The Spiral Path

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Archive for the category “Davies (Stevan)”

17 Aug 2012

RS24: Some Thoughts on Healing From Jesus

Lilies of the Field - colour - June 2013_0003

“. . . [Jesus] said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners'” (Mark 2:17).  About the illustration: This was one of the first posts I wanted to illustrate, but at the time I had no digital camera and few art supplies on hand. I had to make due with a sheet of oversized paper and a few coloured markers – along with my own artistic need. Sometimes God asks us to help with a healing task even though we have no formal academic training and no technical equipment. It’s amazing what we can do by following our intuition, listening to God’s wise counsel, and using the few tools we have on hand. Illustration credit JAT 2013.

A:  I’ve read some interesting theories over the years to explain the healing miracles in the Gospels.  Some of these theories fall under the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” umbrella.  There’s the theory that the miracles stories are reports of true supernatural events — proof of Jesus’ divinity and sovereignty over the powers of evil.  (This theory appeals to devout evangelical Christians.) On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the theory that the healing miracles should not be understood as fact but as pure metaphor — as literary window-dressing to enhance the credibility of the main character, you.  (This theory appeals to liberal and progressive Christians, who often don’t believe in miracles.)

And then there’s the bizarre group of theories that attempts to “explain” your healing powers through analogy to altered states of consciousness as they’re understood today by some anthropologists and psychologists.  Stevan Davies’s book Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Continuum, 1995) is a particularly egregious example of this kind of thinking.  (At the bottom of this post I’ve pasted in a book review I wrote about Davies’s book for an Historical Jesus course, a review which explains why I’m not fond of Davies’s thesis.  This is the same Stevan Davies whose translation of the Gospel of Thomas we’ve been using in the Jesus Redux series of posts.)

So whatcha say, big guy?  Were you wandering around the Galilee as a Jewish magician with serious DSM-IV issues, a wannabe charismatic prophet suffering from a dissociative disorder, a delusional shaman who had a honkin’ big need for an olanzapine prescription?  Is this who you really were?

J (chuckling):  These guys make me sound like a creepy bad guy from the Criminal Minds series.

A:  Yeah, like that two-part episode where James Van Der Beek plays an UnSub who has a multiple personality disorder (Season Two, “The Big Game” and “Revelations.”)  One of his “personalities” (the really dangerous one) is an apocalyptic Christian prophet.

J:  That’s a good example.  A person suffering from a dissociative disorder is not a well person and needs intensive medical care from a team of trained professionals.  To suggest that it’s a good idea for a religious teacher or shaman to intentionally induce a state of altered consciousness (“spirit possession”) or a permanent state of dissociation in his/her followers is not only morally reprehensible but is also questionable from a legal point of view.

A:  So you didn’t try to teach your followers how to have spontaneous dissociative experiences of being possessed by Spirit.

J (shaking his head):  No.  I did not.  I taught my followers that the key to knowing God is to first know yourself.  This is, by definition, the very opposite of dissociative experiences.

A:  What about Paul?  Did Paul encourage these states of “spirit possession”?

J:  Absolutely.  He not only encouraged these states, but promoted them as one of the major “drawing cards” of his new religion — buy my Saviour and as an added bonus you’ll receive a free gift from Spirit!  Discover how with my easy salvation you can receive, at no additional charge, a special gift of the utterance of wisdom or the utterance of knowledge or faith or gifts of healing or working of miracles or prophecy or discernment of spirits or various kinds of tongues or the gift of interpretation of tongues (one gift per customer, choice made by Spirit at time of purchase, no substitutions, all gifts subject to laws of Divine Cause & Effect, this is a time-limited offer, so call one of our helpful customer service agents now!).

A:  It never ceases to amaze me how rarely Paul talks about healing in his letters.  Why doesn’t he talk about medical healing — the kind of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-touch-your-neighbour kind of healing you engaged in?  Why doesn’t he care?

J:  He wasn’t interested in helping people find healing.  He had different concerns — occult concerns related to power and order and perfectionism, as we’ve discussed.  As far as Paul was concerned, sick people were defective.  They’d already proven their imperfection and undesirability in the kingdom of God.  Corrupt mortal flesh — sarx in Greek — was an ongoing source of shame and judgment, so who cared?  Paul’s focus was the mind and the soul, which were infinitely superior to mere flesh, in his view.  To choose to heal flesh, as I did, by starting with the flesh — with the actual physical body instead of the pure Platonic Mind — was an incomprehensible paradigm to Paul.  In other words, he thought basic medical science made no sense and was a complete waste of time and divine energy.

A:  But that’s what you actually did.  You started with the actual physical body, not the pure mind or soul.  You helped heal people’s bodies so they could find the courage and strength to build their own relationships with God.

J:  Early on in my journey as a prastising mystic — not as a dissociated prophet, but as a mentally healthy mystic and channeller — my guardian angel (my daemon in the Greek — not to be confused with the English word “demon”) gave me an excellent analogy.  She said this:

“The flowers in the field that you admire, that stop your heart with wonder and beauty, are not like dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus in the field.  You cannot treat them in the ways you’ve been taught.  You must think of the flowers in the field as the emotions of God the Mother and God the Father — their memories, their feelings, their stories from times far more ancient than you or any other human being can remember.

The journey through this field of flowers cannot be like the Labours of Heracles if you want to feel the wonder of knowing God.  You must tread softly.  You must not trample in your haste to get to the other side.  You must listen with all your heart and all your mind and all your body and all your soul to the quiet whispers of the lilies.

Each person you meet is like a lily of the field.  The roots and the leaves of the lily bear the weight of the colourful blossom, but without the unseen roots and the hard-working leaves, there would be no chance for the lily to produce its harvest.

Treat the body of all you meet in the same way you would treat God’s lilies.  Respect all parts of the plant, including the most humble and least attractive parts.  Even the smallest root has a part to play.  Do not despise the leaves for the sake of the flower’s beauty.  The flower fades quickly, but the strongly rooted plant produces blossoms again if it is properly cared for.

Care first for the roots and the humble green plant, and, with time and gentle handling, it will reward you.”

This is why I rejected all religious models about the nature of the human body, and turned to a scientific model with the help of my guardian angels and God.  There was a lot I didn’t understand about the inner workings of the human body, but one thing seemed clear to me:

If God made these bodies for us, they must be worth looking after.

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Book Review
STEVAN L. DAVIES.   JESUS THE HEALER: POSSESSION, TRANCE, AND THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY.  NEW YORK: CONTINUUM, 1995.  ISBN 0-8264-0794-3

Review by Jennifer Thomas    November 1, 2007

Breathe deeply before you begin to read Stevan Davies book Jesus the Healer.  There’s no index, no table of contents, no glossary, no illustrations or diagrams, not even an introduction to orient you in this book, so if you lose the thread of Davies’s argument, you have to retrace your steps.  This isn’t a book where you can jump in at any point and quickly grasp the author’s argument.  Davies’s thesis is quite complex, and he keeps adding to it chapter by chapter as he attempts (in his own words) to “bring closer together the two continents of Jesus research: historical scholarship and theological reflection” (p.18).  On the plus side, the book is a mere 216 pages long, including its 7-page bibliography.

One puzzling aspect of this 1995 book is the lack of biographical information about the author.  We’re told nothing about his education or background.  Is he a professional journalist or is he a member of academia?  We don’t know.  All we know is that he’s the author of three other books.  A search of my own bookshelves produced a copy of The Gospel of Thomas (2002), translated and annotated by Stevan Davies, Professor of Religious Studies at College Misericordia in Pennsylvania.  An internet search yielded the same information.  So we can rest assured that he deserves our attention.

Davies begins his book with a brief overview of research into the historical Jesus over the last hundred years.  Rejecting the prevailing view of Jesus as some form of teacher, Davies tackles the less well examined paradigm of Jesus as healer.  His approach is secular, not theological.  For him, New Testament reports of supernatural occurrences are a goldmine of anthropological and psychological data that other researchers have wrongly ignored.  He sets out to show us how we might reexamine the passages about exorcisms, healings, and the Son of God, and reinterpret them in light of 20th century theories about “spirit-possession” and “demon-possession.”

Chapter 2 summarizes the anthropological and psychological models Davies relies on to categorize possession: the state wherein a person’s normal persona is believed to be displaced by a “possessing” spirit or demon.  Davies is very clear that it’s the belief that’s important.  The belief makes it somehow “real” to the people experiencing it.  And this in turn makes it an “historical event.”  In other words, researchers of the historical Jesus can use biblical passages about exorcism without fear that they’re endorsing the paranormal.  This part of Davies’s thesis may prove to have more lasting value to the field than some of his other conclusions.

In Chapter 3, Davies briefly examines descriptions of 1st century Jewish prophets in Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and the New Testament.  From here, he leads into the baptism of Jesus, which he asserts is the correct starting place for understanding Jesus.  Davies uses spirit-possession theory to suggest that John’s baptism triggered a spontaneous dissociative experience in Jesus that led Jesus (and others) to believe he was possessed by the spirit of God.

Building on this novel approach, Davies looks at questions about Jesus’ healings (Chapter 5); demon possession (Chapter 6); Jesus’ exorcisms (Chapter 7); and Jesus and his associates (Chapter 8).  But all of these chapters are really a prelude to Chapters 9 and 10, where Davies tells us that Jesus induced in his followers an altered state of consciousness (ASC) called the “kingdom of God.”  The paradoxical nature of some of Jesus’ parables and sayings is proof to Davies that Jesus was using a healing method akin to the hypnotherapy techniques of American psychotherapist Milton Erickson.

In the last section of the book (Chapters 11 to 13), Davies, not content with a basic model for how Jesus might have healed others, tries to expand his thesis to explain to modern readers why the Johannine-style sayings attributed to Jesus should be considered just as historically authentic as synoptic-style sayings; why we should view early Christianity as a “missionary spirit-possession cult”; and why we must conclude that both Paul and John used “inductive discourse” (that is, intentionally confusing speech) to generate a spontaneous experience of spirit-possession in potential converts.

By the time I finished reading the book, I had found several inconsistencies in his argument, two or three outright contradictions, and an instance where the statistical figures he quoted did not add up (quite literally).  Likely these were unintentional errors.  And I can look past them.  What I can’t look past is Davies’s preposterous theory that the authors of Q and the synoptics recorded only the sayings of Jesus when he was speaking in his own voice as Jesus, and that the author of John wrote down only the sayings of Jesus when he was “possessed” by the Spirit of God (Chapter 11).  And that’s two different people, so of course the sayings sound different!

My ultimate impression?  I couldn’t escape the sense that Davies had gleefully picked fruit from the tree of knowledge in anthropology and psychology, and had tried to put it in a nice, neat gift basket he could present to other New Testament scholars as a sort of sublime “theory of everything.”  Unfortunately, he didn’t know when to stop filling the basket.  He damaged his own thesis because he failed to grasp its limits.  So I would advise caution in relying on the material in this book.

