Apostolic Succession Revisited

The following is adapted from a post, dated 10/31/2008, which I made to a forum on the Gospel of Thomas on Yahoo.

The notion of the Apostolic Succession is a foundational concept of the Christian religion, particular in the RC church, presumably establishing a lineage of spiritual truth all the way back to the twelve apostles. The concept however in effect is a bit of a contradiction in terms, since spiritual truth is known within, and only needs to be remembered, and it is not discrete knowledge, like an art or craft or some such, which is passed down from father to son. In the following I explore the fundamental level confusion between the spiritual and worldly domains on which the concept is based.

"Religion" is the ego's reaction formation against spirituality, for the simple reason that spirituality threatens the ego. Once the mind empowers the idea of separation and therefore duality, it now conceives of mind as an epifunction of the body, since the original oneness of spirit is a threat to the dream of a separate identity (body). I use the term body here more or less in the theosophical sense of everything to do with a separate identity, i.e. astral, etheric, mental, causal, and phsycial.

This conflict was raging in the early years after Jesus's ministry, and the fundamental difference was about the question: Is the knowledge within everyone of us, or is the knowledge imparted from outside? Jesus knows we are spirit, and that's all he taught, and he knows the thruth is our natural state, and all the rest is made up, or as he puts it in Logion 3, the Kingdom or God's Rule, as it is called in the Pursah version, is within. Paul turns the whole thing on its ear, and puts the body central, which is why he ultimately comes down on saying that, the resurrection is of the flesh. So Paul is emblematic of the dualistic re-interpretation of the teaching of the oneness of spirit, and subverting it to a teaching of separate individuals in the realm of time and space. Since this is fundamentally a lie, it now has the psychological need to seek reassurance, and having made the separate identity the basis of everything, as opposed to the oneness of spirit, it then must turn around and convince others of its position, that is the fundamental feature of the ego (separated) mind, and its fundamental need to proselytize. Since it conceives of itself as separated, it then needs witnesses to attest to its substitute reality, and within the dream it now goes out and seeks reassurance of its position by convincing others, really to convince itself. Note that in the end the outcome in this world is always that some will agree with it, and some won't, and that this does not matter, for it is the dualistic battle about its position which reinforces the notion that separated existence is the basis of reality.

Within this context, Jesus, teaching in parables, tells Simon that instead of doubting, which is the ego's condition (duality), he is to put his trust in spirit, which is the foundation of Jesus' church, namely the oneness of the sonship. In other words the experience of the sonship is only available to us if we newly entrust ourselves to spirit as our reality and our foundation, in that realization lies the oneness of spirit. Paul, c.s. misunderstood this and interpreted Jesus dualistically, re-framing the entire thing around the reality of separate bodies, and instead of understanding Jesus's reference to uniting with him in spirit, they turned it into a game of collecting bodies in a building. So what they heard Jesus say was that they were put into the real estate business, and given a license to market their interpretation his words, and they should go and convince other people of the same thing. In this model, wisdom, gnosis, etc. is also of necessity reinterpreted as something I have, i.e. my body has a brain, and my mind is an epifunction of my brain, and it is capable of acquiring wisdom. Since in their model the teacher dies (on the cross), and he's late coming back (Second Coming gets postponed, because they see it as something of the body, which it isn't), these followers now empower themselves as substitute teachers, in the business of preserving (their version) of the teachings until the real teacher comes back. The real beauty of this business model is that its basic premise can never be fulfilled, so within the illusion of this world of separate existence, it is the closest thing you can get to a license in perpituity, and the defining property is that they declare the truth to be something they have and nobody else does, so unless you join them you're out of luck. Knowledge and salvation are now special.

