2 Second Promise: You will be like a king

LG2

Jesus said:
Let he who searches continue searching
until he finds
and when he finds
he will be shocked
and being shocked
he will wonder
and he shall be king over the All.
And as king he will regain his peace.

Gnostics is not a belief, we said in the explanation of the previous logion. But what then? Gnostics is a way. The Gnostics were called “the people of the road” in their time.
You can also say that the gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic texts are a kind of travel description. The texts tell you, according to the gnostic Valentinus, where you come from and where you will go:

Whoever has gnosis, knows where he came from and where he will go. He knows, as someone who was drunk has become sober again, and, having come to himself, has put his affairs back in order. (Gospel of Truth 16)

In the previous logion you were told that you will not taste death if you find the meaning of the secret words. The Thomas gospel is also a kind of adventure novel about an exciting search for a hidden treasure.
You will only be able to find this treasure if you continue to search diligently and not give up too quickly. Keep looking, this logion says. Also be prepared that you will be shocked when you find it.
Being ‘shocked’ or ‘stunned’ (Greek: ekplèxis) by a story is a traditional, positive appreciation in Greek classical rhetoric of a good argument, for example of a Sofist defending a defendant before a court. Saying to the audience that they will be “shocked” is a way of claiming: listen, this is an argument that will provide, with the help of arguments, an insight that you did not have before, so that you will see that the facts of a case completely different than you originally thought. Moreover, it will be so natural with what you actually already knew that you will be surprised that it only now penetrates you.
That of course also applies to the previous claim in Logion 1 that you will not taste death. You may have thought that eternal life is promised there after physical death, but no, that turned out to be meant differently.
Now it is claimed that you will be like a sovereign prince sitting on your inner throne, ruling over the All, once you have found it. That is not wrong either. What does that mean now?
The inner kingship is a common theme in the Western mystical tradition.
The Roman Catholic Church Father Bishop Chrysostomos (347 – 407), for example, spoke about the “royal quality of the soul, which possesses itself”.
Thérésa van Avila speaks about “the throne in the inner palace”.

It was also a general theme in classical antiquity, that royal quality of the soul. That quality was called with the word autonomy. That comes from the Greek words autos = self and nomos = law. A king used to be a legislator and judge. An autonomous person is therefore a king in the sense that he sets himself the law but also judges himself. A morally autonomous person is his own legislator and his own judge.

Whoever, as said here, will be like a king is therefore someone who judges himself, according to self-imposed laws.

In his book “The ascent of Mount Carmel” the mystic Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591) says:

There is no law for the righteous anymore because he is himself a law.

This autonomy was even seen as an important characteristic of Christians in early Christianity, and not only in Gnosticism! Bishop Chrysostom wrote:

Beloved, we have no power over your faith, and we do not command these things as your lord and master. We are appointed for the preaching of the word, not for power, not for absolute authority. We fulfill the function of advisers in the service of your own interest. The counselor gives his own opinion, and does not force the listener, but leaves this complete freedom of choice to what has been said. The counselor can only be blamed for not saying what was said to be said.

Chrysostom had the misfortune to be a contemporary of Augustine of Hippo, Saint Augustine in the Roman Catholic Church. He saw nothing in this liberty. By Augustine, Chrysostom was banned. Chrysostom died poor and lonely.

There are all kinds of good reasons to believe that the spiritual freedom confessed by Chrysostom was a characteristic of early Christianity, because it was precisely that freedom that offered the opportunity for charity. If we wanted to love our neighbour as ourselves, it requires a will decision. Such a decision can only be taken by a free person.
However, Christianity later modeled itself on Augustine, with man as a sinful being, incapable of any good and inclined to all evil, as an unfree slave to his sinful nature. The Gnostics, the Christian freethinkers, were persecuted as heretics and finally, with the mass murder of the Cathars in the thirteenth century, removed from Western history.
In the Thomas Gospel, the royal quality of the soul, that is, spiritual freedom, is seen as an essential aspect of the Gnostic path. But that freedom is not an end in itself. It is only a condition for something else, for something that really matters, namely the life practice of love.

Love and freedom as an inseparable couple

Because of that royal quality, it is surprising to know what the word Christ originally means. It is a Greek translation of the Hebrew word for “anointed one.” With that word the kings were referred to in the Jewish tradition. They were an “anointed of the Lord.” But that word was also used as an indication of the future Messiah the saviour of the Jewish people. That saviour of the Jewish people was supposed to be a king, so was the expectation, but then a worldly king.
In Gnostics, “the Christ” lives in within a human itself. And that means not only that human are there own saviour, their own Messiah, but also that human are king over themselves.

So you can also read the word Christ nature as “the royal quality of the soul.”

At the time the Thomas Gospel was written, the view that autonomy was the royal quality of the soul was a general theme in classical culture. This autonomy was seen as a natural quality of the human soul. What is Thomas saying here? If we go the way of gnostics, we will learn to connect on that path with that natural, universal human quality of the soul, the Christ nature, or the royal autonomy, the spiritual freedom.

And why would that be? Because then we can freely impose the law of love on ourselves. Just as the personal nature of human and the Christ nature form twins (see the prologue), freedom and love are also regarded as an inseparable couple in Gnosticism.

Love is not obediently following commandments.

Love is the moral touchstone of a free human.

5 See the human!

LG5

Jesus said:
See who is before you
and who was previously hidden from you,
will emerge.
Because nothing is hidden
that won’t show itself
and everything that has disappeared will return.

There is a remarkable passage in the Gospel of Matthew. Two blind men come to Jesus. They ask him if he wants to make them see. Jesus does that, seeing the men again, healed from their blindness. But then Jesus says something strange: “Make sure nobody knows.”