Jesus the Healer is not currently in print.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dissociation, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Paul vs Jesus, Realspiritik, religion and mental Illness and tagged , | Leave a Comment
30 Jun 2011
1 Comment

JR53: Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas

A: At the beginning of Stevan Davies’s translation of the Gospel of Thomas, there’s a Foreword written by Andrew Harvey. Harvey has this to say about the Gospel of Thomas: “If all the Gospel of Thomas did was relentlessly and sublimely champion the path to our transfiguration and point out its necessity, it would be one of the most important of all religious writings — but it does even more. In saying 22, the Gospel of Thomas gives us a brilliantly concise and precise ‘map’ of the various stages of transformation that have to be unfolded in the seeker for the ‘secret’ to be real in her being and active though [sic?] all her powers. Like saying 13, saying 22 has no precedent in the synoptic gospels and is, I believe, the single most important document of the spiritual life that Jesus has left us (pages xxi-xxii).”

Harvey then plunges into 5 pages of rapture on the ecstatic meaning of Saying 22. None of which I agree with, of course. And none of which you’re likely to agree with, either, if experience is any guide. But I thought maybe you and I could have a go at it.

J: By all means.

A: Okay. Here’s the translation of Saying 22 as Stevan Davies’s writes it:

“Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples: These infants taking milk are like those who enter the Kingdom. His disciples asked him: If we are infants will we enter the Kingdom? Jesus responded: When you make the two into one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the upper like the lower and the lower like the upper, and thus make the male and the female the same, so that the male isn’t male and the female isn’t female. When you make an eye to replace an eye, and a hand to replace a hand, and a foot to replace a foot, and an image to replace an image, then you will enter the Kingdom (page xxii and 25-27).”

Harvey’s interpretation of this saying speaks of an “alchemical fusion” and a “Sacred Androgyne” who “‘reigns’ over reality” with actual “powers that can alter natural law” because he or she has entered a transformative state of “mystical union,” where “the powers available to the human being willing to undertake the full rigor of the Jesus-transformation are limitless.”

I’m not making this up, though I wish I were.

Mustard Seeds by David Turner 2005. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

“The disciples said to Jesus: ‘Tell us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.’ He replied: ‘It is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all. However, when it falls into worked ground, it sends out a large stem, and it becomes a shelter for the birds of heaven'” (Gospel of Thomas 20). Mustard Seeds by David Turner 2005, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

J: And there I was, talking about a little ol’ mustard seed . . . . It’s a terrific example of the danger of using “wisdom sayings” as a teaching tool. People have a tendency to hear whatever they want to hear in a simple saying. Parables are much harder to distort. Eventually I caught on to the essential problem that’s created when you choose to speak indirectly to spare other people’s feelings. When you use poetry instead of blunt prose, it’s much easier for other people to twist your meaning intentionally. You can see the same understanding in the Gospel of Mark. Mark is blunt. He doesn’t waste time on cliches and “wisdom words.” He goes straight for the truth, and leaves no wiggle room for gnostic-type interpretations.

A: Harvey seems to have found a whole lot of wiggle room in Saying 22.

J: I must admit that Harvey’s “revelation” of the Sacred Androgyne makes me feel sick to my stomach.

A: Why?

J: Because it denies the very reality of male and female. It denies the reality that God the Father is male and God the Mother is female. It denies the reality that everything in Creation is built on the cherished differences between male and female. Being male isn’t better than being female. And being female isn’t better than being male. But they’re not the same. Neither are they yin-and-yang. They’re not two halves of the same coin. They’re not mirror images of each other. They’re not a fusion — they’re not a Oneness — like a bowl of pure water. God the Mother and God the Father are like a bowl of minestrone soup. You can see all the big chunks of differentness floating around in there, and that’s okay, because that’s what gives the mixture its taste, its wonder, its passion.

God the Mother and God the Father aren’t the same substance with opposite polarities. No way. They have individual temperaments and unique characteristics. In some ways, they’re quite alike. In other ways, they’re quite different from each other. Just as you’d expect in two fully functioning, mature beings. That’s why it’s a relationship. They work things out together so both of them are happy at the same time. It’s not that hard to imagine, really. They have a sacred marriage, a marriage in which they constantly strive to lift each other up, support each other, forge common goals together, build things together, and most importantly, raise a family together. They look out for each other. They laugh together. They’re intimately bound to each other in all ways. But they’re still a bowl of minestrone soup. With nary a Sacred Androgyne in sight.

A: Okay. So if you weren’t talking about “oneness” or “alchemical fusion” or the “Sacred Androgyne” in Saying 22, what were you talking about?

J: Well, I was talking about the mystery and wonder that can be found in a simple seed. I was talking — as I often was — about how to understand our relationship with God by simply looking at and listening to God’s ongoing voice in the world of nature.

A: Oh. Are we talking about tree-hugging?

J: You could put it that way.

A: David Suzuki would love you for saying that.

J: I was a nature mystic, to be sure. Endogenous mystics are nature mystics. They see the image of God — and more importantly the stories of God — in God’s own language, which is the world of Creation. The world outside the city gates has so much to say about balance and time and beginnings and endings! The world outside the city gates is a library. It’s literally a library that teaches souls about cycles and physics and interconnectedness and chemistry and complexity and order and chaos all wrapped up together in a tapestry of Divine Love.

A: What you’re saying seems like a pretty modern, liberal sort of understanding. Were you able to articulate it this way 2,000 years ago?

J: Not to be unkind to modern, liberal thinkers, but when was the last time a philosopher of science sat down with a mustard seed and reflected on the intrinsic meaning of it? When was the last time you heard what a humble fresh bean can teach you about the spiritual journey of all human beings?

A: I see your point. People in our society don’t usually take the time to sit down and “smell the roses.”

J: Geneticists and biologists and related researchers can print out all their research on the genome of a kidney bean, and can even modify this genetic code in a lab, but to a mystic the kidney bean holds more than pure science.

A: So we’ve switched from mustard seeds to kidney beans as a metaphor?

J: Kidney beans are bigger and easier to see without magnifying lenses, and a lot of people have begun their scientific inquiries by growing beans in a primary school classroom. So yes — let’s switch to beans.

A: I remember being fascinated by fresh beans and peas when I was young. If you split the bean with your thumbnail, and you didn’t damage it too much when you split it, you could see the tiny little stem and leaf inside at one end, just waiting to sprout. If you planted a whole, unsplit bean in a small glass-walled container, you could watch the whole process of growth — the bean splitting open on its own, roots starting to grow from one end, the stem and leaf popping up, the two halves of the bean gradually shrinking as their nutrients were converted into stem and root growth. Somehow the bean knew what to do. It just kept growing out of the simplest things — dirt, sunlight, water.

J: The bean is a lot like the human brain. If you plant it whole in fertile ground and provide the right nutrients, it grows into a thing of wholeness and balance and wonder and mystery. On the other hand, if you try to split it open, or extract the tiny stem hidden inside, or plant it on rocks instead of good soil, or fail to give it sunshine and water, it won’t thrive. It may not even root at all. You can’t force the bean to grow where it isn’t designed to grow. You can’t force it to grow once you’ve forcibly split it open. You can’t force it to grow on barren rock. The bean has to be whole when you plant it. The outside skin has to be intact. The different parts inside the skin have to be intact. The bean has different parts, but it needs all those different parts in order to be whole — in order to create something new. The bean isn’t a single substance. But it is holistic. It’s a self-contained mini-marvel that teaches through example about cycles and physics and interconnectedness and chemistry and complexity and order and chaos. It appears simple, but in fact it’s remarkably complex. Creation is like that — it appears simple, but in fact it’s remarkably complex.

A: Why, then, were you talking about “male and female” in Saying 22? Why did you seem to be talking about merging or fusion of male and female into an androgynous state? Or a Platonic state of mystical union?

J: It goes to the question of context. I was talking to people who, as a natural part of their intellectual framework, were always trying to put dualistic labels on everything in Creation. Everyday items were assigned labels of “good or evil,” “pure or impure,” “male or female,” “living or dead.” It had got to the point where a regular person might say, “I won’t use that cooking pan because it has female energy, and female energy isn’t pure.”

A: I’m not sure that kind of paranoid, dualistic, magical thinking has really died out, to be honest.

J: There are certainly peoples and cultures who still embrace this kind of magical thinking. You get all kinds of destructive either-or belief systems. You get people saying that right-handed people and right-handed objects are favoured by God, whereas left-handed people are cursed. It’s crazy talk. It’s not balanced. It’s not holistic. It’s not trusting of God’s goodness.

A: And you were left-handed.

J: Yep. My mother tried to beat it out of me, but I was a leftie till the day I died. When I was a child, I was taught to be ashamed of my left-handedness. Eventually I came to understand that I was who I was. The hand I used as an adult to hold my writing stylus was the same hand I’d been born with — my left hand. But on my journey of healing, redemption, and forgiveness, I came to view my hand quite differently than I had in my youth. Was it a “new hand”? No. Was it a new perception of my hand. Yes. Absolutely yes.

A: You stopped putting judgmental labels on your eyes and your hands and your feet and your understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God.

J: One of the first steps in knowing what it feels like to walk in the Kingdom of the Heavens is to consider yourself “a whole bean.”

A: Aren’t there kidney beans in minestrone soup? How did we get back to the minestrone soup metaphor?

J: A little mustard seed in the soup pan never hurts either.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dualism, Favourite Posts, gender and sexuality, Gnosticism, Gospel of Thomas, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Mother and Father God, Mother God, parables, Plato, relationship with God, unio mystica, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged ,
21 May 2011

JR41: City on the Hill: Saying 32 in Thomas

Model of the Acropolis of Athens, Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.

A: Okay. Back to some exegesis from the Gospel of Thomas. This morning my copy of Thomas* opened itself up to Saying 32: “Jesus said: A city built and fortified atop a tall hill cannot be taken, nor can it be hidden.”

Stevan Davies’s notes on this saying, as usual, miss the point. Davies says, “This saying urges strength in defense while at the same time encouraging openness. You should not try to protect yourself by hiding your light, but at the same time you should be aware that attacks are likely. Ultimately you will be safe, above real danger, even if you expose yourself and your light to the world (pages 35-36).”

Granted, there’s not much context to go on here. This saying could be interpreted in a number of different ways. But I’m curious about your thoughts here.

J: I’m wondering in what way Davies can argue that a person who shows their light is “above real danger.” This is a reckless thing to say in view of the way reformers are treated in many parts of the world. Reformers need to know that attacks are likely, as you and I have discussed before. Reformers don’t have a special magical cloak that’s guaranteed to protect them from all harm.

A: Obviously you didn’t have such a magical cloak.

J: No. And I didn’t promise my followers one, either. It’s a fallacy to suppose that a person of faith will be protected from all suffering and all harm. Shit happens. Shit happens to everyone. The question isn’t how to be “above real danger.” The question is how to recognize real danger and how to handle it when it arises. Davies’s interpretation of saying 32 is pretty much the opposite of what I was trying to say.