To Jesus the truth, and gnosis (if you will) is within, and merely needs to be manifested in our experience by living it, which is done through following him to the Kingdom, which again is the oneness of spirit. His teaching then is that since what we fundamentally are is spirit, we may deny it temporarily, but that doesn't change it. And so the split occurs between Jesus teaching the oneness of spirit, in which truth is one, and absolutely universal, since it is what we are. Contrary to that, the emergent religions subvert this teaching into various flavors in which the truth is not one, rather the truth is something separate, which they own, and which they will teach you if you join them. So now a scarcity model is created and a dependent relationship formed, in which you no longer are a child of God, but at best an adopted child as Paul puts it. The fundamental split is then between on the one hand, knowing that gnosis is within each and everyone of us, because it is the reality of what we are and where we come from. We want to return to it to live in the mold Jesus shows us, and what we need to do is join with him in spirit and live his reality, as he demonstrated it to us by his own life. Or, on the other hand to buy the interpretations of Peter, Paul and others, in which truth is a good, which they own and control, and I can only have it by joining them and relying on their imparting that truth to me. So now a codependent relationship is born, in which a "vicar of Christ," i.e. a placeholder for Christ, is the authority to which I must turn, to have the truth, which by myself I do not have.

In this latter model, there is now a need to establish that the "Vicar of Christ" is in fact the rightful owner of the truth, and since the model implies that the truth is a something, a good, which was imparted to a certain group of people by some mythical true teacher (Paul's Jesus myth), the need arises to establish a chain of custody, that shows the world this group are the rightful owners, et voilà there you have the need for the theology of apostolic succession, which you only ever need if you believe as does the emergent religion that the truth is not one, and that you own it, and once everyone accepts that you own it and they don't, you now are on the winning team, and you get to set the rules.

Fundamentally gnosis is the expression of inner knowing, in which we relate to God from the total certainty of spirit (this is the rock Jesus was talking about to Simon Peter), and can merely help each other as brothers to learn to live in that reality more and more. To treat gnosis in the mold of the nascent religious model of Paul c.s., as a good that is to be imparted by specific teachers to specific students is a profound confusion of what gnosis is in the first place, and it is born only from a need to mimic the other guys. The very point is that since the truth is true, and utterly inevitable, the Kingdom is our only reality whether we believe it or not. Thus the only mission is to wake up from the dream in which the separated existence appears to be our reality.

Maddeningly therefore it is only because of the reality of Jesus' teaching that the discontinuity happens that people "get it" outside of a structured tradition, since it is not a linear good, but a truth about the nature of reality in a holographic universe. The reality of spirit is our reality. It is accessible at any time when anybody places their faith on that "rock," independent of specific teachers or teachings, and this is why the church's monopoly on truth never works. They solved this dilemma historically by the system of sainting some people who seemed to speak that truth, usually this meant coopting them if they failed in suppressing them, but again since their very premise is wrong they inevitably make mistakes and saint some idiots and reject some others who were true saints, but were declared heretics by the church, and during much of history were either excommunicated or murdered. The only reason it does not work in the end is because truth is simply true, and is not made by anyone, or any particular institution. This is the same phenomenon which Victor Fraenkel, and the sisters ten Boom observed in the concentration camps, that ultimately spirit cannot be killed or stamped out.

The problem lies that from the notion of gnosis as a direct inner understanding of God, truth, and the reality of Heaven, in reaction to the other groups, religious communities are formed, which end up speaking of gnosis as a something, which it isn't by definition. And again, since there is this seeming discontinuity in our experience in time, it can then occur that Valentinus in the 2nd century perhaps understood Jesus better than many seeming teachers in between, when he spoke of Jesus laughing under the tree while his body was being crucified. So Valentinus understood what the church didn't, namely that Jesus was teaching the reality of spirit, and the resurrection, whereas the creed of the church was based on the reality of the body (separation and duality), and the crucifixion. Thus the early church was--despite the crocodile tears--not disappointed when Jesus missed his appointment (Second Coming), but they were extatic, for that was the premise that kept them in business, and again the business model crucially depends on maintaning the belief that there will be a Second Coming at a future time, for that is their emotional hold on the community they create. It also makes a lie of everything Jesus taught, namely that the Kingdom is right in front of your nose, you just don't see it, because you're looking with the wrong pair of glasses. And the deal that he offers is, is to learn to look with his glasses, and see reality (spirit).

In short, the very notion of gnosis as an incontrovertible inner knowing of reality, that is accessible to us any time because our reality is that we are the son of God, in whom he is well pleased, make it into an contradiction in terms to think that gnosis is something that is to be handed down in some form of apostolic succession. It can't not be handed down, because it is the truth.