That is very strange.

Suppose these men were physically blind. And suddenly they could see again. Could you hide that? That is not likely.

It is therefore questionable whether this is a physical miracle. In the secret words of gnostics, blindness and the healing of blindness means something completely different.

In the previous logion you were asked to look for the child in yourself. That is the start of the spiritual search that the Thomas Gospel recommends. If you succeed, if you can connect with your inner child, then you can look at the world and your fellow people in a different way.

How is that?

Here you are asked, like a child, to look through all the social labels that we usually put on our fellow human beings, and instead see the human being, the child in the other. See the human! As a human being with people, as a child with children, the kingdom will really be “among you” (Luke 17:21).

The core of that is seeing. If you look judiciously at your fellow man, with judgment as a beam in your eye, you only see your own judgment. But when you have returned to the uncircumcised child within you, you can look without judgment, and only then can you love your fellow man as yourself.

Only then do you see your fellow man.

Then what was previously hidden will return: the original person in the other. See, the kingdom is in the face of the other.

A telling example from life practice is the next true event.

It is the meeting of the Jewish mother and the Palestinian mother who each lost a 12-year-old daughter on the same day. As Jewess and Palestinian, these two women were each other’s enemies first. In each other they only saw the image of the other as an enemy. That judgment was the blinding beam in their eyes. But because of this sad event they recognized something of themselves in the other: the sorrow for the loss of a child. They visited each other and fell into each other’s arms. As human beings with other people, they could comfort one another, even love one another. What had disappeared under the image of the enemy had returned: the human being within himself and the other. They could love their enemy by seeing behind the mask of the enemy the original human, the original face of fellow human beings.

In the Gospels from the New Testament there are various stories about Jesus raising children from the dead. This is not about real children, but about the child in ourselves. The child who appears to be dead appears only to be asleep, it is said. And that is also the way in which Jesus makes people see again. First awaken the child in you again, return to the beginning in you, as told in the previous logion. Then learn to look like a child at everything around you, heal from your blindness. Then everything that was previously hidden will show itself to you again.

Yet the question remains: how do you find that child in yourself? How can I learn to look lovingly at other people?

That starts with being true to yourself, says the following logion.

19 The creative power in humans

LG19

Jesus said:
Blessed was he who was before he was there.
If you become my students and
listen to my words,
the stones will serve you.
Because there are five trees for you in paradise
that remain unchanged, summer and winter,
and whose leaves do not fall off.
Whoever gets to know them will not taste like death.

In the Old Testament, God is called “the eternal.” And only God is ‘the eternal’ there. Isaiah even lets him say:

No one is equal to me.

In Gnostics, “the eternal” is also in a human. That is meant by “it was before it arrived.”

In the traditional Jewish and Christian representation there is an unbridgeable distance between man and God. Man and God are essentially unequal. God is ‘completely different’.

In Gnostics we are directly connected to the source as humans. We come out of it. Just as a ray of light is related to the sun, so too is man related to the Source. We have “the features of the Father.” We are “the heirs of the Father.” These are expressions in Gnostic texts to indicate that we as human beings are related to the Source like a child with its biological parents.
We are one with the Eternal. You can experience that unity in mystical moments. Then it seems as if you exist outside of time. In gnostics, that state of consciousness is called the Christ consciousness, or the Christ nature.
As stated in the explanation of the prologue, according to the gnostic tradition, man has two natures. Man carries within him the nature of Christ that participates in timeless eternity. The Christ nature is the presence of the Source in every person.
The Christ consciousness is timeless. It was there before you were there, that’s how you experience it.
Jesus tells us here that there is a way to reunite the time-bound personal consciousness with the timeless Christ nature if that connection is broken. Then you are a whole person.

“Then these stones will serve you,” says this logion.

The Source is the creative force of reality. Man himself is also creative, because man inherits the creative power of Source. Pharaoh Echnaton said so:
God is the creative force in the heart of man.
And that is why we ourselves can infuse the material creation around us, as a continuation of the eternal creation process. By sanctifying ‘the stones’, the matter, from your connection with the Christ nature within you, even the stones will serve you to create the kingdom on earth. Just as clay is available to the potter, material reality, including your own body, will be of service to you in your personal meaning to your life and thereby to all of creation. If you live and act from your connection with the Christ nature within you, you yourself become an active participant in the never-ending process of creation of the entire reality.

In ancient Egypt, too, there was a belief that visible reality is an emanation from Source. In all visible forms, the Source, God, expresses an aspect of one’s own being. In this way De Bron in de roos expresses the aspect of one’s own beauty. The rose is a face of God. God reveals himself in the beauty of the rose. Anyone who is moved by the beauty of the rose experiences an intimate encounter with the Source of being, with God. The Aramean Our Father says it this way:

Source of Being that I meet in what moves me.

Not only the rose, also a crocodile, a cat, a hippopotamus, and all other animals are a face of God, was found in ancient Egypt. That is why a crocodile is holy, all animals are holy. That is why every fellow person is holy, you are holy yourself. Because every person is a face of God in her or his own way. Precisely in everyone’s unique capacity as individual human beings, each of us is a spark, a ray of light, of the divine, an emanation of the Source.

Charity in this view is not only a moral commandment, it is also the experience of the essential unity that we form together in all diversity.

Five trees

Five was the symbol of fullness at that time. In classical antiquity one speaks of the quintessence, the fifth essence. Earth, water, air, and fire were then considered to be the four elements that made up material creation. The quintessence is the all-pervading essence of these four primal elements. Earth, water, air and fire are expressions, forms, of the one quintessence.