A: Davies is implying in his notes that the fortified city on the hill is a metaphor for a person who has uncovered the secret of the Kingdom. He’s implying that knowledge of the Kingdom lifts a person above the fray. It kind of reminds me of the “shining city on the hill.”

J: Which tells you right off the bat it isn’t something I would have said.

A: You’re not big on the idea of Temples on Sacred Mounts.

J: No. I used metaphors from nature and peasant life to explain what the Kingdom feels like. By contrast, I used metaphors from the sphere of urban construction to explain what it feels like to be estranged from the Kingdom. Saying 32 is an attack on the people who choose to be like a fortified city on the hill. They choose to place themselves “above” other people. They choose to build walls around their hearts. Sure, everyone can see them up there, everyone can see their status. But they’re walled off from their feelings, from their compassion. They’re successful. They’re proud of their walls. They love to be noticed for their accomplishments. But they have no heart. And they have no relationship with God. They’ve made themselves invulnerable to pain. And this means they’ve made themselves invulnerable to love. They’re afraid of intense emotions, afraid of intense feelings like joy and grief and humbleness. They hide behind their walls and bemoan the cruel God who allows suffering. Meanwhile, they do nothing courageous themselves. They refuse to come out from behind their walls and engage in the task of coping in mature ways with the love and pain of living. They feel safe where they are, and they’d much rather blame God or other people for the emptiness they themselves feel inside.

Surprising as it may seem, inner emptiness seems like the better choice — the practical choice — for the majority of human beings. For those who’ve endured years of abuse and trauma, it’s often the only viable choice. They can’t make it through the day if they have to think about the pain they’ve endured. So they try to stop thinking about it.

A: Yet the pain always expresses itself somehow.

J: Yes. You can’t escape the pain. When you repress it, it finds a way to reveal itself anyway. Playwrights and psychotherapists make their living from expounding this truth. The pain must be confronted and transmuted — healed — into something deeper and more positive. Otherwise it will ruin your life and probably the lives of the people you’re closest to.

A: This is what Viktor Frankl taught. The idea that you have to find purpose and meaning and the means to go forward despite the most traumatic experiences imaginable.

J: A process that people need help with. If you don’t have a mentor to help you struggle through the emotional complexities of loss and suffering and eventual transformation, you’ll probably end up — like so many people — building gigantic walls around your heart. But there’s a cost for doing this. The cost is your ability to love.

A: You mean the person building the walls is no longer able to love.

J: Right. They can’t love themselves. They can’t love their neighbour. They can’t love their God. They can still function at a logical level, a practical level, but they wake up each morning and go to bed each night having no clear idea who they are or why they’re here or why they feel so empty and miserable. Life feels like a chore to them. A duty. A punishment they must endure. They feel very sorry for themselves.

A: I know a number of Christians who fit this bill.

J: The real tragedy is that once a person has finished building his or her fortified city on the hilltop, he or she “cannot be taken” — cannot let love in through the walls of logic and status. No amount of kindness or empathy or forgiveness or patience will breach the walls of intentional dissociation in another human being. You can’t “fix” such a person from the outside. If they don’t want to come out from behind their walls, you can’t make them do it, no matter how hard you try.

A: A lesson it took me years to understand.

J: The person who is like the city “built and fortified atop a tall hill” is NOT “ultimately . . . safe, above real danger.” Such a person IS the danger. She’s a danger to herself, her neighbours, and her community.

A: Why?

J: Because she thinks she’s in her right mind, in full control of all her thoughts and feelings and actions, but she’s not. She’s built a city of logic stone by stone, choice by choice, and she’s happy with it. She likes being dissociated from her soul’s own feelings. She chooses to live this way. But big chunks of her biological brain are miswired as a long term result of her intentional choices. She can’t make balanced choices anymore. She can’t because she’s worked very hard not to make balanced choices. She believes she has all the tools she needs in case of emergency or real danger. But she doesn’t have the brain tools she’ll actually need in an unpredicted crisis. So she’ll panic. She’ll freeze. She’ll think only of herself. Because that’s what she’s trained her brain to do.

A: You’re saying it doesn’t have to be this way.

J: I’m saying Darwin was dead wrong about survival of the fittest. The stupidest human beings on the planet are the ones who’ve made themselves into isolated cities on hilltops. And when I say “stupid” I don’t mean temporarily foolish or poorly educated. I mean less functional and less able to grasp complex issues and act on them with common sense, compassion, and integrity. Including many individuals with PhDs. These are the people you don’t want on your team when a genuine crisis hits. They’ll stab you in the back without blinking when the going gets tough.

A: Says the man whose own family and friends turned him over to the Romans when he made the going too tough . . .

J: Damn straight.

*For readers who haven’t been following our posts about the Gospel of Thomas, I’m using a book translated and annotated by Stevan Davies. (Stevan Davies, The Gospel of Thomas (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2004.))

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Davies (Stevan), dissociation, Gospel of Thomas, healing, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, spiritual ascent, status addiction, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
01 May 2011

JR35: Father of Lights, Mother of Breath

Father of Lights, Mother of Breath

“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the Word of Truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures” (James 1:17-18). Photo credit JAT 2014.

A: Saying 56 of the Gospel of Thomas is somewhat puzzling. Stevan Davies translates it as “Jesus said: Whoever has known the world has found a corpse; whoever has found that corpse, the world is not worthy of him.” Davies suggests that this saying relates to the two Creation stories in Genesis. He says, “it seems that the animating principle of the world is the Kingdom within it that remains undiscovered by most people. They do not realize that for them the world is a corpse; when they discover that it is, they simultaneously discover the Kingdom that can animate it” (page 61). Davies’s interpretation doesn’t feel right to me. What were you trying to get at here?

J: Davies’s thesis that the Kingdom is an animating principle within a person and within the world outside each person is central to his interpetations of the Thomasine sayings. He’s entitled to his own theories, but I don’t have to agree with them.

A: So you don’t agree.

J: No. Davies’s interpretation — for all that he tries to cast it in the light of Wisdom teachings instead of Gnostic teachings — is still Gnostic. In other words, it’s an occult interpretation. Occult interpretations of the world rely heavily on dualistic thinking — everything is reduced to pairs of opposites such as “good versus evil” or “light versus darkness.”

A: “Alive versus dead.”

J: Yes. As soon as a person starts talking about “dead things” being animated — literally, being brought to life — by outside forces, then you’re moving in the direction of dualistic, occult thought. What scholars call Christian Gnosticisms are really just a form of immaturity. Emotional and intellectual immaturity. Nothing in Creation can be reduced to the kind of simplistic “either-or” religious formula that’s being offered in Davies’s interpretation. Life just isn’t like that.

A: So you don’t agree that “alive versus dead” is a legitimate pair, a legitimate starting point for discussion about the nature of life?

J: You have to understand the religious context in which I lived. People had some very strange ideas about birth, life, illness, and death — everyone did, regardless of their religion. Jews were no different. We had tons of restrictions and limitations and taboos around natural life processes. Especially around death. Taboos around some other things had loosened up when Jewish lands fell under the sway of Hellenistic thought and then Roman thought. But the taboos around death hadn’t diminished. People were very frightened of dead bodies. Only certain people were allowed to touch them. No one could be buried inside the city walls. The list went on and on.

A: That doesn’t sound much different from today.

J: One of religion’s most important jobs is to help people deal in mature and compassionate ways with death. Few religions manage to accomplish this task with any grace or decorum. One of the few modern religions that brings death into the community in a living, natural way is Rabbinic Judaism. Christianity could learn a thing or two from Judaism on this score. However, the approach to death seen in today’s synagogue was not the approach to death I grew up with. Rabbinic Judaism didn’t exist in the first half of the 1st century CE. Judaism was a mess. We had so many competing philosophies and so many competing rituals that regular people were hopelessly confused.

A: Dare I say that you added to that confusion?

J: You can say that. It’s true. But Judaism had some good things going for it. Even though I had studied the works of Hellenistic philosophers, looking for nuggets of spiritual wisdom, I came back in the end to the best that Judaism had to offer. In my view, the best ideas of Judaism topped everything the other religions were offering.

A: Can you give some examples?

J: The most obvious one is the image of God in the Hebrew texts. There was the strange idea in Judaism — uncommon, though not unprecedented in the history of religion — that there was really just one God, not a whole pantheon of gods. Of course, I didn’t agree with the Platonic idea that God was a single undifferentiated “He.” This idea had slowly made its way into Jewish thought, and by the 1st century CE it was widely accepted by many Jews. But not all Jews saw God as 100% male. A thinking person couldn’t make sense of the natural world if it was seen solely as a “male domain.” There had to be a feminine principle in there somewhere — a feminine principle that was equal to the male principle and in full partnership with the male principle. My personal experiences as a mystic clinched that theory beyond all doubt. Once I had seen and felt the reality of God the Mother and God the Father in my own heart, I had no doubt about who God really is. God is Father and Mother together — Abba and Ruah. Father of Lights, Mother of Breath. That’s what I called them.

A: You refer to the Father of Lights in the Letter of James (James 1:17-18). You also say there that the Father of Lights gave birth to us “by the word of truth.” What did you mean by this?

J: “The word of truth” — logo aletheias in the Greek, which is not the same as Sophia (Wisdom) — is a name I sometimes used for God the Mother. I was trying to make it clear that God the Father doesn’t give birth to us by himself. It isn’t a weird form of parthenogenesis (virgin birth). It’s the most natural form of creation imaginable.

A: Two partners coming together in light and in truth and fulfilling our creation because they want to.

J: This image of God was considered heretical to both pious Jews and pious Gentiles. There were countless images of the Divine in many different religions. The only image of the Divine that wasn’t being preached was the one I was preaching — the God Who Is Two. One God, many children. One God, many souls. One God, many Kingdoms. This image of God as God really is did have — and still has — the power to free so many people from the suffering caused by prejudice and hierarchy and male dominance! This image has the power to open up the gates of meaningful relationship with God. Everything you see in the world around you makes so much more sense when you allow yourself to make room for the “crazy, heretical notion” that God is Two — not One, and not Three. All the most meaningful experiences of life as a human — the experiences of love, of redemption, of healing, of trust — they all rely on relationship. On two people — at a minimum — coming together in mutual aid and comfort. As the song says, “one is the loneliest number”. On the other hand, two is the number of change, growth, creation, balance, and divine love. The world of science and nature constantly reinforces this one simple message: it’s all about Two, not One.

