine,
if you make eyes instead of an eye,
and a hand where there is a hand
and a foot where there is a foot,
and an image where there is an image
then you will enter into the kingdom.

Again such a typical misunderstanding. Jesus says you have to become like children being suckled. And the students literally understand that comment and wonder how that is possible. But of course that’s not the point. This image of a child on the mother’s breast is a symbol. But of what?

It clearly has to do with what follows: to make the two one, or to break the dualities.

People tend to divide reality into good and evil, friend and foe, men and women, heaven and earth, matter and spirit. Everything they experience is interpreted in those dualities. And a value judgment is almost always attached to this. One half of reality is good, the other is bad. But with that you lose sight of the totality, the unity of everything. It makes you blind.

Blindness arises when you look at reality through the eyes of your own value judgments. Your own judgment about the divided reality is the proverbial bar in your own eye. By despising one half of reality, and glorifying the other half, you lose sight of the wholeness of reality, including wholeness of yourself. So you not only become blind to the reality outside of you, but also to the reality within you.

Your value judgment about divided reality lends a veil to everything behind which real reality is hidden. You see the interpretation, the judgment, not the real, whole reality. If you let go of the attachment to that value judgment about reality, that veil falls away. Therefore you also restore yourself to your original unity.

On the one hand everything is the same, a hand is still a hand, a foot is still a foot, and at the same time everything is completely different, totally new. It is as if you are only now seeing everything for the first time.

For a child everything is one. His food, breast milk, is one. There is no duality in that breast milk yet.

The mother breast in this logion is of course also a symbol, and here depicts the cosmic mother breast, “the Source of all being.” The cosmic Source of all being knows no dualities, that is, dualities are not part of reality. Dualities are judgments about reality imposed by humans afterwards, but are not part of reality itself.

For the one life that flows from the cosmic mother’s breast, the text from the Gnostic Gospel of Philip (10) applies:

Light and darkness, life and death, right and left are brothers of each other. They cannot be separated from each other. For that reason, neither the good nor the bad are bad and life is not just life and death is not just dead.

Therefore everyone will be dissolved to its origin.

The “origin” in this text of Philip to which we will be dissolved is depicted in this logion in the mother’s breast. If we are ‘dissolved’ from duality, we can again feed on that cosmic mother’s breast that feeds all life, all life and not just that one half of duality.

58 Realized Insight

LG58

Jesus said:
Happy the person who suffered
and found life

Happy the person who suffered? What should we do with that?

It must also have been a surprisingly strange statement for the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus, shockingly defamatory. Suffering was a punishment from Yahweh on sin, right? Hadn’t Moses been clear about that? In the Deuteronomy Bible Book, he says that Yahweh rules life as a judge. Whoever follows him will be rewarded, whoever does not will be punished. And later Bible books are not unclear that all the calamities that strike the Jewish people time and time again are a justified punishment for disobeying Yahweh. Thus the prophet Ezekiel says on behalf of Yahweh:

I will not spare you nor pity you, but I will repay you for your walk, your abominations will come upon you, and you will know that I am the Lord.

And the prophet Hosea adds, also speaking on behalf of Yahweh:

Samaria has to pay because it has rebelled against his God. They will fall by the sword, their little children will be crushed, their pregnant women will be ripped open.

Jesus leaves this vengeful view and emphatically breaks [with] it. The New Testament tells that he mixes with lepers and other outcasts. With this he shows that nobody is excluded from the charity he calls for. Nobody, really nobody. Every person is a neighbour.

Jesus’ answer to human suffering is not an accusing finger, but mercy without judgment. That is perhaps the most characteristic difference between Jesus and the Old Testament.

This logion fits in with Jesus’ revolutionary new attitude towards suffering, and adds something to it. It shows that the willingness to accept suffering without judgment as part of life, makes you a whole person, “a living” in the symbolism of Gnosis.

In the previous logion we already talked about the illusion of enlightenment. You can form an image of what it is like to be enlightened and then rebuild yourself to fit into that image. Such an illusion about being enlightened can contain the idea that as an enlightened person you will no longer suffer, that you will then be above that. A release from suffering is not the commitment of gnostics. With that thought, with that idealised image of the enlightened, you place yourself outside your own wholeness as a person, outside of life, and, even more so, outside of Source.

