Your Immortal Reality

The full title of the book is: Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death, and for reference purposes on the Yahoo! group on Gary's work, it was promptly abbreviated to YIR. Within the work of Gary Renard, this book is the most important one with respect to the Thomas Gospel specifically, for it is here that Pursah gives us her version of the text, which comes in Chapter 7.  Her presentation lines up well with history. While the Nag Hammadi library was clearly buried around the time that Bischop Athanasius was propounding the Canon of the New Testament, and would-be Christians were turning violent against any books that disagreed with the accepted positions, and therefore around 375 CE. We know from the correspondence with the fragments of Greek Text which we have from a find dating back to the end of the 19th century that the text of the Thomas Gospel existed in similar form in Greek, which would have been the original language, in ca. 140 CE. And circumstantially it is now clear that the Thomas Gospel must have existed as an identifiable collection ca. 50 CE, or within the first 20 years after Jesus's death.

Pursah's proposition is that she is reducing the collection of 114 sayings to a presumed kernel of 70 sayings, corresponding to 71 in the Nag Hammadi collection because of the contraction of Logia 6 &14. Her edits are mostly fairly cosmetic, but for a few cases. In all cases her edits produce a crisper statement, without any compromise, usually leaving off stuff that feels like it could very reasonably be suspect. Her proposed contraction, discussed on page 161 of the book, of 6 & 14 into one statement makes so much sense, that one wonders why we did not think of it ourselves. In short her edited version is very convincing, and leaves off about 1/3 of the collection, of which Pursah says they were generally added later and subject to some amount of correction, and in the process some inner contradictions are removed. In short she proposes, based on her recollection, that these 70 sayings she selects are the ones she can vouch for were very close to the original, going sofar as to say that if you rendered these in Aramaic, you would have just about the words Jesus spoke back then. As I've argued in my book, Closing the Circle, the rest is a personal decision, quite along the lines of the distinction William James made between formal and personal religion: we have only our own inner compass to go by if we want to rely on Pursah's version. I did, and I even wrote a book about it. So for me it's a done deal. One important comment Pursah makes, which should be obvious, but merits mention here, is that quite evidently the Thomas Gospel is not a complete presentation of Jesus's thought system. The quotes are a bunch of pearls on a string, however in the treatment in both DU and YIR, it becomes evident that the string is the thought system of the Holy Spirit of which we do have a very profound and complete presentation in the form of A Course In Miracles.

The book as a whole is a continuation of Gary's deeply inspiring personal learning experience of the Course, as guided by Arten and Pursah. And in spite of all the clowning around he does, giving us so many ways to recognize ourselves in his exploits, he remains thoroughly humble in his overall presentation, presenting himself as just another Course student, but sharing with us just exactly how much it is all in the application, not in the theory. If Gary could learn it, we could too. We may not have the experiences he has, but we can still learn from his experiences, and the implicit promise is that to us all experience will come along the way in forms that we can understand. So it is never about imitating the form, as was the old Christian misunderstandig about the Imitatio Christi, which was the early Christian belief that if we only let ourselves be crucified for our tenaciously held beliefs we would go to heaven. Of course that was never what Jesus meant to teach, and he firmly disabuses us of that notion in the Course. It is always about learning to walk the talk, and Gary's sharing his own struggles with us via these books remains a powerful encouragement that we can do the Course, for we all can identify with him, since we've all done what he's done, and sometimes worse, or at least different variations. But in the process he really works through all the issues we all have with learning the Course.