A: It seems very strange to me that when an individual adamantly holds to the idea that God is One, his or her thinking becomes less holistic and more dualistic — more based on black-and-white pairs of opposites. When pious religious followers commit themselves wholly to the idea that God is One, it’s like a cartoon thought bubble pops up and fills itself up with all sorts of nasty, judgmental words. Words so nasty they could singe the hair off your head. You wouldn’t think the idea of God-as-One could lead to so much hatred and prejudice and racial discrimination. But we have plenty of history to prove it. I’ve been watching the Kennedy mini-series on the History Channel, and of course they examine the racial rioting in the U.S. South in the early 1960’s. I simply can’t understand or relate to that kind of vicious hatred.

J: Well, we had plenty of that kind of vicious hatred in my time. Jews against other Jews. Rich against poor. Chosen people against damned people. Blah, blah, blah. No end to the bigotry. No end to the narcissism.

A: I see you’re equating bigotry with narcissism.

J: Sure. Bigotry can only grow in a garden that’s growing the weeds of narcissism and bullying. Narcissism is a psychologically dysfunctional state where an individual’s brain becomes addictively dependent on the myth that he or she is “special,” “better than others,” and entitled to better treatment than other people. Like any addict, the status addict has to receive regular fixes. To maintain a stance of bigotry towards another person on the basis of skin colour is simply proof of addiction — addiction to status. The choice to hate somebody on the basis of race or skin colour has the same biological effect on the brain as an addiction to cocaine. Bigotry is a form of “using.” It has no place in the life of a person of faith.

A: Bigotry is another form of dualistic thinking — “us versus them.”

J: It’s also a clear indication of immaturity in an individual. A mature individual is able to process ambiguity, change, complexity, and “shades of grey.” A mature individual is capable — even as a frail human being — of perceiving and appreciating the vast scope of Creation and the awe-inspiring, humbling interconnections that exist among all forms of life, both here and elsewhere in Creation. A mature individual doesn’t ask “what God can do for you,” but instead asks “what you can do for God.”

A: That statement would be considered blasphemous by the “piety and pity” crew that insists we’re all full of sin and unworthy before God.

J: Well, I rejected the “piety and pity” parade, as you can tell from everything I’ve been trying to say on this site.

A: I’ll just call you the “trust and twofulness” guy instead.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dualism, Gnosticism, Gospel of Thomas, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Letter of James, life and death, Mother and Father God, Mother God, status addiction and tagged , | Leave a Comment
10 Apr 2011

JR31: Jesus, the Man Who Was a Mystic

Life as a Mystic (c) JAT 2015: always drawn to the path less travelled

Life as a Mystic: always drawn to the path less travelled. Photo credit JAT 2015.

A: Sayings 18a and 18b in the Gospel of Thomas have some interesting things to say about our relationship to time — to beginnings and endings. Stevan Davies’s translation says this: “The disciples asked Jesus: Tell us about our end. What will it be? Jesus replied: Have you found the Beginning so that you now seek the end? The place of the Beginning will be the place of the end [18a]. Blessed is anyone who will stand up in the Beginning and thereby know the end and never die [18b].” Your makarisms — your beatitudes — don’t sound much like the makarisms from the Jewish Wisdom thinkers who wrote books like Proverbs and Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. Why is that?

J (shrugging): I was a mystic, not a Wisdom teacher. I believed in logic, but I believed more in Divine Love. My understanding of happiness was founded in my personal mystical experience. When people asked me how I could be so happy despite all the personal suffering I’d experienced in my life, I told them. They didn’t believe me, but I kept telling them anyway.

A: People today don’t think of you as a mystic. They may think of you as a rabbi or as a wandering Cynic philosopher or as a political revolutionary or even as a shaman-like fellow wandering around Palestine in a severe dissociative state.* But none of the well-respected biblical scholars I’ve read have described you as a mystic. Why not?

J: There’s nothing so poorly understood in the history of religion as mysticism. Having said that, the form of mysticism I practised has been rare in the annals of religious mysticism. I was neither an apophatic mystic nor an anagogic mystic. I was an endogenous mystic.

A: You’re going to have to explain that.

J: Mystical experiences from different cultures can be categorized. And should be categorized. Unfortunately, they’re usually lumped together in one big pot. They’re assumed to be roughly equivalent to each other. But they’re not. For instance, mystics who claim to have had an experience of timeless, transcendent oneness or union with the Divine come away from the experience with the belief that “less is more.” These are the apophatic mystics, from the Greek word meaning “negative speaking” or “unspeaking.” Apophatic mystics believe you can only experience union with God through the constant practise of mystical contemplation. This practice allows you to first “unknow” or “unspeak” yourself, to escape your frail human senses so you can become a proper empty vessel. If you do it correctly, goes the theory, you find yourself in a transcendent state where you no longer think of yourself as “you.” In other words, the path to knowing God is eradication of the self.

A: The opposite of what you taught.

J: Yes. Another thing I taught was the futility of the anagogic path — the vertical or upward path of spiritual ascent that’s been taught so many times by so many different teachers over the centuries. Anagogic mystics may or may not also be apophatic mystics, just to make things more confusing. Basically an anagogic mystic is somebody who believes that the only way to know God is to achieve perfection by following a rigorous step-by-step set of instructions or laws in the correct order. This takes you one step at a time up the spiritual ladder. The ladder of perfection takes you closer to God and farther away from your sinful neighbours. It sets you above and apart from your neighbours. Benedict, the founder of the Christian monasteries and the monastic Rule that bear his name, was teaching his monks a form of anagogic mysticism.

A: Again, not what you taught. So explain what you mean by endogenous mysticism.

J: It’s a term I’ve coined to suggest an experience of intense mysticism that’s hardwired into a person’s DNA rather than being imposed from the outside on an unwilling religious acolyte. True mystics are born, not made. Just as true engineers or true musicians are born, not made. An endogenous mystic is somebody who was born with a particular set of talents and communication skills aimed in the directions of philosophy, language, music, mediation (that’s mediation, not meditation), and what I’m going to call for lack of a better term “the geek factor.” True mystics are more interested than most people in offbeat stories and unusual phenomena. They show a life-long interest in stories and experiences that are somewhat unconventional. Not too weird, but a bit weird. You wouldn’t find a mystic teaching an M.B.A. course. But you might find a mystic teaching a Creative Writing course. Most true mystics don’t even know they’re true mystics. Most often they end up as writers. Writers need more solitary time than most people, as mystics do. They need the solitary time so they can pull up from somewhere inside themselves the emotions and the insights they long to express. They’re not being unfriendly or rude or hostile. They just need the quiet time so they can hear themselves think. This is true for both writers and mystics.

A: Well, you can count me in on all scores there. I spent a lot of time indoors reading as a child. And drawing. And watching TV shows that had a science fiction or fantasy element. I loved the first Star Trek series when it first came out. Come to think of it, I still like it.

J: I was like that, too. I was fascinated by the Greek myths. As soon as I learned to read, I read the Iliad. Then the Odyssey. My strict Jewish mother wasn’t pleased. But what could she do? She was a widow with a big family to look after. As long as I stayed on the family property, where I couldn’t get in too much trouble, she put up with my unusual interest in books, books, and more books. I read everything I could get my hands on. I learned to write by studying the authors I most admired.

A: I’m thinkin’ that Plato probably wasn’t one of your favourite authors.

J: I liked plays, actually. I learned a lot by studying Greek poets and playwrights. I liked the comedies of the Greek playwright Menander. Much healthier than the doleful rantings of the Jewish prophets.

A: These aren’t the literary influences one would expect you to describe.

J: No. I had to learn to read and write from the sacred Jewish texts because my mother and my maternal grandfather insisted we be literate in our religious heritage. So I knew my Torah and my Proverbs. But I was a born mystic, and, like all mystics and mystics-in-writer’s-clothing, I was interested in — utterly fascinated by — the fine nuances of character and environment and insight. I wanted to know what made people tick. I wanted to hear how they spoke, how they phrased things, how they interacted with each other. I wanted to know why people fall in love, what they say, what they do. I wanted to absorb all the joys, all the nuances, of life and living.

A: As writers do.

J: Writers can’t help it. It’s what they do. They’re so attuned to the rhythms and patterns of language and dialogue and everyday speech and sensory input and colours and textures and movement and nature and choices and especially change. Mystics are like this, too. Deeply attuned to patterns of communication that other people don’t pay attention to at a conscious level. A mystic is somebody who’s hardwired to pay conscious attention to subtle, nuanced communications from the deepest levels of Creation. Sometimes these communications come from God. Sometimes they come from one’s own soul. Sometimes they come from somebody else’s soul. But basically it’s about conscious observation and understanding of specific kinds of communications. Mystics are tuned to certain bands on the divine radio, if you will. They can pick up stations that most other people aren’t interested in trying to pick up. These “mystical” stations aren’t better than other stations. They’re just . . . well, they’re just different. All the stations on the divine radio are good, because different styles of music are all inherently equal. They’re all inherently equal, but they don’t all sound the same. Because they’re not the same. They’re different but equal.

A: As souls are all different but equal.

J: Yes. A lot of people imagine it would be wonderful and exciting to give over their lives to mysticism. But being a mystic is only wonderful and exciting if you’re hardwired to be a mystic. If you’re like most people — born with intuition, but not born to be either a mystic or a writer — you would find it very isolating, frustrating, even depressing to live as a mystic — as many Christian nuns, monks, clerics, and mystics have discovered to their misfortune. The “Dark Night of the Soul” is not and should not be part of the journey to knowing God. At no time in my life as Jesus did I experience a Dark Night of the Soul. On the contrary, my experience as a mystic gave me only an ever deepening sense that I was in the right place doing the right thing with the right people for the right reasons. I trusted my “beginning.” As a result, I stopped worrying about my “ending.” I lived each day in a state of comfort, peace, trust, and love.

A: The journey was not about the end goal, but about finding your own beginning — knowing yourself as you really are, then going from there.

J: This is the only way to find the freedom that comes from knowing and loving your Divine Parents — to whom I would like to say, once again for the record, you both rock!

* In 1995, Stevan Davies, the same author who published the translation of the Gospel of Thomas I refer to, wrote a very puzzling book called Jesus the Healer (New York: Continuum, 1995) in which he claims that Jesus carried out healings during a trance state that can be called “holy spirit-possession.” He concludes, therefore, that Jesus was a “medium.” If you’ve read my comments on The Blonde Mystic blog about psychic powers and psychic mediums, you’ll be able to guess what I think of Davies’s spirit-possession thesis.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, apophatic mysticism, Davies (Stevan), ethical mysticism, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' original writings, makarism, Soul, soul purpose and tagged , | Leave a Comment
14 Mar 2011

JR22: Why You Need To Know Yourself (Mystical Commentary on Saying 67)

A: Can you please explain as simply as possible WHY it matters that each person has a unique soul blueprint and WHY it’s important for each person on a spiritual journey to uncover the specific details of his or her own unique blueprint?

J: Let’s use an imaginary person as an example to make this simpler. I’m going to call this imaginary person Jane Tamaguchi.

A: Okay.

