God, Is That The Word

Joe Croker sends me this song about Thomas, and I'm reproducing the text here, as well as his Biblical references.


God, Is That The Word?
By Joe Croker

Peaches and plums -- ripe them up distant sun, burning empty eye
Old men saw God inside, but even you will die -- even you will die
Burst and turn to stone: white dwarf or black little hole
Peaches and plums -- get sweet then they come undone

Look up in the sky -- Orion burns, galactic eye … galaxy so wide
White silk spread in the black of night, it’s

God, is that the word?  Is that the word?  God, is that the word?

Sometimes late at night in the warm pool of my little mind
The softest colors glow -- somehow everything I know
I’m just a little boy -- so at home, so unmoored -- it’s

God, yeah that's the word.  That's the word?  God that's the word.

Thomas wanted the bloody cloths, the fingers in the wounds
The Lord appears, no one swoons … deceptively mundane
Sort of like most everything, but he’s

God, is that the word?  That's the word --  that's the word. 
God, is that the word?
Or is that absurd?

Tackle, trim, bridle, bit: the long-haired mare, girl riding it
On into the barn … undress upon the straw
You’re so pure, you got it all, it’s

God …

•

John 20:24-29
John 20:24    But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.

John 20:25    The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.

John 20:26   And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

John 20:27   Then saith he to Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.

John 20:28   And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.

John 20:29   Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

And, of course you can buy his album at the ITunes store
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=287193905&s=1434

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some notes to the above.

No doubt Thomas was "on" to the fact that Jesus was inside, not out, that the Kingdom was inside, not outside, etc., based on the material in the Thomas Gospel, and the song reflects that. The quotes from the Gospel of John show the caricature of Thomas, in the Gospel stories, and it is dubious if that was about the real Thomas or just made up for effect. 

The Thomas character in the Johannine tradition is "the doubting Thomas," who represents all of us in a way, portraying the sign of Virgo, and insisting in typical ego manner that form comes before content, or that unless I see the physical proof, I won't believe anything, which turns things on their head. The cause is in the mind, and physical reality is but a reflection of that, and not the other way around, as the Virgo characteristic wants to believe. Since we weren't there, we won't know, but it might be that the "historical" Thomas was in fact this doubter at times and a real Virgo, however, if so, he certainly did learn the message of Jesus later in life to be able to compose the Thomas Gospel as we know it. In that case maybe he once was the doubting Thomas, who later outgrew his doubts. The beatification "pure of heart" who shall "see" God is of course the outcome of those who overcome exactly these doubts, and then, in accepting the atonement for ourselves, which is the completion of the forgiveness process, we would come to "see," i.e. experience God. (notes on the astrological nature of the Thomas character based on J.W. Kaiser, Beleving van het Evangelie, Uitg. Synthese, (p. 216-217). The word the Course tends to use for this "seeing" is vision, which again has nothing to do with the physical eyes, but everything with the question of with whom we are doing the seeing. With the ego we will always see the world of separation, with the Holy Spirit we will "see" the universe of Love.

Closing the Circle, Squared

At least. And there may be more than two... circles that are being closed, I mean.

When picking a name for this book, I quickly noticed that the name that suggested itself to me was not all that original, and that the subtitle would have to clarify exactly what circles were being closed here. Nevertheless the name seemed appropriate, and the publisher agreed, so closing the circle it was.

The main circle that was being closed, and the overt point of the book, was for me the living connection between the Jesus of the Thomas gospel and the protagonist of A Course In Miracles.

Another circle that is being closed by means of this book, starts with my connection with the work of Johan Willem Kaiser, whose work early in life set me on a track of understanding that the issue was not a moral conversion as in the Pauline traditions of Christianity, but the actual following of Jesus as a living reality, i.e. experience. Therefore the issue was not theology to clarify in terms the world can accept what the meaning of Jesus might be, which after all boils down to us telling Jesus what it is he said, but rather, it was to make oneself available to learning what Jesus might have to tell us, which means to accept him as a teacher, and shut up ourselves, until we begin to hear what he has to say. In the end, this historical issue turns out to be merely a special case of the ego's resistance to salvation, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Paul from time to time also wrote some brilliant, as well as beautiful things that seem undoubtedly inspired and inspiring.