Whoever wants to become a whole person, and as a whole person wants to coincide with Source, will have to embrace reality as a whole, with all the trimmings, without reservation.

This is called surrender. Surrender is unconditional.

Because, what is always at stake in the Thomas gospel is wholeness as a person. That wholeness cannot be achieved by amputating oneself in any way whatsoever. Not even by wanting to change reality.

Suffering is an inescapable part of being human. It is the other side of love. For example, we suffer for the loss of a loved one because we love our fellow human beings. Unconditional love can only exist in combination with the unconditional willingness to experience the pain that life sometimes inflicts on us.

Only that surrender will be able to bring man the deepest possible joy of life. If one wants that joy, one must also include suffering. Strangely enough, love and joy of life do not exclude suffering, but on the contrary. The three of them form the depth of reality.

That in order to become a whole person one should embrace reality as a whole is a point of view that often evokes protest. Because it is understood that everything should be okay. That is not at all what is meant here. That you should agree with everything is a mental judgment, not a surrender. Surrender also means letting go of that conception. Only then can you make reality appear to you as it is, in all its infinite diversity, without excluding anything from it.

Then you have found life. Then there is a willingness to be touched in the heart without conditions.

This unconditional willingness to be touched can very well result in a strong inner protest about a certain situation or course of action. You can also experience approval, for example in the form of a happiness experience. Protest and approval of the heart then form the inner guidelines for human action, and not the judgments imposed from outside. Such a protest or a consent from the heart is not a mental judgment. They are the result of emotional openness. Those experiences are the messengers of the soul, see Logion 65.

It’s something you have to deal with, act upon. Those are the assignments that are handed to you by life itself.

In the Christian tradition, suffering has unfortunately fallen under the spell/charm of sin and martyrdom. The suffering of Christ in particular has become dominated by penance.

One can also read the story about the descent of Christ on earth with the willingness to accept suffering in a different way. Not as a historical reality, but as a meaningful myth. Then that story is also about the acceptance of suffering as part of reality. The otherwise so mysterious silence of Jesus in his condemnation to the death on the cross suddenly becomes very meaningful. That silence acquires the meaning of the unconditional surrender to life as a gateway to the resurrection from spiritual death.

71 Realized Insight

LG71

Jesus said:
I will overthrow this house
and nobody will be able to rebuild it.

The house, that is gnostic symbolism for the inner being of man.
What values ​​and norms are there in your house? That of an outer world, that of hearing, that of some powerful institution that thinks it has a lease of truth?
That outer world in you must first be broken down to make room for something else. But that other one was actually already there. It has always been there. But maybe you didn’t know that yet, or you forgot. It was only hidden behind the values ​​and norms of hearing say.
But once you have uncovered that hidden in yourself and have come to know it, it cannot go wrong, because it is the reality in yourself.
And once you have learned to distinguish that reality in yourself from the empty appearance, then the appearance world has lost its hold on you forever.

Releasing the empty appearance changes your consciousness, and no return is possible. That is meant by “and nobody will be able to rebuild it.” No institution, political or religious, will be able to exercise power over your inner house once you have seen the empty appearance for what it is: nothing. This is called realized insight. The insight has become reality, not just an arbitrary opinion or thought.

This meaning can also be found in the text of Mark 14:58:

We have heard him say: “I will demolish that temple made by human hands and build up another one in three days that is not made by human hands.”

Three is the symbol of the wholeness, the wholeness of man who coincides with himself.

A beautiful text about this from the Gospel of Truth, from the Nag Hammadi scriptures:

As long as ignorance
filled them with fear and confusion,
and left them unbalanced, uncertain
and divided,

There were many illusions that
chased them,
and empty delusions,
as if they were sunk in a deep sleep,
the victim of nasty dreams.
(…)

Until the moment that they
who are experiencing all this,
awaken.

Then they see who have experienced all these confusions,
suddenly: nothing.
Because it was nothing,
just delusions.

So they throw ignorance far away,
just as they shook off sleep
they do not consider important,
neither do they consider these visions
as reality.

But they leave them behind
like a nocturnal dream.

Everyone acted as if they were asleep,
during the time that he was ignorant,
and so he gets up again,
as if he wakes up.
Joy for the person who discovers himself
and wakes up!

87 The reality is one and indivisible

LG87

Jesus said:
miserable is the body
that is a slave of the body.
and miserable the soul
who is a slave to the two.