The Meaning of the Thomas Gospel

It pays to dig deeper. It always does. My own experiences with the Thomas gospel started innocently enough. My mindset from very early on was one of feeling that Jesus was a teacher who I wanted to find, but somehow he seemed buried under the archaeological rubble of stories, theories, theology and dogma about him, which had pretty much obliterated anything he might have ever said. I was pretty much raised in the notion that the churches were not the place to start looking. As a young man, and literate in Greek, I began to focus on the fact that Jesus had spoken Aramaic, and began to study the Aramaicisms in NT Greek, guided by the likes of Gustaf Dalman and Matthew Black, which led nowhere fast, other than some interesting dabbling in Aramaic, but never any meaningful mastery, for by that time I began to see how ludicrous the attempt was. Surely if Jesus really was who I thought he was, he was not dependent on my learning Aramaic, just because that was his language 2,000 years ago. In retrospect I recognize that experience as clear guidance, and that he was saying to me that he was perfectly capable of speaking my language, so there was no use in taking the long way around. So I decided the exercise was silly, and not worth pursuing further.

Thomas popped up in my teens because my parents went to a lecture by Prof. Gilles Quispel, and excitement was in the air over hearing something perhaps more original than the gospels we had. Somehow it was to be still a few decades before Thomas was to start getting the attention it deserved, because of the increasing recognition that it did in fact predate the Canonical Gospels and more importantly the Inventor of Christianity, aka. Paul of Tarsus. But the Thomas Gospel is a symbol, and its history is itself a parable, of how we buried (but literally!) the clearest record of the teachings of Jesus, which have an immediacy, that still speaks to us today, with more force of directness than almost any of the stories about him.

When in the 3rd Logion he tells us in colorful imagery not to listen to the teachers that tell you the Kingdom is elsewhere, then this is quite in the same vein as the Course's notion of a "Journey without distance to a goal that has never changed," (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7) and the Jesus speaking to us wants to be invited into our life here and now--whenever here and now is, for we are always in the moment, unless we take another ego detour which merely validates the time-space framework of the world. The whole ego-ploy that made him into a religion, not to mention an important historical figure, in fact separates him from us and us from him, and puts him on a pedestal. "Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world,"  the Course says (ACIM:C-5.5). This presence and immediacy which is asking for our attention, places us in the borderland between learning and knowing, which is described in the Course as follows: "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you."

So having the Kingdom is entirely possible to us, but we're our own worst enemies as long as we hold on to "something else," and the forgiveness process of the Course, as much as the core of any other spiritual path must be the gradual realization that the ego's "something else," is nothing, and giving it up is no sacrifice, once we start wondering why we are holding on for dear life to smeothing so totally valueless. A key passage in the Course describes it thus:

No one who comes here but must still have hope, some lingering illusion, or some dream that there is something outside of himself that will bring happiness and peace to him. 2 If everything is in him this cannot be so. 3 And therefore by his coming, he denies the truth about himself, and seeks for something more than everything, as if a part of it were separated off and found where all the rest of it is not. 4 This is the purpose he bestows upon the body; that it seek for what he lacks, and give him what would make himself complete. 5 And thus he wanders aimlessly about, in search of something that he cannot find, believing that he is what he is not. (ACIM:T-29.VII.2)

And again, to come back to Thomas, this Jesus who is here with us, now, in the moment if we let the book speak to us, tells us in Logion 42 to "Be passersby,"  to climb in the observer's seat (with Jesus naturally), for looking at the ego with him is the process which will undo the ego's spell. The ego not only sells us the Brooklyn Bridge, but the whole universe, all of time and space, and for the longest time we all think it is quite something, much like Plato's prisoners believe they are seeing reality on the wall in their cave. Yet the way out is right here, in front of our face, if we honestly look with the forgiveness of Jesus (doing it alone we may feel stupid having bought the damn bridge, let alone the rest of it), for only with his love beside us can we gently let it go. So our shortest way home always starts right here, if we choose to rely on this Internal Teacher who is as our Elder Brother, offering us his guiding hand to help us find the way home, for in Logion 5 he is quoted as saying:

Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.

(Pursah's Gospel of Thomas, in Your Immortal Reality, P. 163)

The resurrection is ours if we will only open the book, and sit with it, and realize he's talking to us, and he'll walk right off the page, if we'd just let him in.