87 The reality is one and indivisible

LG87

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

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

Paul also says in Galatians:

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

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

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

The gospel of Philip 11 says it this way:

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

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

In Thomas 22, Jesus says:

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

And in Logion 106, Jesus says:

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

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

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

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

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, that’s not it.

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

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

Being free can only be found in wholeness.

106 Son of a human (Son of man)

LG106

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

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

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

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

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

61Self-image and the true self

LG61

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

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

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

Salome said:
I’m your student/pupil.

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

61a

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing your image constructs is the beginning of redemption.

61b

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

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

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

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

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

She also gives a preliminary answer:

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

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

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

I come on behalf of an equal.

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

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

66 The unsung ground of your existence

LG66

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

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

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

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

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

What is that keystone doing here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it mean?

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

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

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

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

51 The new earth is already there

LG51

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

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

The first logion of the Thomas gospel started like this:

Everyone who understands these words
death will not taste.

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

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

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

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

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

When will the new earth come?

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

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

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

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

113 The kingdom is spread over the earth

LG113

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

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

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

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

It can be different.

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

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

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

They are the inhabitants of the kingdom.

2 Second Promise: You will be like a king

LG2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and freedom as an inseparable couple

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

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

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

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

Love is not obediently following commandments.

Love is the moral touchstone of a free human.