The experience and the insight that all diversity is supported by a comprehensive unity, has many names. Here, that bearing unity is expressed in the image of the everlasting five trees in paradise. Because these trees do not change and the leaves do not fall off. They therefore symbolize the eternal that is also in man.

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.

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.

27 “The world” as a frozen meaning

LG27

Jesus said:
If you are not stuck towards the world,
you will not find the kingdom.
If you do not observe the Sabbath as a Sabbath,
you will never see the father.

As a child we are included in the world of appointments of our parents, teachers, priests and rulers. We get to know the agreements that our educators have made with each other around the world. “That is how the world works,” we think as good children. And with that in mind, we step into the world of agreements around us. In this way we become part of the world of our educators with dedication.

Is it wrong that we insert ourselves into the world of our educators? In some spiritual traditions it is claimed that we must renounce all these agreements about reality, that is to say, to completely distance ourselves from it, because they, as agreements, do not actually exist, they are only an illusion, in the negative sense of that word.

But in gnostics it is different. It is not about leaving the world of agreements and leaving us behind. The goal of gnostics as a spiritual path is to make people free participants in “the world” and with that freedom to co-create the agreements we make with each other about the world. As free people, we can make love a part of life.

To be able to achieve that freedom, we must, however, dare to let go of our belief in the absolute truth of the agreements that have been learned. So we do not let go of the agreements, but the belief in the absolute truth thereof. That is “fasting” compared to “the world.”

By fasting with regard to the world, and thus protecting our inner freedom, we enter an infinite space of meaning. Then we can freely give our meaning to life on earth. It is precisely the fact that we can hold meaningful meaning on earth, nature, our fellow man, ourselves, that is the creative divine power in our heart that Gnostics refers to. Releasing that creative power offers the opportunity to establish the kingdom on earth, if at least our significance is associated with the compassion of our hearts.

But what is unfortunately often the case? If we believe that the learned description of reality is the same as reality itself, if the former meaning is frozen to absolute truth, then we are trapped in our own faith, and therefore we are not connected to the heart. Then we heartily test everything against the agreements. Then the judgments about our fellow human beings are ice cold and unloving.

But when we free ourselves from our belief in the absolute truth of the descriptions in which we grew up, space is created to become co-creators of life on earth, from the connection with love within ourselves. Then our heart will thaw and become sensitive to the relationship between all people at the soul level.

Only then can we make the two one, “the world” and the heart. Then we can even experience that “the Father” – whatever you mean by that at the level of description – is present as a source in our own heart and can also be known there. Then we can become co-creators of the kingdom on earth, where peace and justice are figures of the inexhaustible love that dwells in us.

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.

40 The error has no root in reality

LG40

Jesus said:
A vine was planted outside the father
but because he does not stand strong,
he will be pulled out and destroyed with root.

The previous logion showed compassion for the scribes as human beings, because the scribes alienate themselves from the Source within themselves in their great zeal. Yes, that’s a shame for them.

This logion is about the sciences themselves, and about the evil that they can do. It is about thoughts, dogmas, etc. that start to lead a life of their own independently of reality, and therefore have no roots in reality. They are planted “outside the Father.”

Thoughts about “the Father” who have started to live their own life, so that they have become detached from the original emotion, are the hallmark of fundamentalism. They have the foundation in themselves, and not in “the Father.” That kind of fundamentalism kills the heart, kills love, and therefore needs to be radically uprooted in order to reconnect life, action in the world, with the source of love, “the Father,” which is present in ourselves.

Who is ‘the Father’ here? In Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, the word that is usually translated as “Father” actually means something else. It literally means “Birth giver.” That word is neuter, not masculine or feminine.

You can also translate it as ‘Source of being’. There is a source and all that exists flows from it. Reality flows like a river from a source. That is the image of creation that fits within Gnostics.

We are right here in the middle of the problem of appointment. That Source of Being, so is the Gnostic view, falls outside of every description. The Source is still unformed, the possibility of being that has not yet taken shape, which precedes all forms. So: if we describe reality as a river, flowing from a source, then that is also just a ‘way of speaking’. It is no more than an image. And that image is not reality itself.

The Gospel of Philip (10) says about this:

The names that are used to describe cosmic affairs are often very misleading, because while they derive their meaning from what exists, they focus on what does not exist. Whoever hears “God” does not think of what really exists, but thinks of something that does not exist. So it is with ‘the father’ and ‘the son’ and ‘the holy spirit’ and with ‘life’ and ‘light’ and ‘resurrection’ and ‘church’ and everything else: one does not think about what exists but about what does not exist, unless one has come to know the existing.

So that’s the problem: we try to name the indescribable, and then we start to believe in the words. The story replaces the real thing.

Buddhism has a beautiful expression for this: “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” But the problem is that people are so easily inclined to think that it is really about the finger, and not about the moon. Then church, faith, and spiritual traditions become more important than what they refer to, and thus “the Father,” the source of all life, becomes invisible.

The scribes mentioned in the previous logion did not enter. They stayed outside.

Going inside is here for: looking for the experience within you. Only in experience can one get to know the really existing.

But, in order to be able to go inside, to know the source of being in your experience, all those images must first be released. The absolute truth of all those images must shatter. The images must become images again and not the truth itself. And you will indeed be shocked, as Logion 2 said, if you see how much those beautiful images can actually keep you from Source. And how fundamentalist scribes, who know the images and stories, but exclude the experience, can keep you from that Source by demanding that you believe in their images and stories, as if those images and stories are reality themselves.

Many stories are told about the Source. And that is not at all wrong. Philip says:

The truth was given many names in the world because it is impossible to know without names. However, the truth itself is one. It manifests itself in many forms for the sake of us being taught in love about this one under many names.