Gnostics is a teaching of redemption. There is the redeemed state and redemption. Gnostics often refer to the unsolved state as slavery.
And what is the redemption? That is not so much a liberation of the redeemed person, even more so: the liberation of being free itself. “We are called to be free,” says Paul in his letter to the Galatians.
And what is the result of being free? That, in that space, we can love our neighbor as ourselves, Paul adds, freedom as a condition for love.

Paul also says in Galatians:

“Christ delivered us so that we might live free; So hold on and don’t be put on a slave yoke again. “

The concept of slavery also plays an important role in Judaism, and then it refers to slavery in Egypt, from which God delivered the Jewish people, the Old Testament says. This narrative, regarded as a historical event, is also frequently symbolically interpreted within Judaism, and then it is also about the slavery of the soul, that is to say, slavery as an image of the redeemed state.

Slavery and freedom, these are important themes, not only for Paul and in Judaism, but also in Gnostics.

The gospel of Philip 11 says it this way:

The powers wanted to mislead people because they saw that they are related to the true good. They took his name from what is good and gave it to the bad to deceive the people with that name and to bind them to the bad.

And oh, how nice they are to people! As a favor, one may accept their false goodness.
They knew what they were doing. They wanted to capture the free man and make them their slaves forever.
This logion is also about slavery.
It is not so difficult to see what could be meant by slavery on the body. Anyone who allows his actions to be determined entirely by his physical urges may have the illusion of being a free person – I do what I feel like doing and I don’t care – but that is in reality a plaything of fancy and desires. And as attractive as that may seem, it is a very unfree state that will certainly not make you happy.
What does the phrase “miserable is the soul that is a slave to the two”? That is certainly not immediately clear.
The key to understanding this is the frequent statement in Thomas that we “must make the two one.” It is therefore about the term “the two”.

In Thomas 22, Jesus says:

When you have made the two one (…)
then you will enter into the kingdom.

And in Logion 106, Jesus says:

If you make the two one,
you will become a son of man.

The Coptic word translated “the two” in Logion 22 and 106 can also be found here in Logion 87. So here too, and as far as I am concerned, we have to translate that with “the two.” And certainly in terms of meaning, we must see the similarity.

Well, making the two one is important. Thomas is about wholeness, because the human being in his wholeness is part of the Source. And the whole belongs to that wholeness.

But how can you as a soul be a slave to “the two”? What is that all about?
In the time of Jesus there is a great influence of Plato’s dualism on religious life. And this logion resists this. It is a sneer at the dualism of body and soul as it was popularized by Plato, in which “the two” are just glorified, and even made the condition for a purely spiritual life.
Plato was a Greek philosopher. He lived in Athens about three hundred years before Christ. His influence on Christianity forming itself in the centuries after Jesus has been immense.
Plato divided reality into two realms of being, matter and spirit. That is “the two” that this logion turns against.
For Plato, all matter is inferior, despicable. He saw the spiritual as the only good, far beyond matter. The body of man belongs to the sphere of being of matter, and the soul of man belongs to the sphere of being of the mind, according to Plato. In this way he introduced a dichotomy between the body of man, which is purely matter, and the soul of man, who is purely spiritual. He came up with ‘the two’ of which this logion says rather viciously that you can be a slave to that.

In his book, De Phaedo, Plato explains how the human body is an obstacle to spiritual life. The truth is purely spiritual in nature, says Plato. Whoever wants to get to know this truth must therefore separate himself from his body. Only those who completely free themselves from everything that has to do with the body can look into the spiritual sphere of eternal and unchanging truth, Plato thought.

He wrote:

A real sage you can recognize a true philosopher by the fact that he strives more than other people to free his soul from fellowship with the body.

Only those who so liberate their souls from their bodies can know the truth, because:

If the soul tries to investigate something together with the body, it is deceived by the body.

And so, Plato thought, we must, in this life, still attached to our despicable body, take an advance on death, because:

Did we not just call “death”: the liberation of the soul from the body?
And did we not claim that the release of the soul is the pursuit of the true sages?
Well, true philosophers practice dying.

