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.