The stories that people tell about ‘the fixed’ are just stories, no matter how beautiful. The literal belief in such a story is called “error” in Gnostics. The vine that was planted outside the Source, that is, the belief in the images and stories that replaces the experience, yes, it must be released. Only in the void of not knowing, yes, even of unbelief, can the Source be experienced. And that could sometimes cause a considerable inner storm of images.

45 Keeping up appearances hurt

LG45

Jesus said:
They do not harvest grapes from thorns
and figs not from thistles,
for they bear no fruit.
A good person brings out of his treasure room
the good.
A bad man brings out of his bad treasure room,
who is his thinking,
the evil forth,
and he says evil things.
Because what his thinking is full of
from it he produces evil.

With logion 39 a new chapter started, as it were. It was said there that the Pharisees had received the keys of knowledge, but they had hidden them, both for themselves and for others. And they no longer knew where. The subsequent logions are about how those keys can be found again.

Logion 40 is about naming. That what matters is beyond all images. Nevertheless you need images to come to the unnameable. The mistake that one can make in this is, however, that one starts to believe in the images, instead of looking for what the images refer to. The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. The map is not the landscape. The cookbook is not the meal.

Logion 41 shows what happens to you if you look beyond the images, or if you get stuck in the images: beyond the images, life itself is, the belief in the images kills.

What attitude should you take in order not to get stuck in the images? “Become passers-by,” says Logion 42. In your memory you make the past an image. Do not look back, otherwise you will become a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife.

The almost ineradicable tendency to chain everything into images, and to hold that true, even applies to the students when they listen to Jesus. They want to understand him, to grasp him intellectually, by catching him in an unchanging image, Logion 43 tells us, and they even want Jesus to provide them with that image. Of course Jesus refuses.

Logion 44 goes straight to the core of gnostics. What you are looking for beyond the images, you must first find that in yourself and then you will also be able to experience it around you. That requires an almost radical allegiance to the compassion of your heart. Infidelity of the compassion of your heart, yes, that is the source of all loss.

This logion, 45, summarizes all of that.

It points to the deceptiveness of images. They seem so true, but they just aren’t.

The fruits of the thistle resembles the fruits of a a fig. Whoever wants to pick these sham figs will be hurt by the thorns. Moreover, these sham grapes will not produce wine, wine as a symbol of the spirit.

The fruits of a thistle have some resemblance to a fig. And this sham also has spines that hurt.

You just have to look around to see what is meant here. Fundamentalism, the belief in unchanging images, always leads to a struggle, for example against alleged apostates, or against so-called heretics who are supposed to be burned at the stake. These are the thorns and thistles of the fundamentalist belief in images that really matter.

Whoever seeks the fruits of a doctrine, the real meaning of the images, will harvest real grapes, pick real figs, the fruits of love.

50 A movement and a rest

LG50

Jesus said:
If they ask you: Where are you from?
say then: We have come from the light,
from where the light originated from itself.
It has risen and revealed itself in their image.
If they say: Who are you?
then say: We are his children
and the elect of the living father.
If they ask:
What is the sign of the father who is in you?
then say: It is a movement and a rest.

In the Old Testament tradition, God created the entire cosmos at a single time, namely “in the beginning”. That cosmos has existed entirely by itself since then.

But in classical antiquity, especially in Egypt, there is also another myth of creation. In that other creation story, the world is created new at every moment. Just as the light shines from the sun every day, so in a never-ending process of creation, reality flows from the Source of being. People call that permanent process of becoming reality: an emanation.

Many texts from the Thomas gospel, and especially this logion, can only be well understood against the background of this Egyptian creation story.

In the Old Testament creation story, God first models man out of clay and then blows his breath into that image of clay. This image fits into the Greek dualism of body and soul that has had so much influence on ecclesiastical Christianity. The body is the molded matter, the breath of God is spirit.

A Greek myth also tells how the god Prometheus from clay formed a human in the image of the gods. The goddess Pallas-Athene, the heavenly friend of Prometheus, who watched his work with admiration, blew her breath into the lump of earth and she also gave the human being the ghost.

Both in the Old Testament creation story and in the myth of Prometheus, body and mind belong to two different and completely separate areas of being: matter and spirit.

In the Egyptian creation story, everything comes from that one Source. Everything is a form of Source, including the human body. Body and soul are together, in their unity, a face of the Source.

That is why you could see divinity in everything. A crocodile also comes from the Source, with all the trimmings, so a crocodile is sacred. And a cat, a cow, a tree or whatever. Because in each of these manifestations, the Source expresses an aspect of itself. Man too is a manifestation of Source and therefore sacred in its entirety, including the body.

All nature, the entire cosmos is sacred. Everything in it, every creature with its unique individuality is a face of the Source. Mind you, because that is essential for Gnostics, so it says here that it is the unique individuality of every creature with which it is a face or part of the Source. That partnership is lost when that unique individuality is denied or replaced by an image that does not coincide with that unique individuality. By replacing the unique individuality with an image, a creature becomes profane, alienated, separated from the Source.

Creation as a whole can also be profaned. That desecration can also be restored. The cosmos can be healed again. The gnostic also sees the role of Jesus as the healer of the cosmos with everything in it. Jesus cleanses the All and brings it back to the Father and Mother, as expressed in the Hymn to Jesus from the Gospel of Truth:

This is how the Word of the Father goes out in the All.
as the fruit of his heart and the expression of his will.
It carries the All, it prefers it
and it also receives the traits of the All.
It cleanses it and brings it back to the Father
and to the Mother:
Jesus, of infinite sweetness!

