Friday April 19, 2013 4:40 p.m.

Gospel of Thomas

Logion 42

Yeshua says,

Come into being
as you pass
away. (Lynn Baumann)

Be passersby (Leloup)

Becomes passersby (Pagels)

Passerby sounds like someone who is not involved. In the story of the Good  Samaritan, the passersby are not the heroes in the story. Too many people are passersby.

But in the positive sense a passerby is one who is not attached to form. Pointing towards what is known in the tradition as “witnessing presence” which gives westerners lots of trouble. This is not about self-consciousness.

Witnessing is a new presence and a new consciousness that gets carved into you by meditation practice. It is a capacity not to get hooked.

Sufi tradition has a saying, “Solitude in crowds” – “In all your outward doing remain inwardly free. Learn not to identify yourself with anything whatsoever.”

If attachment is not our motivation most of us can only think of identity. We use this sense of placing our identity in something to build motivation.

Gerald May – “As attachment (or identification) ceases to be your motivation your actions become reflections of compassion absolute.”

Objectively we swim in a sea of mercy. Mercy is the fundamental substance out of which all else is made. The fundamental building block of reality is mercy. The currents and energy which uphold this world, all set towards compassion. As we get out of the way we discover this. As we do what we think is the most counter-intuitive action in the world, loosening our grip, what grows up in the space we have allowed is not apathy but compassion (“feeling with”).

When you begin to trust what goes on at the deeper level you begin to trust that you are carried by something deeper.

There is a Faulkner story “A Rose for Emily” of a poor woman who was refusing to be jilted by her fiance so she poisoned him, put him in bed and slept with his corpse for the rest of her life. The townsfolk are wondering about Miss Emily and why her beau isn’t coming around any more. Finally, they go into the house and the bedroom and find the corpse next to which is a bit of silver grey hair.

This isn’t so far away from the reality we so often construct – “You say you love me but you won’t let me grow, how can you call this love?”

Be the light traveler, the one who is not hooked. A constant thread throughout the GoT is that it is ok to be on the horizontal axis, we have to do that, but if we get hooked there we lose our effectiveness on both axises.

Logion 56

Yeshua says,

Those who make knowledge
of the cosmos their reality
have made freinds with a corpse,
but the cosmos is not worthy
of those who know it to be so.

Cosmos = horizontal axis made into an end in itself. We have a 2,000 year tradition of mis-communication around the term “world” or “cosmos” –  there is such a negativity coming out of things like Jesus saying, “You must hate the world”. A pervasive thread has said that if you want to get to heaven, you have to stomp on the world. This is mis-identification of the world as the enemy.

In point of fact, “world” in the inner tradition means simply the horizontal axis considered as an end in itself. We are in the “world” when we forget the vertical axis. Forgetting that life is lived on a bi-axial grid and it is only when the two are interwoven that either has any meaning.

We forget we came from a larger place and narrow our sights and become useless to the earth plane and the heaven plane. If you are trying to get all your needs met at the level of cosmos/world you have made friends with a corpse. Something more is required of human beings – infusing into the earth plane supernatural life and handing up its heart made precious through your conscious interaction with it.

It is a tremendous privilege and responsibility to get to play in this dimension, because things get brought into manifestation here that can’t be brought into manifestation anywhere else.

Refusing to tangle with the game of life. Cautious, hedge my bets, avoid rocking the boat so you can finally get to heaven is not what the spiritual traditions call us to. We are offered an enormous invitation to say yes moment by moment by moment to the grace of being alive.

We live in a bi-axial realm.

Your anxiety comes from your search for tranquility. Accept chaos and peace will certainly follow.

When Eastern religion hit the shores of the west and eastern unity meshed with western ambition we got a huge preference for one kind of state over another. We came to believe that we should always be perfectly peaceful, that we could reach a state where there was no ego yapping all the time. The real way to begin to manifest with this is simply to see what is going on. Look and inquire – why?

There is nothing you can do except to live in your own skin.

Bede Griffiths –  “Enlightenment is not the achievement of a single desired state but the ability to be ok in all states.”

You can very easily be pushed into egoic fussiness. So when you fall into what you think is a lesser state just notice it and be ok. Your old identity is a psychologically constructed being. Your  new identity is a spiritually constructed being.

Philip Booth – wherever it leads you
you are bound to recognize the place.

Spiritual work is done so that we can begin to live with death already behind us and live with real joy and usefulness here. Once you ask to wake up, everything will work in your own life to bring you to the place you began from.

There are a lot of people who seem to have no interest in this at all. The best way to behave is not to comment on that. You never know what’s percolating in people.

Keep your attention in your self and allow God to draw the journey of others.

Meister Eckhart – “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

When you begin waking up you are already being led in your unfolding.

Each level has some sort of food/gift that it renders collectively out of the particular endowment it has. And human beings are gifted with reflective consciousness which makes it possible for us to create. We are the only species that has the ability to take money and turn it into generosity. We can make real things that have no bodies – peace, compassion. When we do that these become the energies that are offered back up into the cosmos.

The chronic aberrations of humanity around greed, aggression, fear don’t just rain down on our planet as ecological pollution but when we collectively offer up energy bodies like greed and fear, these are psychic toxins and they rain back down on the planet. We are psychologically poisoning our planet by our inability to bear and give forth the gifts of the Spirit. These are the things human beings are supposed to produce. It requires a certain collective intelligence, a regaining a vision of human purpose.

In the good old days we were kept to the task by cruel means. We produced because we were scared not tt. But now  what are people putting back into the cosmos?

It is not an invitation it is an obligation. As we fail the luminous web is jeopardized.

What really moves and transforms and transfigures is not strategies or projects but energies. When you raise the energy to a differnt level than different things happen. Getting people together for problem solving often ends up in wrangles if they don’t have enough being to make seeing possible.

Logion 68

Yeshua says,

Blessed are you who
in the midst of persecution,
when they hate
and pursue you
even to the core of your being,
cannot find “you” anywhere. (Baumann)

“Place” – when the disciples gather and ask Jesus – Master where do you come from? Are we talking about a physical place or an imaginal place?

Your being isn’t hooked. Surrendered people are not wimps. They draw on something extraordinarily powerful.

Talks about a kind of total freedom.

But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb
   and by the word of their testimony,
for they did not cling to life even in the face of death. (Revelation 12:11)

The seed of the seed of the soul that is indestructible becomes the source from which all can be reconstructed.

Centurion – “truly this man was the son of God” – when we live by the laws that transcend  the survival of the self at all costs, a fragrance is emitted from that death that is not only a fragrance but is a power. When one lives according  to this principle blessed are you who are persecuted, the energetic impact of the moment of your leaving this planet will be an extraordinary jolt to the planet. The big bang that was Jesus is not finished.