J: Like all human beings, Jane is a soul. She doesn’t have a soul. She is a soul. She’s an angel — a child of God. Like all angels, she was born as a soul long before she decided to incarnate as a human being. Soul energy isn’t visible in the third dimension — the dimension that human beings live in during their temporary lives as incarnated souls — but soul energy can be felt in the third dimension.

A: Can you give some examples of “feelable” soul energy? (I think I just invented a new word.)

J: Yes. When you feel a deep sense of connection with another person, that’s soul energy. When you feel empathy for other creatures, that’s soul energy. When you feel committed, romantic, monogamous love, that’s soul energy. When you give or receive forgiveness, that’s soul energy. When you’re willing to trust in a loving and compassionate God, that’s soul energy.

Thomas 67: One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing. (Photo credit JAT 2015)

Thomas 67: “One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.” (Translation by Stevan Davies, photo credit JAT 2015)

 A: Those are all emotions. Positive emotions. Uplifting emotions.

J: Yes. All souls are intensely emotional in positive, uplifting, creative, intuitive, loving ways.

A: So much for Christian angelology, that says angels have no emotions of their own and are simply instruments of God’s work and God’s will.

J: Yes. That’s another Christian doctrine that should go the way of the 8-track recording system.

A: But angels also have minds, as you’ve said previously. They have minds plus emotional hearts.

J: Yes. Christians have long believed — based largely on theories of the soul put forward by Plato, Aristotle, Tertullian, Augustine, and others — that the soul itself consists of a single indivisible substance. Arguments raged as to the exact nature of this substance. But the basic idea was that the soul was made of just one thing because — as the theory went — the soul couldn’t really be a soul if it could be “divided” into two or more substances. It should go without saying that this is a ridiculous supposition. There are no analogies anywhere in nature or in the quantum world for a complex lifeform made of a single element such as pure hydrogen or pure gold. All lifeforms, whether they exist in the third dimension or in higher dimensions, are extremely complex. A soul is a quantum being whose “biology” is far more complex than that of any 3D creature — which is pretty much what you’d expect for children of God who were born in the fourth dimension, and who will spend most of their eternal existence in parts of the “implicate order” that can’t be seen or measured by human beings in the third dimension.

A: So people just have to take it on trust? On blind faith?

J: I wouldn’t say that. Individuals who want to take the time to do intensive research into quantum physics and quantum biology will soon discover that the universe being studied by today’s scientists is extremely complex. This isn’t the cosmology of Plato or Thomas Aquinas. It’s breathtakingly complicated and interconnected. There’s plenty of room in there for a modern doctrine of the soul that doesn’t in any way violate the laws of quantum biology.

A: Okay. So tell me about Jane. Who is she as a soul?

J: Jane is a female angel, and for the purposes of this discussion she’s heterosexual.

A: I know what this means for human beings. But what does this mean for angels?

J: It means exactly what it sounds like. All angels are one of two sexes: male or female. Just as with human beings. There are no “in-between” sexes or alien sexes. All angels are either male (the same sex as God the Father) or female (the same sex as God the Mother). This is pretty much what you’d expect by looking at life on Planet Earth.

A: Some creatures on Earth are able to reproduce without a sexual partner. Komodo Dragons, for instance.

J: There are different modes of reproduction for creatures that live on Planet Earth. Reproduction is part of the 3D biological package. It isn’t part of the 4D soul package. We’ll come back to that at a later time.

A: But sexual orientation is part of the 4D soul package. Why is sexual orientation necessary for angels?

J: Because each angel has a soulmate. One true eternal love partner. A divine spouse. The one partner in all of Creation who’s a perfect match in every way, including intimate, private ways. Each angel in God’s Creation is paired with his or her perfect eternal partner. For many angelic couples, the perfect partner is of the same sex. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

A: So God the Father and God the Mother are not a same-sex couple themselves, but it’s okay with God if their children choose a same-sex partner to share eternity with.

J: Yes. God’s children are not carbon copies of their divine parents. God’s children come in every size and shape and colour imaginable. Yet every soul couple is blissfully happy, blissfully complete. This is what God the Mother and God the Father want for their children — bliss. Everybody’s different. Yet everybody’s happy. It’s the perfect divine family when you think about it.

A: So Jane has a specific sex — female — and a specific sexual orientation — heterosexual. What else does she have?

J: She has a soul body. Her soul body has a unique size and shape that’s perfect for her. Her soul body probably doesn’t look too much like her current human body, but that’s okay. She’s very happy with the soul body she has.

A: What else?

J: She has a soul mind. As a soul, she’s pure consciousness — by that I mean she has full awareness at all times of her own thoughts and her own feelings and her own choices and her own needs and wishes. Part of her unique mind lies in the way she thinks, the way she learns, the way she remembers, the way she expresses herself. These attributes lie within the soul mind. Jane doesn’t “know” everything. Nor does she want to. She has certain interests that are hard-wired at the very core of her consciousness, and these are the things she learns fastest and remembers best.

A: Can you give an example of what Jane might be interested in as a soul, as an angel?

J: Okay. Let’s say for argument’s sake that Jane is a gifted musician.

A: There are some angels who are more musically gifted than other angels?

J: All angels enjoy music to some extent. But not all angels want to spend most of the day in classes devoted to advanced musical performance and interpretation skills. As with all things in Creation, it’s a continuum. All angels appreciate music. But some angels want to devote most of their time to it. Which means they can’t be devoting their time to other interests, other skills. There’s only so much time in a day, even for an angel.

A: What other interests does our imaginary Jane possess as a soul?

J: Jane likes to be around a lot of other angels. She gets very lonely if she can’t hear other angels singing. She’s happiest when she’s with a big group of noisy, laughing angels.

A: Are there any angels who are more quiet in temperament, who wouldn’t feel comfortable in large groups?

J: Yes, lots. And that’s okay, too. These angels are quiet, but not in any way unfriendly or unloving. They just need more quiet than other angels do. Nothing wrong with that.

A: Let’s give Jane a third unique attribute. What would you suggest.

J: She doesn’t like the colour red.

A: Huh?

J: All angels appreciate the fact that everything in Creation is beautiful and deserving of respect. So Jane respects the colour red, and she’s happy for her friends who love all things red. But angels have their own taste, their own “likes” and “dislikes.” And Jane herself is under no divine obligation to like red. It happens that she doesn’t. God the Mother and God the Father respect the fact that Jane just doesn’t happen to like red. On the other hand, she can’t get enough black. She’s crazy for black.

A (grinning): I know a certain male angel who happens to love black! And a particular shade of charcoal grey.

J: Yeah, I do like those colours. Can’t deny it.

A: Okay. So we have our angel Jane, who’s passionate about music, loves to be around large groups of people, isn’t fond of the colour red, but likes black. Jane decided a while back to incarnate as a human being on Planet Earth (her choice), and right now she’s 35 years old, is working as a nurse, is taking night school courses so she can apply to law school, and lives with a female partner who has painted the bedroom red. Tell me about Jane’s current brain health.

J: All the things we talked about — Jane’s true soul interests — are hardwired into her human DNA. That’s the junk DNA that geneticists are puzzled by. Her soul’s blueprint is hardwired into her brain and central nervous system. Her brain stem, cerebellum, hypothalamus, thalamus, basal ganglia, and glial cells contain coding that’s unique to her, unique to her true soul personality. If Jane were to make conscious choices that “matched” or “lined up with” her core blueprint, her biological brain would function smoothly. It would function the way it’s supposed to. Her mood would remain stable. Her thinking would be logical and coherent. Her memory would be pretty good, especially around music and musical interpretation! She would have excellent social functioning. All in all, she’d be pretty happy, healthy, and well adjusted.

A: Okay. But right now Jane isn’t making conscious choices that “line up with” her own soul’s core identity. She’s working as a nurse, not as a musician. She’s around lots of people, which is good, but the people aren’t singing. She’s in a lesbian love relationship. And every night she has to go to sleep in a room that isn’t healing or calming for her as a soul. What’s happening inside her brain at this point?

J: There’s a software conflict. On the one hand, the so-called “primitive” parts of Jane’s brain are saying “I want to craft music, I want to find a loving male partner, I want to be around the colour black.” Meanwhile, Jane’s forcing the outer cortical layers of her brain to make different choices — choices that seem logical to her peers or to her family, perhaps, but which make no sense to her core self.

A: So how’s Jane doing?

J: Her brain is pretty messed up. There are competing signals from the different regions of her brain and central nervous system. The signals contradict each other. By now she’s feeling confused and upset with her life, and she doesn’t why. Things seem okay on the outside. But on the inside she’s not happy. She may be having trouble with headaches or poor sleep or depression or one of the many other signs of imbalance that can emerge via human biology.

A: A lot of these medical issues would begin to clear up if Jane were to seek professional counselling and appropriate medical care to help her uncover the choices she’s making that aren’t working for her.

J: Yes. Jane has been making choices based on other people’s priorities rather than her own core priorities — the priorities of her soul. Over the long term, her poor choices have begun to affect her health and her happiness.

A: Can she force herself to “be” a nurse and “be” a lawyer if her soul isn’t wired for healing or for case analysis?

J: No. This is what I meant when I said the soul isn’t malleable in the way that clay is malleable. Jane can only be who she is. If she tries to be somebody she’s not — if she tries to be a lesbian nurse-lawyer who wears red power suits — her biological brain will begin to sustain serious damage from the continuous push-and-pull of her internal “software conflict.” She’ll literally fry her own brain from the inside out.

A: Okay. That’s pretty clear. Be yourself — be the person God knows you to be — so your brain and body will function the way God intended.

J: Simple in fact. Simple in reality. But not always easy to implement.

A: At least it gives people a starting place on the journey. At least it helps them understand where they’re going and WHY. It helps so much to understand WHY.

J: Insight is one hell of an amazing miracle.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), brain's Soul Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Davies (Stevan), gender and sexuality, Gospel of Thomas, insight, interoception, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, orthodox teachings about the soul, Plato, quantum theory, Soul, soul blueprint, soul purpose, Thomas 67 and tagged , | Leave a Comment
14 Mar 2011

JR21: Saying 67 in the Gospel of Thomas

A: Okay. Here’s another pretty big question for you. Stevan Davies translates Saying 67 of the Gospel of Thomas as “Jesus said: One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.” Was this saying central to your teachings? Was it an important theme for you?

J: Yes. I tried very hard to express this idea. I tried to express it in many different ways.

A: Similar ideas have been taught by many spiritual leaders over the centuries. In fact, it’s almost a spiritual cliche. It’s so easy to say, “One who knows everything else but who does not know himself knows nothing.” But what exactly does it mean?

J: It means you have to know who you actually are as a soul — “the core you” that’s left after you strip away all the false, damaging prejudices and religious doctrines and abusive teachings of your family and culture. It means you have to love, honour, and respect the person you are when you remove all the weeds from the garden of your biological brain. It means you have to trust that when you pull out all the weeds, there’s still going to be something left in there. You have to trust that when you pull out all the weeds, you won’t be left with a barren patch of lifeless dirt. Instead you’ll be able to see the flowers of your soul — the lilies of the field — for the first time.