Whoever wants to become part of this once again sanctified cosmos must also cleanse himself, ‘sanctify’. Or even more correct: who sanctifies himself, sanctifies the entire cosmos. And remember that the word “holy” is related to the word “whole.” So “sanctifying oneself” means: to make oneself whole, to make one, and therefore also: to unite body and soul, and to become creatively a partaker of the Source again.

The Gnostic Philip (108) puts it this way:

The holy man is completely holy, including his body. After all, when he has received the bread, he makes it holy. Likewise, he cleanses the chalice and everything else that he has received. Why then should he not cleanse the body?

So man has appeared from the light, says this logion. And that light revealed itself in their image. Exactly, the whole person, the whole person, and every person, is an image of the Source. Whoever restores the unity within himself is for himself the revelation of the Source, therefore one with the One, and therefore also knows the One. Whoever knows himself, in his original unique individuality, knows the All.

And in himself the person will be able to experience that he is a movement and a rest. He is a rest with his timeless Christ nature, the Source in himself. He is a movement with his personal time-placed human nature. (See also the explanation of the prologue about the twins.)

And just like Source, man himself is the permanent creator of his own world, the movement. But there is also “a place of rest” in people. The gospel of Truth says about this:

Everyone will talk about where he came from and he will hurry to return there. He received his true nature from that. From that place you can derive your true nature again, by tasting from that place and receiving food and growth from it.

And his own place of rest is his Fullness.

All emanations of the Father are therefore a Fullness and all his emanations have their root in him that made them all grow in themselves. He has given them their destiny. That is why they have each been revealed individually, so that they may know Him through their own being.

51 The new earth is already there

LG51

His students asked him:
When will the dead find rest
and when will the new earth come?

He told them:
What you expect has already come,
but you don’t recognize it.

The first logion of the Thomas gospel started like this:

Everyone who understands these words
death will not taste.

Logion 18 and 19 already provided an explanation of that promise. Logion 18 says:

Fortunately he who is standing in the beginning
He will know the end
and do not taste death.

Logion 19 perhaps makes it even more puzzling than it already was:

Fortunately he who was before he was there.
So there is the beginning, that beginning was apparently there before you existed and if you stand in it you will not taste death.

Logion 2 adds that you will then find peace.
Nice promises, for sure. What does it mean? The students ask again. Apparently it is still not clear to them.
And they add something to the question about the peace of the dead:

When will the new earth come?

So now it is no longer just about the personal redemption of death, but also about a new earth. That is a big step further.
For your personal salvation you should look for something within yourself that already existed before you were born.
The same applies to the entire earth! The new earth that Isaiah predicted is already there. Isaiah said (65:17):

See, I create a new heaven and a new earth.

Isaiah is entirely focused on the future. That new heaven and earth are yet to come, in the future. They will one day be created by Yahweh. Not by man, therefore, but by Yahweh.
Jesus – radically – reverses that. That so-called new earth is already there, has always been there. The students do not recognize it. They also do not understand what was said in the previous logion that the unique and sacred uniqueness of each individual and of the All can be obscured behind the belief in all kinds of images that do not correspond to that.
That new earth, which is not new at all, can only be recognized in the here and now by releasing all those images.

LG51^BM CON~LG1/2/18/19

54 The empty consciousness and the inner observer

LG54

Jesus said:
Happy are the poor,
for you belong to the kingdom of heaven.

The statement “Happy are the poor” here of course concerns ‘the poor in spirit’, also mentioned in the New Testament. Those are people without illusion, or at least people who are not trapped in an illusion.

So that has nothing to do with material poverty.

We have already mentioned two forms of consciousness. In personal consciousness we experience ourselves as an individual between birth and death, with everything that goes with it. There is also another state of consciousness in which we experience our connection with all that is. That other state of consciousness is called the Christ consciousness in Gnostics, and in contemporary language the transpersonal consciousness. In that state of consciousness there is no attachment at all to what appears to consciousness.

We always have something of that open consciousness, even in everyday life. And that reveals itself in the fact that we can perceive ourselves, even our emotions.

Usually this will not be experienced as special, but it is still very remarkable that we can be angry and perceive that we are angry, that we can be happy and perceive that we are happy, and so on. There appears to be an inner observer within us who can perceive the state of our mind without being a participant in it, without being attached to it and, above all, without being identified with it.

It is already quite a step on the spiritual path when you realize that there is such a thing as an observer in you. Spiritual growth consists primarily of becoming more aware of the observer in you. You then acquire the ability to perceive yourself from inner freedom.

Sometimes you can immerse yourself fully in what you are doing in the here and now. You can also observe yourself in the position of the inner observer, especially the state of your mind.

The inner observer, also called the inner witness, can see all the movements of your mind without judgment, without merging into it and without fighting it. The inner observer can see that you are angry, without being angry yourself, or perceive that you are happy without being happy yourself. The observer sees that there is anger or happiness, but is completely free from it. That is why it is said that the consciousness of the inner observer is empty or with the symbol word in this logion: poor, poor in spirit. The inner observer is like a mirror that merely reflects, without itself being the reflected reality.

That state of consciousness is completely detached and is called empty or poor, but it is not without its own qualities. You can summarize those qualities of that consciousness under: free, trust, being and goodness.

Free

The inner observer is completely free. It is free, or, with a usual term, ‘freedom of mind’. The inner observer is the inner free. Free is the essence of the inner observer.

Trust

Confidence as a characteristic of the inner observer is the inner condition of a calm and unwavering certainty. It is not a dogmatic certainty, which consists of attachment to outer truths, but more a form of fearlessness, regardless of all circumstances. Trust knows no fear. The inner observer can still detect fear, or any other emotion, in your mind, but is not a participant in it yourself. Perhaps unlike what you would expect, fearless trust even allows you to make any emotional condition happen to you uncensored and perceive in yourself, including fear, but without being attached to it yourself. The inner observer himself is fearless, free from any movement of mind.

