22 Make the two one
LG22
The eyes of Jesus fell on children who were fed.
He said to his students:
These children who are being suckled
are like those who enter the kingdom.
They said to him:
Should we be like these children,
to enter into the kingdom?
Jesus said to them:
When you have made the two one,
when you make the inside as the outside
and the outside as the inside
and the top and bottom,
and when you make the male and the female one,
so that the masculine is no longer masculine
and the feminine not feminine,
if you make eyes instead of an eye,
and a hand where there is a hand
and a foot where there is a foot,
and an image where there is an image
then you will enter into the kingdom.
Again such a typical misunderstanding. Jesus says you have to become like children being suckled. And the students literally understand that comment and wonder how that is possible. But of course that’s not the point. This image of a child on the mother’s breast is a symbol. But of what?
It clearly has to do with what follows: to make the two one, or to break the dualities.
People tend to divide reality into good and evil, friend and foe, men and women, heaven and earth, matter and spirit. Everything they experience is interpreted in those dualities. And a value judgment is almost always attached to this. One half of reality is good, the other is bad. But with that you lose sight of the totality, the unity of everything. It makes you blind.
Blindness arises when you look at reality through the eyes of your own value judgments. Your own judgment about the divided reality is the proverbial bar in your own eye. By despising one half of reality, and glorifying the other half, you lose sight of the wholeness of reality, including wholeness of yourself. So you not only become blind to the reality outside of you, but also to the reality within you.
Your value judgment about divided reality lends a veil to everything behind which real reality is hidden. You see the interpretation, the judgment, not the real, whole reality. If you let go of the attachment to that value judgment about reality, that veil falls away. Therefore you also restore yourself to your original unity.
On the one hand everything is the same, a hand is still a hand, a foot is still a foot, and at the same time everything is completely different, totally new. It is as if you are only now seeing everything for the first time.
For a child everything is one. His food, breast milk, is one. There is no duality in that breast milk yet.
The mother breast in this logion is of course also a symbol, and here depicts the cosmic mother breast, “the Source of all being.” The cosmic Source of all being knows no dualities, that is, dualities are not part of reality. Dualities are judgments about reality imposed by humans afterwards, but are not part of reality itself.
For the one life that flows from the cosmic mother’s breast, the text from the Gnostic Gospel of Philip (10) applies:
Light and darkness, life and death, right and left are brothers of each other. They cannot be separated from each other. For that reason, neither the good nor the bad are bad and life is not just life and death is not just dead.
Therefore everyone will be dissolved to its origin.
The “origin” in this text of Philip to which we will be dissolved is depicted in this logion in the mother’s breast. If we are ‘dissolved’ from duality, we can again feed on that cosmic mother’s breast that feeds all life, all life and not just that one half of duality.