Gardens of the soul (Photo credit JAT 2014)

Gardens of the soul (Photo credit JAT 2014)

A: I take it you’re not too fond of the image of Creation in Genesis 2:7: the Lord God forming Adam from dust and then breathing the breath of life into his nostrils so he’ll become a living being.

J: No. The Bible has many references to human beings as dirt or clay or potters’ vessels. Clay is nothing more than a kind of dirt that can be shaped, moulded according to the creator’s will. The message that’s repeated again and again is that human beings are malleable in the way that wet clay is malleable. Wet clay starts out as a lump. It can be turned into any shape imagineable (as long as the laws of physics and chemistry aren’t broken). You can make a plate. You can make a bowl. You can make a large urn. You can make a small storage container. A complex sculpture. A string of beads. Clay is like that. You can make whatever you want. Many people — pious Pauline Christians especially — believe that God intends human beings to be like clay. They believe that each person is basically a lump of malleable clay. Based on this belief, they assume that God can reshape each individual in any way God chooses. It’s the idea of neuroplasticity taken to absurd extremes: “I can be anything God wants me to be if only I try hard enough to surrender to God’s will!!!” How often have you heard a sanctimonious preacher say that?

A: It’s a popular Christian idea.

J: It was a popular idea with many Essene and Hellenistic philosophers in my time, too. It’s an idea that makes it very easy for religious leaders to blame people in their flock for “not trying hard enough.” It makes it very easy to accuse regular people of being “weak”. To accuse them of falling short of true faith. To make them feel guilty for “letting God down.” To point fingers at them and say they’re filled with sin. These teachings are spiritually abusive.

A: You’re talking about the bread & butter of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians.

J: And fundamentalists of other faiths, too.

A: You’re saying, then, that the doctrine of malleable clay is factually incorrect. That Genesis 2:7 is wrong in its portrayal of human beings.

J: Both Creation stories in Genesis are wrong. Obviously (without apologies to any Creationists who might read this) there is no literal truth to Genesis 1 or Genesis 2-3. On top of that, there’s no metaphorical truth, either. Human beings are not malleable lumps of clay. They can’t be shaped by God or by anyone else into something they’re not. You can’t force a woman to become a man (though some people would like to try). You can’t force a gay man to become straight (though some Christians would like them to try). You can’t force a musician to become an engineer (though sadly many parents have tried. And tried and tried and tried.) God the Mother and God the Father don’t make souls this way. Souls aren’t malleable. Each soul has a unique identity, a unique blueprint, a unique set of talents and traits and strengths and absences of strengths. Souls are like snowflakes — no two are alike. You can’t take what God the Mother and God the Father made and “fix it.” You can’t turn a bowl into a plate. You can’t turn a sculpture into a wind chime. You are who you are. It’s true that you may not know who you are. It’s true that you may not know whether you’re a bowl or a plate or a sculpture or a wind chime. But your soul knows. And God knows. Between you — between you and God — you can uncover your own true soul identity.

A: I like the garden metaphor better. I’d rather discover what kind of “flower” I am. I’m not sure I really want to “see” myself as a set of dishes in the kitchen cupboard.

J: I hear ya. Nature metaphors are much more natural, much more helpful. That’s why I used so many images from nature in my teachings. There’s a natural resonance, a natural harmony between the images of nature and the soul’s own language. The soul “gets” nature imagery. The soul doesn’t mind being likened to trees or flowers or fruits. Or the totems of Native North American tradition. It helps human beings to have a nature metaphor of their own soul. An image to help them “see” themselves as God sees them.

A: If I were a tree, what kind of tree do you think I’d be? (Not that I’m saying I’m literally a tree . . .)

J: You’d be a yew. A tough, gnarly yew. That reminds me a lot of you.

A: Yeah? Okay, well that makes sense to me. I even really like yews. Always have. Nobody’s gonna believe this when I say this, but to me, you’re most definitely a magnolia. A big, showy magnolia. And damn but you wear it well! Of course, if the shrivelled up hearts of the pious Pauline Christians had their way, you’d be a bleeding, suffering, miserable, ugly thorn bush.

J: What? No burning bush? No branch of Jesse? No grafted grapevine? No olive tree? I think I’d make a particularly fine Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Don’t you?

A: You’re such a cynic.

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Posted in "4 S's", Book of Genesis, Davies (Stevan), Essenes, Gospel of Thomas, humility, insight, Jesus Redux, orthodox teachings about the soul, soul blueprint, Thomas 67 and tagged , | Leave a Comment
10 Mar 2011

JR20: Persecution of the Heirs of the Kingdom

Perseus by Antonio Canova (Vatican City), by Tetraktys (from Wikimedia Commons)

“Jesus said, Blessed are you when they hate and persecute you. No place will be found where they persecuted you (Gospel of Thomas 68).” Statue of Perseus by Antonio Canova (Vatican City), photo by Tetraktys (from Wikimedia Commons)

A: Another important theme you included alongside the idea that the poor were “heirs of the kingdom” was the idea that the faithful would be hated, excluded, reviled, defamed, and persecuted (Luke 6:22 and Thomas 68). Stevan Davies, in his commentary on the Gospel of Thomas, is puzzled by this. He says, “It is puzzling why so much very early Christian literature assumes that persecution is an inherent part of being a Christian. The ancient world was by no means a place where well-defined doctrinal parameters defined orthodoxy and heresy so that dissenters would regularly be persecuted for their beliefs. The violent suppression of religious ideas became characteristic of Western religions only in later centuries (p. 74).” Why did you place so much emphasis on the idea that the heirs to the kingdom would be reviled?

J: Davies makes a lot of assumptions here that need to be challenged. Like many commentators, he’s making dualistic assumptions. He’s assuming that I was primarily teaching about “mysticism” — something separate from everyday realities, something elevated or special or hidden. He assumes a Gnostic interpretation of my early sayings. He assumes that persecution arose when others became envious or angry because they didn’t know “my secret.” But this isn’t at all what I meant. I was telling people the honest truth about what would happen to them if they followed my teachings about God and status. I was telling them to be prepared to be vilified, attacked, abused, and scorned for daring to provoke the psychopaths and narcissists around them. I was telling people to be honest and realistic about other people’s reactions.

A: Whoa. That’s a pretty big statement you just made. That’s a statement with a lot of implications. Can you explain in more detail?

J: Yes. Put bluntly, “Hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned.”

A: Ooooh. Nice image.

J: This is the psychological context that all people should be aware of, not just the people who’ve chosen a spiritual life. This is the psychological context that lurks behind corruption and crime and abuse. If there’s one good thing I can say about TV dramas like Law & Order and Criminal Minds it’s this: these TV shows are doing more to teach regular people about psychopathy and narcissism than Christianity ever has. It’s a valuable public service.

A: It goes without saying that you didn’t have TV shows or films to use as teaching aids.

J: True. But we had something almost as good. We had Greco-Roman mythology. We had a complete psychological “language” available to us, a complete collection of cautionary tales that graphically described all the best and all the worst choices a human being can make. There were — are — myths about jealousy. Myths about rape. Myths about prophecy. Myths about hubris. Myths about suffering. Myths about trickery. Myths about bravery. Myths about romance. Myths about empathy. The characters in these myths are archetypes for different psychological states. These archetypes are still quite useful for talking about psychological choices, psychological states. They’re much more memorable than long-winded academic articles full of jargon.

A: And they make better action films, too. I’m thinking of the recent remake of Clash of the Titans.

J: The archetype of psychopathy that worked best for me was the image of Medusa. Not the snake chick from Clash of the Titans — that’s not the version of the myth I knew best — but the version that described Medusa as so hideous to look upon that she had the power to turn you to stone. That’s what the power of psychopaths is like — they’re so frightening, so unrepentant in their pursuit of power and status, that the people around them feel paralyzed, “turned to stone,” unable to move or think, let alone react in self-defense. This is how psychopaths end up running major institutions, corporations, and countries. They just keep on turning people into stone until they get what they want.

A: Which is usually money, power, status, fame.

J: And sexual gratification.

A: Yuck.

J: Respectful, tender, devoted, consensual sexuality between two committed adults is not on the menu for psychopaths. They can pretend for a while, but they get bored. Eventually they go looking for “side dishes” if they think they can get away with it.

A: What happens when you confront a psychopath directly, challenge his or her actions?

J: That’s when the fireworks begin. Psychopaths are often easy to get along with on a day to day basis as long as they believe they’re in full control, as long as they believe they’re receiving the status they “deserve.” They’re especially affable and agreeable at work or at home if people tell them how nice they are. One of the most misunderstood qualities of a psychopath is his or her desperate need to believe that he/she is “a nice person.” It’s their main coping mechanism, believe it or not.

A: Ahead of habits like lying, manipulation, substance abuse, and abusive sexuality?

J: The need to find “proof” that they’re nice is the psychopath’s Number One psychological defense against the truth of his or her unconscionable behaviour.

A: So Hitler believed he was “a nice person.”

J: Oh, absolutely. Same with his close buddies. As a group, they told themselves comfy little lies about what nice people they were and what an important job they were doing for the German people — the German people they loved.

A: Throwing themselves on their swords for the good of the people, eh?

J: That’s how they explained it to themselves. That’s how they managed to keep functioning, despite the severe damage to their biological brains.

A: Hitler had a violent temper and he made irrational military decisions that revolved around “honour.” His honour.

J: That’s what I meant when I said that hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned. When you impugn the “honour” — by that I actually mean the status — of a psychopath or a severe narcissist, you can expect to be on the receiving end of a narcissistic rage reaction. Such a person will not rest until he or she has exacted revenge. The revenge may be physical. It may be psychological. It may be financial or social. Or some combination of these. But you can count on one thing: it’ll hurt like stink, and you’ll probably be deeply traumatized for a long time afterwards. Only occasionally will such a person decide to “let it go” and walk away from the “deservee.”

A: They want to turn you to stone, in other words.

J: This is the reality. It seemed appropriate to me to caution my students about this reality. You could say it was a question of “informed consent.” Is it right to give students a new understanding of how to be in relationship with God and not warn them about the practical consequences of standing up to the bullies, the tyrants, and the religious status seekers? It didn’t seem right to me not to warn them.

A: The version of the Medusa myth I liked best when I was growing up was the version where Perseus cut off Medusa’s head and released the beautiful winged horse Pegasus who was trapped inside. There are other versions of the Pegasus myth, but somehow I liked the idea of the noble creature trapped inside the monster. It made sense to me. Not that I’m endorsing the Gnostic idea of good-soul-trapped-inside-evil-body. I don’t mean it that way. It’s just that so many people misuse their bodies and brains. They choose to ignore their true self — their Pegagus, if you will. They choose to identify with this horrible snake-covered outer mask that enjoys hurting other people, enjoys turning other people into stone. They’re in a complete state of denial about the choices they’re making.