That free of the inner observer of his own movements of mind makes one free to choose whether or not to act accordingly. People are not dragged unintentionally by all sorts of emotions, but can freely decide, considering the emotional state of your mind, to sometimes and sometimes not to connect with such an emotion and to act accordingly.

To be

The being aspect is a kind of solid ground under your feet. It is a very characteristic experience that can make you say “I am”. There is the experience of pure and crystal clear ‘being’.

It is like walking on water. That is, the ground under your feet is not hard and immovable, but flowing, creating, happening – a stream of being. And it is precisely that mobility that is, very paradoxically, the solid ground under your feet. Because there is nothing more that you can go under. Logion 50 already says it is a movement and a rest. Life is a movement, like running water, like a rippling and sometimes even turbulent sea, but the calm security of the inner observer does not perish there, how intense the current, no matter how fierce the waves.

Christ, as a symbol of this inner observer, the Christ nature in a human, walks on the water, Matthew tells. Peter, the symbol of a human who first found apparent safety in ‘the boat’, as a symbol of dogmatic security, gets out of the boat and threatens to drown. But the Christ in himself knows how to save him.

Goodness

This is the experience of fundamental goodness. In this logion it is called “being happy,” often translated into Christian texts with “being blessed.”

That goodness is not a moral judgment about the events in reality, but a characteristic of the inner observer. The inner observer is no longer attached to what is observed, but it is precisely that detachment that makes the combative and unconditional submission to reality in the here and now possible.

Precisely because the inner observer is detached, it allows you to be touched conditionally and in total emotional openness in your heart by the events in the world.

So there is a remarkable duality: on the one hand the detached inner observer is in a state of untouchable goodness, on the other hand the inner observer can then censurelessly detect how the circumstances of life can touch the heart, and base the actions in the world on it .

In fact, the detachment of the inner observer can allow you to experience the pain and joy of your fellow creatures as your own pain and joy, without threatening or arousing desire. And you could also call that love.

Here, in this logion, the goodness, that happiness aspect, that is, the salvation of the inner observer, is emphasized. And that is not without significance.

The sense of goodness is an important indicator of unity with the Source. Even though the first three fundamental experiences of freedom, trust and being may be missing, the sense of goodness can also manifest itself. We also experience that sense of goodness when we are accidentally connected to the Source, when we walk in nature or listen to music. So it is extremely important to learn to recognize that feeling and to dare to trust it as a message from your soul that lets you know that this is what life is all about, what really matters to you.

That very special sense of goodness will usually present itself when you do something, when you are doing something.

It is a cosmic pat on the back
that tells you
that it’s good
you are who you are
and
[this] is what you have to do here on earth right now.

With that experience of goodness you are in the kingdom, in the here and now.

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.

69 The willingness to be touched in your soul

LG69

69a
Jesus said:
Blessed are those who are touched in their souls.
Truly, they are the ones who got to know the father.

69b
Blessed are the hungry,
for the belly of those who desire
will be saturated.

Charity [relativeslove, #lit_trans], as is of course known, is a core theme of Christianity. But we know that through the ecclesiastical tradition mainly as a commandment, as a “Thou shalt”, or as a call to imitate. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. Marvellous acts of mercy have been performed following Jesus’ call for charity. And whoever makes the decision to put love into practice, following Jesus, even if that is only an intention, an intention, will discover by doing that there is true love in her or him, as a perhaps unexpected Inner power. That is the way of practical action.

Here, in this logion, it is emphasised that love is not just a moral commandment, no matter how valuable it is to imitate, but that love is at the root of reality. Love exists.

In Gnostics, we have two natures as human beings, personal nature and Christ nature – see the prologue to the Thomas gospel. Personal nature is our appearance in time, our temporary existence between birth and death. If our consciousness is only connected to personal nature, we can experience ourselves as separate from our fellow human beings. I am me and you are you.

He who connects his consciousness with his timeless core, called Christ nature in Gnostics, connects his self-awareness with all reality, with the Source of all being. Then, as said here, you got to know the father. Then there is also the self-evident sense of unity with all that is. Then the separation is lifted. Then charity is a matter of course, because then we will be touched in our soul by everything that happens around us. Then the pain and joy of our fellow man and other creatures is also our own pain and joy. You are me in a different form.

The reverse also applies: if we are willing to be touched in our soul by what is happening around us, then that willingness will bring us to the Source within ourselves. Because if we want to open ourselves emotionally to what is happening around us, that emotional openness will also make us feel an inner desire, a hunger as said here, in ourselves.

In every person lives an inner desire, a hunger, for wholeness, for the connection with the Source. That is a natural desire. We are born with it. If we close ourselves emotionally to the events around us, then we will also not be able to perceive that inner desire.

You cannot selectively close your emotional experiences. You can not only have fun experiences and close yourself to all others. Even if you only want to exclude one emotional experience, you can only do that by locking the entire gate of your soul. This is how the armored personality is created.

If we want to open ourselves emotionally, then that is only possible by allowing all experiences, without any exception, without censorship.

If we are prepared to do so, if we also want to and dare to experience the painful aspects of human existence, without arming ourselves against it with all kinds of judgments, we thereby also open the door of our soul to the experience of love.

A beautiful symbol of this is Mother Mary depicted with empty hands, and the palms of her hands facing forward. That is the moving symbol of the unconditional and unquestioning surrender to reality in its total fullness.

Then there is sympathy with our fellow creatures, in the literal sense of that word: “feeling together,” “sympathy.” (An image of Maria with empty hands can be found here.)

