Do We Want the Problem or the Solution?

Duh, you think, of course I want the solution. Not so fast. Our ego system is a lot craftier than that, and as kids instinctively know, but frustrated parents often ignore, it pays to observe what we do do, and not obfuscate matters by paying attention to what we say we do. And what we do do is to hang on to the problem like a dog to a bone. Byron Katie is demonstrating with her work, The Work. In A Course in Miracles, it is expressed as follows:

Seek not outside yourself. For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls. Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there. Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place. There is no other answer you can substitute, and find the happiness His answer brings. Seek not outside yourself. For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found. What if it is not there? Do you prefer that you be right or happy? Be you glad that you are told where happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere. You will fail. But it is given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself. (ACIM:T-29.VII.1)

And we all think, when we first read this, that of course we'd rather be happy, and we are thus fooling ourselves, with the PR version of our own lives. As Byron Katie also asks, who would we be without our story? So the bottom line is that our ego identity is all wrapped up in the tale of woe which is our life, and we hang on to the problem like a dog to a bone, and no way do we prefer to be happy, all our protestations to the contrary. Everything we do is geared to validating our ego-identity. This is why Jesus was not understood 2,000 years ago. And the next point is to observe that it is completely natural that we would not understand him. Now if you've followed some of the examples of how the world reconstructed Jesus' identity in adapting the simple sayings of the Thomas gospel, and making something else out of them, then you begin to fathom the tremendous psychological resistance to accepting what Jesus was saying. For what our ego hears is that his "Kingdom not of this world" implies that we were wrong, and he was right. No way were we going to have that. Not then, not now. That's being honest about it.

Accordingly, my point in demonstrating this process of the reconstruction of Jesus in the transition from the sayings in Thomas (his actual teachings) to the story of the narrative gospels (somebody else's teachings about him), based on the analysis by Stevan Davies, is not to demonstrate that Mark (or anybody) got it wrong. The more important point is to see it as a mirror, and understand that we all get it wrong all the time, and the way he was misconstrued then, is an example of how we misconstrue him today. The joke in Course circles was often that we want Jesus to find us parking spaces, when we get to the workshop. In other words, we want to make the problem good and real, according to the way we have set up our lives, and then ask him to fix it. We completely ignore the fact that we created the problem in the first place and that the purpose of the problem is to keep him safely outside our doors, and our ego firmly in charge. We absolutely insist that instead of listening to him, we are in charge of defining the problem, and then telling him to fix it, as if he were a car mechanic. This is the process we are watching as it unfolds, when we follow the metamorphosis from Jesus the teacher, as he speaks to us in the Thomas gospel, to Jesus the Christian savior, as he is portrayed in the Pauline culture which became Christianity. All the narrative gospels were written after Paul started his preaching and writing, interpreting Jesus in his own way. And now we can understand why.

Much like Gary Renard, I like sometimes to try and shock people into this recognition by using as a point of departure the notion that Jesus was not a Christian. Then you can explain it historically, but few people realize the meaning of it. However when you see the examples I'm discussing here recently (and which I'll continue), then you begin to realize just how profound the change is. It is the transition from Jesus the Teacher of the way out of Hell, who asks us to take responsibility for our lives, and follow him, to Jesus-as-Santa-Claus, the savior who, through vicarious salvation makes it all-right, and meanwhile we don't have to do anything, except believe that it's so. That's the Maitreya role, and anything along those lines sees the problem and the solution to it outside of ourselves, so we get to have our cake and eat it too.

Some Scholarly Stuff about Thomas

Occasionally it makes me bristle when Gary or anyone states that my work would be 'scholarly,' in my view it is not, strictly speaking. I find that epithet a bit off-putting in the sense that I neither produce college textbooks or original research, even if I am--at times at least--a keen watcher of what is developing in some of the literature surrounding Thomas. And some good stuff has been percolating for years now in the community that studies Thomas with an open mind. A very interesting discussion about Thomas in relationship to Mark (my favorite of the canonical gospels), can be found here: http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/tomark1.htm and here http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/tomark2.htm

The above material in essence documents in a formal, scholarly fashion, having recourse strictly to the form of the material, and the sequence and circumstance of its borrowing, the transformation of Jesus teachings in their raw, relatively unedited form in the Thomas gospel, towards the Pauline/Christian rendering of him, of which Mark is the first example. Clearly the dominant influence behind all this is Paul and his interpretation of Jesus, which progressively pulls him into this world, and puts all kinds of theological make-up on him, ultimately insisting that the resurrection and second coming are of the body, thus accomplishing what the ego always wants to do, namely to pull Jesus down into the muck of this world with us, and solve our problems here, instead of us learning to follow him to a Kingdom not of this world, of which he speaks to us always. But which we do not want to hear about in the worst way. This last issue is of course the crux, and it is the reason why the Course spends so much time putting us in touch with our resistance to what Jesus teaches.

So, the simple thing to take away from it all is that the reason Jesus in Thomas does not sound like a Christian, is because Christianity is an ego-dominated, dualistic, distortion of his teachings, which fully makes the world real, and as such ensures that we do not hear what Jesus teaches in reality. And as Course students we may then always recognize that this is merely a very useful mirror of our own tendency to want to do all of these things with Jesus, thus compromising the Course. Our ways of doing so are often very subtle, but as we progress with our work they will become more and more clear and easy to recognize, and for many who are 'recovering Christians' forgiving Paul will be one way this process can take form, for different from what Dan Brown et al. believe, we were not duped into believing certain things while an evil church withheld the truth. The ego's conspiracy is always to set it up so that someone else can be blamed for our betrayal of our true Self, which in this Judaeo-Christian imagery is symbolized as the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, and we simply do not hear, and do not want to hear his message of forgiveness, the meaninglessness of the body and the fact that he does not believe in betrayal (ACIM:T-6.I.15:5) for those reasons, knowing us, as he does, as spirit. He is asking us to follow him and do the same, and we simply reinterpret him to make sure we don't, so that the ego stays firmly in charge. We simply resist, because we realize that if we are spirit, we didn't happen, and so we have to keep on killing Christ, as Wilhelm Reich fathomed in his own funny way (see his The Murder of Christ).