The choice however is between the crucified Jesus of Christianity, and the resurrected Jesus of the living spiritual tradition of which for me personally J.W. Kaiser was an exponent and A Course In Miracles is another, for either, the point would be to help us live in a living relationship with Jesus, which they might help facilitate, but hardly define or limit. Not for nothing does the Course say of itself (ACIM:W-189.7:5), "Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God." In short it wants to be a conduit to the living experience, and with that its function is over. Kaiser takes a similar position when he says in the dedication of one of his books: "If it [the book] could here or there accompany a lonely Traveler through the desert in his hour of difficulty, then this work of one who had to bend over backwards towards the light, has already fulfilled its function." (In  "De mysteriën van Jezus in ons leven," not yet available in English). In other words again, he can only point us in a direction, and the last thing he would want is for his words to become important and be given meaning in lieu of experience, as opposed to leading us to experience.

To intellectualize spirituality is to pretend spirituality with the ego as our guide, and it is another last-ditch attempt by the ego to prevent us from leading a spiritual life in practice, which is all Jesus ever meant with "following him," i.e. take the risk of living in his spirit in our own lives. Paul is perhaps the prototype of this symptomology, but we see it every day, everywhere, and if we dedicate ourselves to spirituality in our own lives we will see how we ourselves are tempted to remain stuck in such intellectualizations, which prevent us from actually living the reality of spirit, and keep us sound asleep in the dream. The ego values intellectual accomplishments very highly, and the world likewise rewards the study of itself, including its spiritual dimensions, for confining it to an intellectual understanding, as opposed to a living realization, means that it has been reduced to a theory of life, instead of a life. To spirit therefore this is all dead matter, but it sells well, so you can make a career out of it. The effect however is to put the ego in charge of our spiritual development, which may produce an effective stage prop, never any spiritual accomplishment. This is why the Course is so clear that the choice is completely either/or, the Holy Spirit(Jesus), or the ego. There is no other choice to be made.

J. W. Kaiser made me very aware early on about the unbridgeable gap between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul (ostensibly about Jesus), the latter of which became Christianity. He was also familiar with much of the debate about Jesus and Paul that had raged in theological circles in the 19th century (Radikalkritik, et. al.), about which he observes that Paul always won out in those circles. He furthermore was very clear that the relationship with Jesus was about inner experience (change of mind), while Paul shifted the action towards morality, confession, and conversion (repentance). Thus Paul represents a typical example of skipping steps in our spiritual development, and underestimating the radical nature of the fundamental change of mind Jesus is talking about. In this way intellectual accomplishment, theology is the meat and substance of this stage prop ("All the world's a stage," after all), and repentance, and contrition in our condition as miserable sinners, ensure that we safely exclude ourselves from the possibility of spiritual achievement.

In Kaiser's time the Gospel of Thomas was just being discovered--the first translations appeared in the 1950s, and he died in 1960--but for the time being its historical significance was not well understood, particularly not that--as is now fairly generally understood--the fact that it must be dated before Paul, which nicely explains why none of the elements of Christian theology even make an appearance in the sayings of Jesus which are in this Gospel. For me, this is definitely the closing of another circle, meaning that it substantially solidifies the record of the pre-Pauline Jesus of Thomas, free of Christian theology, as the teacher I was looking for all along, and who I have found speaking to me in a very authentic way, albeit in a very modern form in the pages of A Course In Miracles. Kaiser in his day suggested in one of his books that the time might come that psychology might enable a movement to abandoning Paul, and returning to the teachings of Jesus. Little did he know that within ten years after his death Dr. Helen Schucman, a psychologist, was to have this channeling experience, the fruits of which we now know as A Course In Miracles. Therefore the early dating of the Thomas Gospel is compelling not only as a matter of literary form, in that sayings Gospels predated narrative Gospels, but it is also compelling because Jesus speaks only directly of spiritual experience in the form of quotations that express his teachings in the parabolic koan style, with which we have now begun to become somewhat familiar, and which are clearly geared to living experience and not to theological ruminations. This is evidently the reason why this little book has caused some mild indigestion at times in Christian circles. It would seem better to deal with it forthright. The fact that the Pauline tradition became historically dominant is hardly proof of its authenticity. The two are simply different and hence totally incompatible.

We might see this in yet a different light by observing that the theological development always follows, and never precedes the spiritual development, and that alone should make us sceptical of the value of intellectualizations as a facilitator of spiritual experience. Within the context of the Course, it is very clear that intellectualizing the work can short-circuit the experience, and thus delays us on the trip. Understanding is helpful only to the extent that it leads to experience, but it becomes harmful if it prevents the experience, and in the Course context this problem is known as skipping steps, i.e. where we act as if we are further along in the process than we are, and thus prevent ourselves from having the experiences we need, and which our ego is always desperate to prevent us from having, such as to "question every value that we hold," which the Course posits as absolutely crucial to our process (c.f. ACIM:T-24.In.2:1). Skipping steps is a nifty way of safeguarding some of our dearest sacred cows and assumptions, meanwhile pretending to accomplishment we don't have. It is at that juncture that often times cults and religions are formed, which pretend to be something different, but always end up being yet another rehash of the ego's thought system, which we do not want to let go in the worst way. A Course In Miracles at least helps us understand the basis of our resistance.