There is then not only sympathy with other people. If we dare to open our mind unconditionally, as in the image of Mother Mary, we will also be able to experience our own inner desire, the hunger for wholeness, in ourselves. That desire will lead us to the Christ nature within ourselves in oneness with the Source. That desire then becomes our inner spiritual guide.

Only in emotional openness can the Christ be born in you. That emotional openness is the mother of the Christ in you. Mother Mary is called ‘mother of sorrows’ for a reason. In her as a symbol, suffering has become legitimate as an inseparable part of life, in addition to the joy of life, also on the spiritual path of Gnostics.

So the gnostic does not promise you a release from suffering. On the contrary, to be able to experience the unity with the Source, this requires unconditional surrender of life in all its facets, represented in the open hands of mother Maria.

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!

75 The loners and the bridal room

LG75

Jesus said:
Many are at the door,
but it’s the loners
who will enter the bridal room.

This logion is an addition to the previous one, about “the many” who, although standing around the Source, keep their distance. This logion emphasizes ‘the loners’.

We have already seen that the word singling is an almost literal translation of the Latin word individuum, of in = not, and dividere = divide. An individual is therefore not shared, a whole person, a loner.

Not “the many” will enter the bridal room and connect with the Source there, only the whole people, the heals, the loners, the person as an individual. A whole person is originally the meaning of a holy person, a saint. In English we see that in the relationship between “whole” and “holy”. A “saint” is a whole person. Your individuality is your holiness.

Very special and characteristic of the Thomas Gospel is that you must first be a loner before you can enter the bridal room. You must first become an individual, a whole person, before you can coincide with the Source.

Here an important distinction is made with some other spiritual traditions that are strongly focused on selflessness. Egoism plays no role in gnostics. It is not even there as a concept.

For two reasons, Gnostics emphasizes the realization of your personal individuality.

With your true self you are part of the Source, you are a participant in what is, you exist.

Moreover, the realization of this in the practice of life is everyone’s personal destiny, which you fulfill by growing with your individual talents.

There is a beautiful Jewish anecdote about this. He is about Moos who dies and comes to God to be admitted to heaven.

God asks him curiously: “What have you done during your life on earth?”

Moos replies: “Lord, I have studied all sacred texts and done exactly what it says that one must do.”

“Really?” Says God, and his face is somewhat clouded. ‘That was all?’

“Oh no,” says Moos, “I’ve been at the feet of the most important rabbis, and if I couldn’t find what I needed to do in the scriptures, I asked them. I have always done exactly what they ordered me to do. “

Moos looks up proudly at God, expecting to get a prominent place in heaven, very close to God.

But God doesn’t look happy at all.

“You know,” he says thoughtfully to Moos, “I have thought for centuries about the person you were supposed to become and who would be needed at the place and time where you would be born. I have given you an inner knowing of your personal destiny. I have provided you with rich talents to realize that destination. I have filled your heart with a desire to do what you were meant to do. And you have not listened to your heart? You didn’t become Moos? What a shame that you missed your destination. “

And God adds, after being silent for a while: “You know, I am Love, and I cannot help but allow you to enter heaven, for I too must follow my destiny as God. Everyone is always welcome here. That you are welcome is heaven. So there is the gate of heaven. But sometimes, when we look at each other, you will see the regret in my eyes that you have not become the way I intended. And the pain in your heart that you will feel is perhaps what you people call hell. “

83 The unreality of the images

LG83

Jesus said:
People know the images,
but the light that is in them,
remains hidden in the image of the light of the father.
He will be unlocked,
but his image will merge with his light.

This is a warning. You may have believed in an image of God and you thought your image was God himself. That image is only an image; every image is a pretty good-looking counterfeit of something that actually exists.

If you believe in an image as if that image is the real existing self, then you put the real existing in the dark.

If you believe in ‘an image of the light of the father’, then, oh irony, the really existing light will be hidden by the belief in its image. And the light in you will also not be able to shine.

Well, that you can see. As was spoken of earlier.

The warning here is that you ‘must’ be prepared for a painful disappointment on the spiritual path of gnostics. All those beautiful images and stories to which you may have been so attached, in which you sincerely believed, will lose their reality content along the way. And that is the intention. The images and stories will fade in the light of reality, in your own surrender to the real thing.

In another way, those images and stories also regain a new meaning. They do not exist by themselves, but they have become a sign, a reference to something else that can be known in experience. And that is their right to exist, nothing more. But that makes sense. The map is not the journey, but a means to prepare for it. The recipe is not the meal, but teaches you what to do to reach your goal.

The gospel of Philip (67) says it this way:

The truth did not come naked into the world but dressed in symbols and images. The world cannot receive the truth in any other way.

There is rebirth and an image of rebirth. It is definitely necessary that one is born again by the image. What is the resurrection and its image? You need to stand up through the image. What is the bridal room and its image? It is necessary that one enters into the truth through the image – that is the restoration.

84 Joy: the profit of losing the images

LG84

Jesus said:
When you see your reflection,
do you take delight in that.
But if you see your original face
that existed before you were there,
and that neither dies nor arises,
how much joy will you experience!

This is a further elaboration of logion 83. There it was about the loss of images. Here it is about the profit that that can yield.

Anyone who believes in images, as described in the previous logion, places the core of his own existence outside himself, namely in those apparently independent images.

Whoever realizes what those images refer to as a sign, will discover that “the light of the father” from the previous logion is present in himself, that all those images are an image of your own core of beings, here called your original face.

Yes, there is something in the person that is independent of time. In the prologue to the Thomas gospel, we called it the Christ nature.

The benefit of losing the images is the joy of discovering the timeless Christ nature as truly existing in yourself.