Stevan Davies Translates the Thomas Gospel

The Shambala Library edition of Stevan Davies' translation is absolutely beautiful in form and in content. It is somewhat unfortunate that the very passionate foreword by Andrew Harvey does not integrate well with the book. First of all we are not even introduced to Mr. Harvey, nor is there any clarification of his relationship to the translator, publisher or the Thomas material in general, other than that he apparently feels inspired by it and has an opinion. We find out mr about Mr. Harvey on-line, here: http://www.andrewharvey.net/biography.html In terms of content this foreword in my view strikes a bit of a discordant note with the rest of the book. While clearly Mr. Harvey feels very inspired by Thomas, and presents a few interesting observation, his overall point of view is highly personal, and if not seemingly at odds with Stevan Davies' views, at least not well integrated with them, nor is it clear in what tradition it stands besides Mr. Harvey's own idiosyncratic reading, based on Sri Aurobindo's work, the rationale of which is less than totally clear from this piece. In a more general sense these comments reinforce for me the feeling that the study of Thomas is pretty much lost at sea if the point of departure is found only in the fact that Jesus somehow teaches something different from Christianity, without any clarity about what the difference is all about, for the Thomas Gospel is not sufficiently comprehensive to support a complete picture. Needless to say I feel that without the vantage point that Pursah provides through the work of Gary Renard, this is pretty much a lost cause.

The part of the foreword by Prof. Davies however is eminently worthwhile and a very good synopsis about the position of the Thomas tradition, and serves to make a few very important points which are not always brought out by even the best texts on Thomas. First, Prof. Davies broadly embraces the timing as represented in the first post on this blog, which provides a foundation for a roughly similar look at the material. However, he makes a number of very insightful comments, which to me were worth the price of admission. These include a very well reasoned view of why and how the emerging main stream orthodoxy starting from Paul and Mark represents a radically different view from the Thomas tradition by placing Salvation in the future. And based on these observations he proceeds to hint strongly that what we know as Christianity may not at all represent Jesus' teachings.

Further, he does take up the issue of the Thomas timeline, and in fact pretty much disembowels the church-favored notion that Thomas must be late and Gnostic, as merely a convenient way to get rid of him. He provides crystal clear logic why Thomas is not automatically a "gnostic" book, because it was found (at Nag Hammadi) with other Gnostic books, as it evidently lacks the cosmogenetic speculations that make the gnostic tradition in the narrow sense so recognizable. Meanwhile of course in the wider sense Thomas does have a focus on the direct knowledge of God, which on the most abstract level is the heart of the Gnostic tradition. In this spirit Davies closes the foreword by referring us to the obvious purpose of the Thomas gospel per se, which is to have our own relationship with the material (and with Jesus no doubt, though Davies does not express that clearly), and explore the meaning of it as a point of departure for our own spiritual growth, making the point that the very idea of learning the "meaning" of this gospel from someone else would defeat that very purpose.

Davies then proceeds with an introduction, which is very helpful, and continues to make very salient observations. He lays out carefully why Thomas appears more "original" than the synoptics, thus reinforcing the very common-sensical view that it must have been older and a source for that tradition, as well as leading an independent life of its own with a tradition that developed in Syria and India. He makes the very astute observation that since it incorporates in saying 12 a recommendation to let James lead the community after Jesus' death, that the book therefore logically should predate the death of James in 62 AD, which seems highly likely also from the point of view of the absence of any Pauline influences in Thomas. His repeated emphasis on the statements that the Kingdom is already here, and "seek and ye shall find," are grist for the mill of Course students, since the Course teaches that "the world was over long ago," and that the  "tiny mad idea" never happened in reality, and that the only thing needed is that the student should "accept the Atonement for himself," referring to the experiential realization that the tiny mad idea indeed did not happen, and had no effect except illusory ones.

Finally, in a little section called "Cast of Characters" he makes the very important observation that the Apostles in Thomas appear as examples of people who misunderstand Jesus' teachings. He does not elaborate on this further, but I would like to add that this is a crucial point. If one has this vantage point, the entire reading of the canonical Gospels changes, for one then abandons the assumed homogeneity of the "Christian" tradition, and reads the books as the attempts of people struggling to understand this teacher Jesus to whom they felt attracted, but who they did NOT understand. We literally don't understand where Jesus is coming from because he is present to us from outside of the time/space framework, and beckons us to come and follow him there, out of the "cave" in which we are chained to the time/space framework - almost literally, the dimensions of time/space are the "walls" of that symbolic cave.
At the moment we shift to that position of uncertainty about our understanding of him, we are back to seeing the whole tradition, canonical and apocryphal alike, as potentially at least equally relevant and as an invitation to come to our own conclusions, and seek our own relationship with the teaching. From that vantage point we have by implication abandoned the arrogance of the orthodox tradition which already knows what Jesus teaches, to one of seeking, in which there is room for Jesus to teach us what it is he has to say. And Jesus explicitly guarantees: "Seek and ye shall find," as Davies frequently reminds us.

The translation itself is unproblematic and clean, and it might be one of my favorite translations. The commentaries are definitely inspired and inspiring, with the proviso of course that there are inner contradictions in the material which only Pursah's Kernel resolves, resulting in a much cleaner reading. In all this is a lovely book, a beautiful edition and certainly a worthwhile introduction to the Gospel of Thomas materials.