For example, Plato formulated the requirement for the body to die as a condition for a spiritual life.
That vision of Plato about the contempt of the body and the exaltedness of the mind has exerted a great influence on the forming Christian tradition. This is all the more remarkable because the Jewish tradition, of which Christianity would nevertheless be a continuation, did not at all know that distinction between matter and spirit, body and soul. The Phaedo of Plato, however, enjoyed great popularity among the early Christian Fathers.
The “true philosopher,” according to Plato, later even became the role model of the Roman Catholic “clergyman” who, following Plato, should live celibate, to this day.
The demand for mortification of the body is also found among the Protestants. Thus Luther, one of the founders of Protestantism, stated in his famous Wittenberg theorems that the notion of one’s own sinfulness is not sufficient to attain God’s grace, because:

The sense of sinfulness is meaningless if it does not bring about the death of the flesh. (Luther, Theorem 3)

And Calvin, the other leader of Protestantism, spoke enthusiastically about “the sinfulness of the flesh.”
And all in imitation, no, not from Jesus, because he will not have talked about it as a Jew, but from Plato.
So this logion says that you can not only be a slave to the body, but also to “the two” of the platonic dualism of body and soul, of matter and spirit.

But this logion also says that you can be addicted to the body? Is that not in accordance with Plato?

No, that’s not it.

This logion talks about slavery, and that is an attitude. Not the body or matter is wrong in itself, but the slavish submission to it. No part of reality is good or evil in itself. Slavery is a form of dealing with reality. Reality itself is beyond that. You are only a slave to the body if you make yourself a slave to it. The body does not do that, you do that yourself.

And so you can also slavishly submit yourself to “the two” of the distinction between body and soul, between matter and spirit, as if only the soul were good. And that is just as much a miserable state because that conviction also places man outside the wholeness of creation, and is thus the cause of the separation from Source.
Plato called the body a dungeon of the soul. This logion says that the belief in the dualism of body and soul is just as much a form of slavery. The redemption that Gnostics seeks is also a redemption of “the two,” of the dualistic image of reality. Because the reality of which we are part is one and indivisible.
The often-proclaimed view that the body would be a hindrance to a spiritual life is just another slave yoke.
The body is not good, nor is it bad. It’s just there. But how do you deal with it? Are you making it your master? Are you making it outcast? Or is it a good friend with whom you sometimes have difficulties, but with whom you want to build a pleasant relationship as a free person?

Being free can only be found in wholeness.

106 Son of a human (Son of man)

LG106

Jesus said:
If you make the two one,
will you become a son of man,

and if you say:
Mountain, go away !
It will go.

A wonderful addition to the previous logion. It shows the other possibility. In the previous logion there was talk of “a son of a whore.” Here it is again confirmed that by making the two one, by allowing your personal nature and your Christ nature to marry within yourself in the inner bridal chamber, you can be born again from that marriage as a son of man.

You are then no longer just the child of your biological parents, but as the king from logion 2 a human child, a free person, connected to your fellow human beings.

You are then no longer trapped in a suggested meaning frame. Then you can give everything your own meaning, from the connection with your true self, and with that also with the Source. Then you can say to the ideology in which you were imprisoned: ‘Go away’. And then it is gone too.

61Self-image and the true self

LG61

61a
Jesus said:
Two will rest on a bed;
one will die,
the other live.

61b
Salome said:
Human, who are you?
You sat down on my couch
and you eat from my table,
as if you were representing someone.

Jesus told her:
I come on behalf of an equal.
I was given of what is my father’s.

Salome said:
I’m your student/pupil.

Jesus said:
That is why I say: Whoever is one will be full of light,
but who is divided,
will be full of darkness.

61a

In the previous logion, Jesus said “Find a place of rest for yourself.” This logion is a continuation of this. What happens when you have found a place of rest for yourself?

At the place of rest the false self will die and the true self will wake up.
The false self, that is the image that you have made of yourself and that you mistakenly think you are. You are not. The true self, that is your true personal identity that will emerge if you dare to let go of your false self.

So that is the opposite way of the previous logion. A Samaritan was on his way there to become a legalistic Jew. “Don’t,” Jesus said there.
If you are already such a person, if for example you have been eaten by “a crowd” who paint you a self-image of you, you have to go back to becoming a human again. And you do that by seeking that inner place of rest and surrendering to it. There your false self dies, and you become a living, a true human being. The place of rest is the grave of the false self. Then there is the resurrection from spiritual death.