The Gospel of Philippis says it this way:

The Lord said: “Fortunately the one who already existed before he became. Because he who exists has become and will be. “(57)

No one can see anything of the fixed things without becoming the same as those things. It is not like the man in the world who sees the sun without being the sun and who sees the sky and the earth and everything else without being those things. The truth is different: you saw something of that place and you became like them; you saw the Spirit and you became the Spirit; you saw Christ and you became Christ; you saw the Father and you will become a father. That is why you see everything here and not yourself, but there you see yourself. And what you see, you will become. (44)

Just like the Gnostics from Paul, he is extremely scrupulous about the externalities of religions – ceremonies, holy days, rules and regulations. Like the Gnostics, he says that true Christians become like Christ; “It is given to them to behold the glory of the Lord with an unconcealed face and to be recreated into ever more glorious likeness to him.” (Freke & Gandy p. 206)

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.

91 See what is, instead of a belief

LG91

They said to him:
Tell us who you are,
so we can believe in you.
He told them:
You interpret the signs in the heavens and those of the earth,
but you have not recognized him who is before you
And this moment
you don’t know how to interpret that?

Ah, ah, the students want a faith. They want Jesus to tell them what they should believe about him. They may want to make Jesus a god, unlike themselves, far above themselves, so that they might worship him appropriately.

But then they would place that which is present in themselves outside of themselves, namely in the image that they so much want to make of Jesus.

Jesus is not about faith. Faith makes blind all too easily. Jesus wants to correct that blindness; wants to make the students see, and especially of themselves in their true nature.

Jesus does not want them to make an image of him and to believe in that image and thereby blind themselves to themselves. He wants them to recognize something in him that is also present in themselves, so that they can also say to Jesus: “You are me in a different form.”

If the students don’t want to do that? See the following logion.

97 The empty jar

LG97

Jesus said:
The kingdom of the father is like a certain woman,
who carried a jug on her back, full of flour.
And so, going her way, still far from home, an ear broke from the jar,
and the flour flowed behind her on the road.
She did not notice it and was not aware of any harm.
When she got home, she put the jug down and found it empty.

This logion is of great beauty again. It is a beautiful image of a woman who is on her way, spiritually understood. In Gnostics, women are often the symbol of the human soul, of inner knowing.

This woman carries on her back a jug full of images, dogmas, teachings and everything else. It is a heavy burden, and not exactly the light yoke of Thomas 90.

She was still far from home, says this logion, so she was still separate from herself and from the Source.

Along the way on her spiritual path something happens. The ear of the jar breaks off. The hold that the images, the dogmas and the teachings had on her weakened, and without her realizing it she let go.

And then there comes a moment when she suddenly experiences that she coincides with herself. She has come home, one with the Source. And her jar is empty. So she no longer needs to carry it with her. She is free.

101 Let go of your parents

LG101

Jesus said:
Who does not hate his father and her mother, like me,
can’t become a student of mine.
And whoever does not love his father and her mother, like me,
can’t become a student of mine.
Because my mother gave birth to me,
but my true mother gave birth to me.

 This logion is a continuation of logion 55. It also says:

Who doesn’t hate father and mother,
can’t become a student of mine

Here is added:

And whoever does not love his father and mother, like me,
can’t become a student of mine.

In the explanation for logion 55 it became clear that we can understand the word ‘hate’ as ‘let go’. And then it becomes understandable that you can let go of your parents and love them at the same time. That is what it was all about in Logion 55. So we can also understand that here.

Then that does not explain the meaning of the final sentences of this login:

Because my mother gave birth to me,
but my true mother gave birth to me.

That clearly goes a step further. For the meaning of that we must discover who or what is meant by the two mothers.

It is almost obvious to see the first mother as the biological mother, because he “gave birth to Jesus for death.” Death is a symbol word in Gnostics. That will therefore not be the intention.

This is about the image of ‘the mother’ that you can carry within yourself, but also the image of ‘the father’.

Becoming a free person, a Christ in the Gnostic language, means not only that you detach yourself from your parents in the practice of your life, but that you also have to let go of your internalized parents, the internalized images of your parents. Only then can you really build a free relationship, not only with your parents, but also with yourself.

Then a different kind of parenthood can arise within yourself. In a way, you become your own father and mother. That inner parenting of yourself is no longer connected with your real parents, but with something bigger in yourself, the royal autonomy that was spoken about in Thomas 2, the Christ in you. From that mature, free self-determination you can once again incorporate your actual parents into your feelings of love for your fellow man.

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.

113 The kingdom is spread over the earth

LG113

His disciples said to him:
When will the kingdom come?

Jesus said:
The kingdom does not come by expecting it.
You can’t say, “It’s here,” or “It’s there.”
No, the kingdom is spread over the earth
but they don’t see it.

Jesus is very clear here. Salvation, in whatever form, can be found in the here and now, here on earth. Here you find your destiny as a person, here you share life with your fellow men, this is the place for love.

By raising your eyes to the sky, or looking back to a heavenly past, or by setting your hope for a blissful end time, far beyond the present earthly existence, you become blind to the here and now.

It can be different.

The Jewish and Palestinian mothers in the explanation to Logion 5 saw the kingdom in the other, which they first experienced in their blindness as an enemy.

Mr. Pastor in the explanation to Logion 6 saw the kingdom in himself when he put his inner refusal above the doctrine.

Jorge Semprún and the German guard from the explanation to Logion 51 saw the kingdom in a frosted tree when they both deviated from the path and stopped at a frosted tree. How symbolic is that? In order to see the kingdom, to be healed of your blindness, you must apparently first deviate from the path and stand still.

They are the inhabitants of the kingdom.