J: Part of the journey of forgiving the Hitlers of the world is the choice to trust that behind every snake-covered Medusan mask of hatred lies the true self — the brave and beautiful Pegasus. A.k.a. the soul. The core consciousness that isn’t being listened to.

A: Ah. But we haven’t got to those teachings yet. Those are the most challenging ones of all.

J: One step at a time. That’s the best anyone can do.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dualism, gender and sexuality, Gnosticism, Gospel of Thomas, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, psychopathy, psychopathy (niceness), status addiction, Thomas 67 and tagged | Leave a Comment
03 Mar 2011

JR17: Interpreting Jesus’ Parables: Some Guidelines

A: Tell me about your parables. Why did you switch from short wisdom sayings to narrative parables as a method of teaching?

J: I switched because wisdom sayings are the easiest thing to pervert if you’re a leader. They’re a convenient source of mind control or brainwashing, if you will. A clever leader can always find a wisdom saying or a biblical law to back up his or her desired position. Such leaders know that regular people will feel guilty and ashamed if they believe they’ve broken an important moral law. Regular people back down quickly when they think they’ve broken moral codes, moral imperatives. That’s a good thing, by the way.

A: Explain who you mean by “regular people.”

J: Balanced individuals. Emotionally mature individuals. People who respect both themselves and the needs of the wider community. Compassionate people. People who reject libertarian values.

A: You once wrote some scathing comments about the Ten Commandments to show how even these supposedly unbreakable laws are interpreted differently by those who are in power and those who don’t have any power.

J: As many political revolutionaries over the centuries have pointed out.

A: And more recently, liberation theologians.

J: The problem with these short wisdom sayings is that they can be given any context that’s convenient. Interpreters of wisdom sayings can claim the sayings must be interpreted literally, if that suits their purpose. More commonly, interpreters claim the sayings are symbolic — filled with hidden esoteric meanings that only the most advanced religious initiates can fully understand. Needless to say, this leads to no end of abuse. If wisdom sayings can be moulded like putty to suit any need, then they have no meaning. There’s a reason that most major world religions are centred around only a few small books of sacred teachings plus vast libraries of commentary and interpretation that run into the thousands and millions of pages. Each new generation of theologians wants to prove how clever they are at “reinterpreting” or “revealing” the hidden message of the short sayings. It’s a cottage industry.

This rock sample on display at the Natural History Museum, London, UK is a perfect visual metaphor for the parables written and taught by Jesus. As you begin to study the parables, you’ll likely see them as a whole and durable stepping stone that combines traditional teachings such as moral obedience with new strands of thought such as forgiveness. Eventually, if you persist in your efforts to know God, the older themes of purity, piety, and perfection wash away and leave only the enduring networks of love, healing, and forgiveness in your heart. When Jesus’ parables start to “pop” like this for you, you know you’ve found the pathway of your own soul. Photo credit JAT 2024.

A: I noticed a while back that if you try to read the whole book of Sirach at one time (the apocryphal book of Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach in the Oxford NRSV Bible) your head feels as if it’s going to explode.

J: That particular scroll was quite popular in Judea and Galilee at the time I was teaching.

A: The author of Sirach just goes on and on and on with endless lists of pithy little wisdom sayings. “Don’t do this.” “Don’t do that.” It’s impossible. Impossible to live up to. They ought to call this book “An Instruction Manual on How to Feel Guilty For Daring to Breathe.”

J: Yes. My mother was fond of quoting from it.

A: I can see how it would appeal to parents trying to govern their children with a firm moral hand. There’s something for every occasion.

J: Yes. Every time you got caught doing something wrong, you could count on getting a lecture, a beating, depending on the severity of the crime, and righteous repetitions of Sirach’s easy-to-remember moral laws.

A: They do stick in one’s head, don’t they? Sort of like “earworms” — those catchy but annoying songs we so often can’t get out of our heads.

J: One of my mother’s favourite moral imperatives was the importance of polite speech. The NRSV translates this favourite of hers as “Pleasant speech multiplies friends, and a gracious tongue multiplies courtesies (Sirach 6:5).” All my life I could hear her voice reciting that phrase whenever people around me started to get rude.

A: I think we all have memories of our parents’ favourite quotations. One of my father’s favourite sayings is, “When all else fails, read the instructions.” I think of this every time I get stuck on a task that would have been a lot easier if I’d read the directions before I started.

J: The problem with a book like Sirach — and it wasn’t the only book in my time to drone on and on about righteousness and obedience — is that it provides no guidance whatsoever, no practical advice at all on how to hear the inner wisdom of your own heart and soul. It’s a “top-down” list of laws, not a “bottom-up” search for meaning, life, purpose, and love. A computer could be programmed to follow all these laws, and would follow them successfully where they don’t contradict each other (as they often do.) But that’s not life. That’s not love. And it’s sure not divine wisdom. It’s just . . . obedience. Blind obedience. There’s no need to draw on your deepest reserves of courage and faith and devotion if all you’re doing is blindly following the laws. And there’s no need for forgiveness. There’s no room in there anywhere for insight. Insight — what writers in the past have called divine wisdom — is a complex blending, a complex interaction of positive emotions plus clear, logical thought plus mature, respectful behaviour. It’s holistic understanding. It’s something more than facts, more than knowledge. Insight is deeply intuitive while at the same time deeply objective. Insight is that hard-to-describe “aha!” moment when understanding suddenly “clicks.” Insight helps you feel more grounded, more connected to reality and to life, not less connected. Insight is the opposite of dissociation.

A: So you were trying to teach people how to find insight, not obedience.

J: Yes. And you can’t teach what insight is by reciting long lists of wisdom sayings. Insight involves the emotions of courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion, so if you’re going to give people practical tools for finding their own talent for insight, you have to speak to those emotions within them. You can’t just speak to the logical mind of the student. You have to speak to the whole of the student’s core self. You have to give them the opportunity to practise hearing. Really hearing. Hearing with their whole being, not just with their logical minds. You have to make them sweat a bit as they struggle to hear the meaning inside their own hearts. If they’re reading or listening to a parable using only the logic circuitry of their brains, they won’t understand the message of the parable. The message isn’t hidden. Nor is it intended to be hidden. But it is intended to make students stretch, to work their “heart” muscles as well as their “intellectual” muscles. It’s intended to encourage them to look at a difficult question from more than one angle. It’s intended to encourage honesty. A parable is meant to be painful, it’s intended to hurt. It doesn’t gloss over the painful truth. It highlights the painful truth, and asks the student to struggle with love and forgiveness despite the pain. That’s what a parable is meant to do.

A: It’s interesting that a person who’s dissociated from his or her core emotions will read your parables in very concrete, literal ways. They won’t get the emotional subtext at all.

J: That’s because they’re using their logic circuitry in unbalanced ways. They look at the “facts.” For them, it’s all they can see or hear. They assume that because there are facts and logic in the parables, the parables can be fully understood in purely logical terms. But they can’t. People get very angry, very hostile, when you tell them they’re being superficial in their reading of the parables. If they can’t feel loving emotions themselves, they want to deny that such emotions exist. They don’t want to admit to themselves or to anybody else that they’re mentally, emotionally, and spiritually imbalanced.

A: They don’t want to admit that they can’t love — that they don’t understand what love is.

J: Yes. And they’ll do everything in their power to avoid facing the issue.

A: Is their inability to love related in any way to their souls? Do they have defective souls that somehow missed out on the whole “love” thing when God was creating their souls?

J: No. Definitely not. Each and every soul in all of Creation knows how to love and forgive. Human beings can blame their upbringing and their own choices — combined in many cases with biological dysfunction in the central nervous system — for their inability to love as adults. People who’ve chosen to be dissociated from their loving emotions shouldn’t be proud of this choice.

A: Usually they have some pretty powerful excuses for their refusal to accept and heal their core emotions.

J: Nobody said it would be easy. That’s a point I tried to make again and again — the healing journey isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.

A: This morning I was rummaging through the Gospel of Thomas, and felt drawn to two parables on pages 68 and 69 of Stevan Davies’s book. When I read these two parables — sayings 63 and 64a in the Gospel of Thomas — I hear you talking about the excuses people make to avoid dealing with the pain of their emotions. I hear you talking about the fact that it’s easier for a “successful” person — a person obedient to logic and the law — than for an impoverished person out on the street to make excuses about sitting down at the table with God in a full relationship of love and trust. I hear you talking about the choices people make. The one thing I do not hear is the explanation that Stevan Davies offers for Saying 64a: “The point of the parable,” says Davies, “may be to hold up the host as an example of one who has failed to think things through (page 71).” To my way of thinking, Davies’s interpretation is logical, but way too literal, way too concrete. He doesn’t get this parable at all.

“Jesus said: Once there was a rich man who had lots of money, and he said, ‘I will invest my money so that I can sow, reap, plant, and fill up my silos with crops so that I won`t lack anything.’ So he thought, but that night he died. He who has ears, let him hear (Gospel of Thomas 63).” “Jesus said: A man entertained guests. When dinner was ready he sent a servant to invite his guests. The servant went to the first one and said, ‘My master invites you,’ but he replied, ‘I have to collect money from some merchants, and they are due to arrive this evening. Therefore I have to do business with them, and I must be excused from the dinner.’ The servant went to another said, ‘My master invites you,’ but he said, ‘I have just bought a house, and I have to spend a day there, so I cannot come. I must be excused.’ He went to the next and said, ‘My master invites you.’ This one replied, ‘My friend is about to be married, and I must organize the dinner. I can`t come. I must be excused.’ Again he went and said to another, ‘My master invites you.’ He replied, ‘I have just bought a village, and I have to go collect the rent. I can’t come and must be excused.’ The servant reported back to his master, ‘those whom you invited to the dinner are unable to come.’ The master said, ‘Go to the roads outside and invite anybody you can find to the dinner (Gospel of Thomas 64a, translated by Stevan Davies).”

 

J: John the Baptist hated my parables. He didn’t understand them, and got very frustrated when some of my students understood something that he — the chosen Messiah — couldn’t grasp.

A: There are no teaching parables in the Gospel of John.

J: He stopped accepting the legitimacy of my parables when he realized I was using them to teach a message that was for all intents and purposes the opposite of his own message. He was also envious and angry because he didn’t understand the emotional meaning interwoven with the logical one.

A: It’s clear enough that in Saying 64a you’re turning the imagery of the Essene Messianic Banquet on its head.

J: That part John understood. He and I were constantly sparring on that issue.

A: No Messianic Banquet for you? No bread and wine? No body and blood? No occult ritual for specially chosen initiates?

J (grinning broadly): Hey. God invites everybody — all people — to the table of divine love, divine trust, divine forgiveness, and so on. If you’re too busy to come . . . well, that’s your problem. Healing and empathy take time. Relationship with God takes time. You want to know what God’s love feels like? You gotta take the time.