Listen to the story of Heinrich, a German child soldier, who is summoned in 1944 to help defend the homeland. When he arrives in the barracks, he not only receives a soldier’s uniform as clothing, but his spirit is also uniformed. His spirit is also clothed in Gnostic terminology, but with ideas. He is told that he is an Aryan, a noble moon. He receives all sorts of enemy images from other people.

Heinrich believes all of that. He now therefore believes that he is an Aryan with a noble task of saving humanity from the Untermenschen. That image of himself as an Aryan-with-noble task is his false self. That self-image is part of the Nazi ideology.
In the same way we all form an image of ourselves during our upbringing. And we think we are that image. When we say “I” we mean that image.
Heinrich shares his false self as an Ariel with all other people who also think they are Arians. And the enemy images also apply to other people in groups.
Such an image of yourself and others makes blind to the own unique self, but also to the self of the other.
To overcome that blindness you need to let go of your false self-image. In the absence of the false self, the true self will present itself “naturally.”
This process requires that you create an inner “place of rest,” a safe place in your consciousness. From there you can learn to see your own constructs about your identity and let them go. See also logion 54 about this.

Seeing your image constructs is the beginning of redemption.

61b

“(Wo)Man (human) who are you?” That the question is remarkable. Is asked by a woman named by her own name, Salome, just like Mary Magdalene in Logion 21. In most Logions, it is “the students” who ask the questions set. “The students” are never mentioned by name, except Peter in logion 114.

“The students” usually perform as a group the rhetorical function of the ignorant who ask the right questions to give Jesus the opportunity to give the enlightening answers. But that’s different here.

It is remarkable first of all that Salome appeals to Jesus with “human.” And then she asks “Who are you?”

To understand that question, we must go back to Heinrich’s example given above. Heinrich thinks he’s an Aryan. He will also introduce himself to his fellow men and they will see him that way, and he will certainly demand that of them. This not only affects himself, but also his fellow human beings are unaware of his true nature as a person. They only see his social mask. They do not see the human being in him. He’s dehumanized.

Salomé addresses Jesus here with “human.” She looks through the social mask of Jesus. She sees him as a “human son”, a person without a mask. But who is he if he doesn’t have a social mask? How can you know someone without a mask, without a social framework?

She also gives a preliminary answer:

It looks like you’re coming on behalf of someone.

It seems to her as if Jesus is not himself, but as a kind of ambassador, he discards himself to speak on behalf of a superior, on behalf of God, for example, like the Old Testament prophets.

But Jesus makes it immediately clear that it is not like that. He says:

I come on behalf of an equal.

An equal! Prophets are not God, they are not God’s equal. They are merely the mouthpiece of the divine. Jesus is not a mouthpiece. He is essentially like the divine.
Salome now understands what Jesus means, and how special that is. She wants to be his student.
But Jesus immediately warns her, just as he did with Thomas in Logion 13.
If she would make a distinction between her and Jesus, if she thought that only Jesus was divine and she was not, she would be divided in that way. Because then she places her divine core outside herself. Then it will be divided into itself. As a result, she will create darkness over her own true self, just like Heinric
By deifying Jesus and making himself unequal to him, she will die in a spiritual sense and become a corpse.
If she relates to herself what she has seen in Jesus, then she too will be one with her true self, her own humanity. Then she too will be a living one. She too is here on earth on behalf of an equal. As a human being, as the unique human being Salome, and not as an unworthy woman, for example, she is one and the same as the Source. Just like Jesus.
And then she takes to heart what Jesus says in Logion 108:

Whoever drinks the words from my mouth will become like me, and I will become like them.

66 The unsung ground of your existence

LG66

Jesus said:
Show me the stone that the builders rejected.
That is the Keystone

This text is a literal quote from Psalm 118: 22. Whatever he means there, we must look for the meaning of this quote here.

What is actually a keystone? The word was usually translated as ‘cornerstone’, but the keystone is perhaps a better translation. It does not matter much which of the two is the correct translation, because this is something that was first rejected and then turned out to be essential.

A keystone is a very nice picture of that. That is the stone in the middle of a stone arch, above a gate or a window. The left half of the arch and the right half of the arch lean, as it were, against the keystone in the middle, and thereby obtain their joint stability. The keystone makes stable what was initially shaky. The keystone also connects the two halves of the arch, thus lifting their duality, as it were. He turns the two into one. Nice image, right?