In conclusion, I feel that this second circle that this book closes has to do with Kaiser's comment about why in theological circles Paul always ends up being reasserted, he has to be, because of the inner consistency of the theology of Christianity, which started with Paul, not Jesus. Hence it should surprise no-one that among Paul's disciples, Paul's intellectualizations of the meaning of Jesus will always take precedence over the actual teachings of Jesus themselves. It is merely a cultural stereotype that substitutes intellectualization for living experience.

Back to the Gospel according to Mark

Some years ago, in the aftermath of a post of mine about Thomas on the DU group on Yahoo!, which Gary later used in Your Immortal Reality, someone made a comment that I should write a book about Thomas. I figured Gary's work was enough, besides I was working on a translation of the Gospel according to Mark, and advised the party of such. To which I got a reply that nobody would read my book about Mark anyway, but everyone would read a book about Thomas. I felt hurt and insulted for about a week, but then I turned around and realized that perhaps I should listen to this suggestion. Shortly we will start finding out, as the book is due out in late summer, and in fact I received the very first advance order the other day.
Meanwhile, I have come to realize during the work on the book about the Thomas gospel, that in reality it was an invaluable preparation for the book on Mark, exactly because it forced me to really sort out my notions of what happened in those early years, and how Thomas clearly comes before the influence of Paul, whereas the canonical gospels all come either contemporaneously (Mark) or clearly after Paul.

Meanwhile, working on the problems of the tradition in the context of the Thomas story, has brought it much more clearly into focus for me just how many levels of distortion are really at play. Evidently, in the earliest, living teaching, if there is any real connection to the teacher at all, and a living awareness of the content (meaning) of the teaching as opposed to the form, being true to the spirit, would allow the apostles to use any kind of example (parable) at all to make a point, as long as they were in the living awareness of serving the same truth Jesus did, and thus were saying the same thing in spirit, even if the form might have been different. Yet, even at that level distortions would creep in almost immediately, for, just as much as we do not understand the non-dualistic teaching of A Course In Miracles for a long, long time, until we begin to fathom it experientially, similarly the apostles, still rooted in their roles in the world, were only rank beginners in understanding Jesus. Hence we end up looking at the accounts, canonical or otherwise, not as consummate expressions of realized truths, but as the first tentative accounts of truths which the writers of these accounts barely had begun to fathom, except they knew it was important enough to write down.

And, in the event, there also are some circumstances which now make it easier for me to work on the Gospel according to Mark, and share some of that work with the readers. As of recently, I have set up an account at www.GreekBibleStudy.org and linked it to my Facebook account. The best way to hook up to this is actually to find me on Facebook, and to click on the "B" symbol on the left hand side under "applications" and then to join the Greek Bible study site from there, the point being that within Facebook you can actually read my notes, along with the English text, while on the Bible Study site, you get more columns of text, including the Greek text, but you cannot (yet) get access to my notes. Therefore at this moment the only way to access my notes is through Facebook. Once you know, it's easy. (Note: As of 12/19/09 this has not been working for a while, but I will reflect it here whenever the site completes their upgrade, so it can work with Facebook again.)

The focus of my notes on Mark will be on seeing that whole book from a right-minded perspective. The foundations for the notes I will develop there will be based mostly on Jan Willem Kaiser's book Beleving van het Evangelie (Experiencing the Gospel), on the Course, and of course the Thomas Gospel. I now realize why I had to write Closing the Circle before going on with the Mark project. All going well the Mark project will result in two books: my own fresh translation of Mark with some added materials from J.W. Kaiser, most notably his Introduction to the Study and Interpretation of Drama.

The major shift is to completely appreciate that then as now the teachings came in a dualistic form, representing a non-dualistic teaching, or as Kaiser would put it, a message of Eternity clad in the images of Time. The imagery was simply different then, than what we now have in the Course, but the range of misunderstanding is the same, starting out with taking things literally. So come and visit me on Facebook if the idea of taking a different look at one of the Gospels is appealing to you. My own foundation in this regard comes from J.W. Kaiser, but nowadays Eckhart Tolle also has some interesting observations about the real meaning of Jesus in the quotes we know of him, and his observations closely parallel the work of Kaiser.