gospel of Thomas 111

Jesus said, "The heavens and the earth will be rolled up in your presence. And the one who lives from the living one will not see death." Does not Jesus say, "Whoever finds himself is superior to the world?"

There are two aspects to life: the physical material life, that we all know, and the spiritual, which we all have the potential to know at the very least. And when talking about these two aspects, it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that they are separate from each other. But they are not. They are two sides of one coin.

And here Jesus is reminding us of this. He says, the heavens and the earth will be rolled up in your presence. Rolled up: they're bound together, they are not separate. And we will feel that as our lived reality day to day: the heavens, the spiritual side of life, and the earth, the physical manifest side of life. They will be rolled up in your presence. And our presence is the key to our spiritual journey – being present, being present with what is.

And this is the beauty: we need only be present, consciously, with the physical, the manifest aspect of life, and the heavenly is shown to us within the physical. The spiritual exists as the less tangible side of that which we call earthly or physical. And it is our presence that allows us to feel this, to sense it directly for ourself.

Jesus goes on, and the one who lives from the living one will not see death. And I'm always a little bit wary about these messages. Because you see, we human beings, living from our ego, don't want to die. It is the ego that is resistant to that. Because death, in a way, shatters that illusion of our self, if we have not had it shattered beforehand by our spiritual journey.

So the ego does not want us to die, and therefore any message that says, follow this path and you will not die, it's appealing to the ego. And it's reinforcing the ego. The ego begins to meddle in our spiritual side. And it has no place here, no place at all.

So I have mixed feelings when I read these words of Jesus. He says one who lives from the living one will not see death. And I know what he means. The living one is God. It's the source. It's the undivided existence. It is life. And if we live from that – if we feel it, sense it, acknowledge it, if we live our life from that space – life takes on a completely different feeling, a different nuance, a different meaning. We become truly alive. And we are living in truth.

And from this space, death has no great significance. Yes, it's the ending of the idea of a separate self, but not much more than that. Everything is dispersing back whence it came. With death, the physical body disperses. The atoms that make up the body do not cease to exist. They are just no longer glued together. They are no longer coalesced. And so it is with consciousness. There's no longer a single individual consciousness.

But if you go into a deep sleep, that is also true. And meditation will take you to that space as well. There is no problem with the ending of the little self. It was only ever an idea. And one who lives from the living one understands that deeply, not just intellectually, but in a felt sense.

And this is what Jesus means when he says such a person will not see death. They will still die just like everyone else. They won't go to heaven and continue in some human-like existence. No, death will come, and there will be a total dispersal of everything that that person is.

Jesus goes on, does not Jesus say, whoever finds himself is superior to the world? And I like this. Look, Jesus is referring to himself, but using a name. He doesn't say, I say; he says, does not Jesus say. And this is of significance.

When you are living as a buddha, the person you are with a name, will be felt rather like any other human being. You will not feel any particular attachment to that one individual. And you, too, might refer to yourself in the third person.

Does not Jesus say, whoever finds himself is superior to the world? And again, those alarm bells are ringing in me. To say you will find yourself superior to something: it's appealing to the ego. The ego wants to be superior; or inferior actually – the ego doesn't mind. The only thing that ego will not accept is equality. Ego needs comparison. It needs to have a higher or lower position. It needs to be special in some way. It could be specially great, or it could be specially inferior. But the ego needs that specialness. It needs to be able to compare.

So, again, I have mixed feelings when Jesus says, whoever finds himself is superior to the world. Yes, our spiritual journey has an aspect of transcendence. We are no longer merely a physical person. As our spirit, as that flame within us grows, then we become more than just the physical, the manifest. In fact, we ever were thus. It is that we have forgotten that, the spiritual side of life.

But does this make us superior to the world? I wouldn't use the word superior. And, of course, to give Jesus his due, he was speaking in a different language, and perhaps this is a matter of translation. So I would say we find that we are more than just the world. We are more than just the physical, the manifest. We are something much greater. And to find that, we have to find ourself. Whoever finds himself is more than just the world.

So come, let's find ourselves. Let's do it.