Why was the cornerstone rejected first? Because he is tapered. It is not a beautiful square stone. So for bricklaying a wall or a pillar, or for the upright sides of a gate or window, it’s no use. Then you put such a tapered stone aside as a bricklayer. When you have almost finished the two halves of a stone arch, you start looking for such a tapered stone. Then the stone that you could not use at first appears to fit exactly with what you intended, even the perfect solution for it.

What is that keystone doing here?

When we are born we land in a story. Our parents, and all sorts of other people with them, tell us the world. And they also give us our own role in the world of the great people.

There is a danger in this, namely that we do not dare, for a smaller or larger part, to be as we are. If we, as a girl, like to climb trees, we are told that this does not suit a girl. So you no longer climb trees. If you play with dolls as a boy, you will be laughed at. So you no longer play with dolls.

The danger is therefore that we will hide part of ourselves in that process of adaptation, because we are so eager to meet the desires of our loved ones. We can then even start to deny that part of ourselves exists.

However, that part of our being that we deny or disallow in our consciousness is not lost. It is a part of ourselves that there will always be, even though it leads a hidden existence. It sticks to you like a shadow. You can do whatever you want to get rid of your shadow, I mean your real shadow as it can be formed by the rays of the sun, or from a street lamp, but we all know that it won’t work.

It is exactly that way with that part of yourself that you deny. It always stays with you, even if you are not aware of it. And it wants to be constantly recognized, it wants to participate in life. And that has consequences.

In every person there is an almost irresistible urge for self-development, for the realization of your personal individuality. That is the task that life places on each of us. That urge can come into serious conflict with your social environment. That can scare us for ourselves.

And so we can learn to suppress the keytone of our being, our natural individuality, our true self, in a convulsive manner. Our tapered individuality does not fit in with the social well-being of our everyday existence. No matter how much we do our best, our personal qualities continue to rise. That is their nature. And it may seem as if there is a hidden evil within ourselves that is constantly encouraging us to disrupt the self-evidence of our social well-being, sometimes even to the anger of those you regard as your loved ones.

For example, a boy may have been put in the cradle to become a scientist. It is curious and wants to investigate everything. One day the boy gets a little car from his daddy. He took that from a long journey. The kid is happy with it and within a few minutes he completely demolished the car. And then he gets to hear from his angry dad that he is ungrateful and always breaks things almost immediately. Do you have any idea how much it costs?!

In this way a beautiful talent, the will to know how the world works, is transformed into destructiveness, into something ugly. The boy becomes afraid of the talent of his curiosity. And then it seems as if it is correct to suppress that “ugly” property. That then goes in the shadow of your existence. It is still there, but it is not allowed to participate.

If you fear a part of your own being, it obscures the view of the wholeness of your true self.

To become a whole person again, to rebuild our existence in our true self, a confrontation with the shadow of our existence is inevitable.

The confrontation with our shadow definitely does not mean that we must learn to accept that we have “bad” sides to ourselves, that we should come to terms with our “badness” by first acknowledging and accepting it. Unfortunately, the concept of shadow is often explained in this way. In this way it is simply a continuation of Christian notions about the sinfulness of man, a continuation of old suppression mechanisms.

What does it mean?

How did the shadow arise again? By hiding away parts of our true self. How do we do that? By learning to call them “bad.” We learn to label certain parts of our true self negatively, and that is how the seemingly just repression of those aspects of our true self comes about. So we are not bad, we learn to label certain aspects of ourselves as bad.

We are ashamed of those negative labels of parts of ourselves. Please note: we are ashamed of the negative labels, not the reality of the self. But we can mean, because we have learned that, that we are really so bad. That is why we believe it is good to keep hiding that side of our true self.

If we want to retrieve those hidden parts of ourselves to become a whole person again, then we cannot ignore those negative labels. So we have to confront those negative labels. We have to look for the rejected tapering stone in ourselves. That is often a painful thing. Because we are reminded of the pain that it caused to be punished for something that really belongs to you. The outcome is not that we accept that we are “bad”. If we are really prepared to face these learned negative labels, the result is always (so here it is: always!) That an almost magical transformation is taking place. Your supposed bad side appears to be a very beautiful side of your own being. That is the healing transformation of the confrontation with the shadow.

The sun shines behind the clouds, the saying goes. The same applies: love lives behind our shadow. The keystone that was first rejected, your true self, appears to be your own and unique connection between acting in the world and the foundation of your existence.