A: Obedience and righteousness can’t replace the benefits of good old fashioned time spent with loved ones, time spent with God?

J: Nope.

A: Following all the wisdom sayings in Sirach can’t replace the benefits of time spent in love with God?

J: Nope.

A: Logic alone can’t lead you to God?

J: Nope.

A: So fear of God probably isn’t going to help much either, then?

J: The one thing you’ll never see in my parables is a man who fears God. You’ll see a lot of pain, a lot of grief, but you won’t see fear. In the Kingdom of the Heavens, the methods for dealing with the pain and the grief are forgiveness, honesty, compassion, healing, and equality. This is the feeling of redemption. Redemption is what you feel when you achieve the remarkable insight that forgiveness, not fear, not righteousness, is the only path to being in full relationship with God. Nobody can “give” you this insight from the outside. You have to find it within your own heart, mind, body, and soul. Other people can help you find it, can help you work towards it. However, nobody but you can give you the actual insight. It has to be up to you to accept God’s invitation to come to the table.

A: Where I assume blood and body aren’t on the menu.

J: The table of God’s love is filled with so many wonders, so many joys! Everything that God touches — not just the Eucharistic bread and wine — is filled with divine love. There’s no end to the mystery of redemption, the mystery of love and forgiveness.

A: That sounds suspiciously like a mushy Hallmark card.

J: Angels are incredibly mushy.

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Posted in building your intuition, Davies (Stevan), forgiveness, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, insight, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, John the Baptist, parables, Purity Piety Perfection, redemption, relationship with God and tagged | Leave a Comment
27 Feb 2011

JR16: Riddles in the Gospel of Thomas

A: This morning I was looking through my somewhat dusty copy of The Gospel of Thomas*. In the notes by translator Stevan Davies, I found this statement about the 113 original sayings: “The correct interpretation of the sayings is not the final goal but the means to the goal, the discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven. Thomas’s Gospel is an exercise book, a list of riddles for decoding. The secret lies not in the final answers but in the effort to find the answers (page 2).” How would you respond to that?

“Jesus said: The Kingdom of the Father is like a merchant with goods to sell who found a pearl. The merchant was thoughtful. He sold the merchandise and bought himself the pearl [Gospel of Thomas 76A].” Jesus’ sayings about pearls are difficult for us to understand today because pearls are fairly common and inexpensive. In Jesus’ time, however, pearls were exceedingly rare and couldn’t be faked or counterfeited by clever human beings. Finding a pearl in the Mediterranean was no easy task, either, as most shells brought up through the risky diving process contained no pearls at all. So to randomly find a miraculous pearl was a sign of God’s blessing and truth, a far more valuable gift than the usual man-made goods. From a theological perspective, the merchant decides to set aside his “earthly treasures” and buy into God’s economy, where the benefits are sure and lasting and unrivalled in their beauty. It’s also important to note the merchant makes his choice voluntarily. No one forces him into it. (Shown here is a 17th century pomander made of gold, enamel, and pearls. It’s on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Photo credit JAT 2023.)

J: Well, the way these sayings have come down to modern readers certainly makes them seem like a list of riddles for initiates to decode. There’s no doubt that most Christians today are confused by the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas. Many earnest attempts have been made to interpret the sayings. The problem for today’s commentators is that they — the commentators — lack context. They don’t understand the context in which I spoke the sayings, or the context in which John the Baptist wrote down the sayings. Most Christian commentators are also desperately trying to make the Gospel of Thomas fit comfortably within the traditional orthodox Christian framework. Since the traditional orthodox Western framework is based on the teachings of Paul, rather than on my teachings, it’s a tall order to try to force the Gospel of Thomas into an orthodox understanding of God.

A: Yes. I know what you mean. People seem to want to read the Kingdom of Heaven sayings in a traditional eschatological way. They want the Kingdom to be about a future time, a future place. They want the Kingdom to be the special heaven that’s close to God, the place where God’s specially chosen people will end up on Judgment Day.

J: An idea that’s very old, in fact. And not restricted to orthodox Christianity, either. The Essenes of my day believed deeply in both eschatology and apocalyptic visions of the future End of Days.

A: How widespread were those Essene ideas?

J: The people I was teaching seemed to know a lot about the Essene prophecies for the coming End Times. Of course, that’s not surprising, since John the Baptist was part of our teaching circle.

A: You say that John the Baptist wrote down the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas. Yet biblical scholars have remarked on the fact that there’s no congruence between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John. The sayings found in Thomas appear frequently in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. But not in John. If John wrote down the sayings collected in the Gospel of Thomas, why don’t any of those sayings appear in his later writings?

J: As I mentioned a few days ago, John and I had a complicated relationship spread over several years. When I first sought out John, I was the student and he was the teacher.

A: Even though he was only 18 at the time?

J: Lifespans were much shorter then for most people. It wasn’t unusual for young adults to take on great responsibilities. If they waited too long to get on with life, they might be dead. So yes — there were teachers who were quite young. What mattered in John’s case was his education, his mastery of the material. It was clear he was highly trained in Jewish religious texts. Who was going to argue with a guy who had memorized big scrolls like Isaiah and could recite them verse by verse?

A: How old were you when you first met John?

J: I was older. About twenty-three, twenty-four. By that time I’d been married, divorced, had lost my daughter to illness, and had spent about a year at a Hellenistic “medical school.” I was so old in heart and spirit that I felt about 50. I was also half bald by then. Probably from all the family stress I was under.

A: I can see how it would have been appealing to sit under a tree and talk about God with other like-minded people.

J: Yes. I was an emotional wreck. And, like so many other people whose lives have been torn apart by tragedy, I needed answers. That’s why, when I heard about John’s amazing new teachings, I sought him out.

A: What was your initial impression of him?

J: He had this serene, otherworldly quality about him, as if he was above all the turmoil and tragedy of the world around him. When you asked him a question about current life, current realities, he always answered with a religious verse. He was so confident that all the answers could be found in the holy texts.

A: What did he look like?

J: He was a big man. Very tall, very robust in stature. I’d use the word “hearty.” Hearty as in big, friendly, strong, salt of the earth. Not polished. Not sophisticated. Homespun and down to earth. I thought he was wonderfully natural in comparison to the elegant Hellenistic Jews I’d grown up with.

A: Again, I can see the appeal.

J: His voice was a rich baritone. He’d been trained in the arts of speaking and rhetoric, that was for sure. He understood cadence, rhyme, repetition — all the tricks of persuasive speech. He was always throwing in bits and pieces of wisdom — small, apt phrases and wisdom sayings. It made him sound very wise. Until I started to notice he had no original thoughts of his own. He could recite ancient wisdom sayings, but he couldn’t process new ideas, new insights. That was part of the mental illness that was slowly simmering on the back burner of his mind.

A: He kept saying the same things over and over.

J: Yes. Also, he couldn’t seem to learn from his own mistakes. Or from the mistakes of others. That was his narcissism. His narcissism got in the way of his ability to admit he’d made mistakes.

A: Eventually you overtook him in the role of teacher in your group. Is that right?

J: The group started to fracture. He had his own loyal followers, who insisted he was still the leader, the long-prophesied Jewish Messiah. Some of the group began to listen to some of the new things I was saying about God. I was actually saying something new about God. John was not. People split down the lines of “belief in tradition” versus “belief in change.” Those who believed in change payed less and less attention to John. He hated that.

A: Describe his reaction to your teachings and in particular to your healing ministry.

J: When I first started doing some teaching, John didn’t mind. He believed at first that I was mimicking his own wisdom, that I was “copying” him. I was tentative at first. I stuck to fairly traditional teaching methods, such as short wisdom sayings. I created some new sayings — nothing too radical at first — and John liked these. He wrote them down when they appealed to him.

A: Did he claim these sayings as his own?

J: He was having trouble separating his own thoughts and feelings from other people’s thoughts and feelings. There was a blurring of boundaries. When he heard me speaking these things, he believed I was somehow transmitting his own thoughts. Broadcasting them. This is a typical symptom of schizophrenia, although these days people with delusions more often believe the TV or radio or Internet are broadcasting their thoughts.

A: So he identified with those sayings?

J: Yes. If you pay careful attention to the tone of the Thomasine sayings, you’ll see that he picked all the sayings that are vague and somewhat cliched.

A: Like traditional wisdom sayings that were widespread in the Ancient Near East.

J: Yes. He picked the short, pithy phrases that resonated with his early training, his early education. Phrases that sound wonderful at first, but say nothing specific. No names, no dates, no places. Lots of metaphors. More poetry than anything. Feelings without facts. Sort of . . . dissociated. Otherworldly. Detached. Serene. But not very helpful when you have difficult questions you want answers for.

A: There’s a marked lack of context in the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas. They could have been written almost anywhere by anyone. There’s a quality of “timelessness” to the book. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean the tone is kind of spacey, kind of “out of it.” Not fully engaged with reality or with life.

J: That’s how John came across. It was a sign of his major mental illness, and shouldn’t be mistaken by others as wisdom. No one who’s suffering from schizophrenia should be placed on a religious pedestal and labelled “wise.” People suffering from schizophrenia need firm, compassionate care, not reinforcement of their delusions.

A: Mental illness was not understood 2,000 years ago.

J: Well, as with all things, that depended on the person. Not all people then believed that psychotic behaviour was a sign of demon possession, just as not all people believed that physical infirmities were a sign of divine judgment from God. Cultural ideas about mental illness usually dictate how a mentally ill person is treated by the majority. But there’s always a minority who understand mental illness to be just that — an illness. You can’t blame everything on cultural ideas. Just because the majority of people in my culture believed in demon possession was no excuse for them to go with the “status quo” on these illnesses. There was plenty of solid science, solid scientific research at the time. In fact, there was more interest in solid scientific research then than there would be in Europe for many years. So I have no sympathy for the attempts made by Christian theologians to excuse the cruel treatment of the mentally ill that appears in the Bible. It wasn’t acceptable then, and it isn’t acceptable now. The author of Mark tries to make that point very clear.

A: You know what’s weird? I remember that when I first looked at the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas — some years before I set out on my path of becoming a mystic — I felt very stupid because I couldn’t make hide nor hair of the wisdom that seemed to be hidden in the sayings. They felt like riddles I couldn’t solve. Just as Stevan Davies says in his notes.

J: And now?

A: Now most of the sayings make perfect sense to me — but only because I fully understand the religious and social and medical context in which they were spoken. You know, there’s actually some pretty good stuff in there if you know what to look for.

J: Thank you.

A: Hey. No worries. You can spend the next umpteen years fleshing out those sayings and explaining in more detail what you meant way-back-when.

J: I look forward to it.

 

* Stevan Davies, Translator. The Gospel of Thomas. Boston & London: Shambhala, 2004.

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Posted in A.N.E. Wisdom literature, Davies (Stevan), Essenes, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, John the Baptist, religion and mental Illness and tagged , | Leave a Comment

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