gospel of Thomas 84

Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear."

When we see our likeness, we rejoice, Jesus says. And I agree with him. We might see an image of ourself and it feels good. It feels good because that image allows us to believe that we exist as this physical form. It is like a proof. Perhaps a photograph or a video clip, or even a painting. Anything which is depicting us, in a visual way, serves as evidence that we exist, as a physical being.

And we might see our likeness in other ways. We might see other people who are similar to us – perhaps of the same racial background, with the same nationalistic conditioning that we have, similar clothing, similar hairstyle. All of these things make us feel part of a tribe: a group of people who have a likeness to us. And with this group identification, we also feel happy. It gives us an identity – something else we can hold onto and define ourself by.

Of course, with all such tribalism, there is a heavy price to pay. For those people who do not have the likeness – who we do not feel to be our kin – they have to be on the outside of the tribe. And necessarily, we will feel antagonistic towards them. It is the inevitable balance to that feeling of coherence within the tribe.

So in these ways, and others too, we do rejoice in our likeness. But Jesus goes on, and here he shifts to a whole other level of reality that many people have not yet experienced. He says, when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear. What are these images that came into being before us?

It reminds me of the Zen koan, Zen puzzle: Show me your original face before your parents were born. It seems absurd. And that's the whole point. We have been conditioned to see life in one way, and we believe that to be reality, and the totality of reality. But if you meditate, you will find, sooner or later, that you are not this physical manifestation that you have taken yourself to be. Sooner or later, we come into contact with the unmanifest – the source of all that is. And this is your original face. This is the image of you before you were born, before you came into being. And this source never dies.

Nor does it become manifest, Jesus says. Well, because it is the source of all that is manifest, we could debate that point. But it is an empty debate of semantics. The source itself is the unmanifest. That's what Jesus is saying. And if you really look into yourself, earnestly, truthfully, you will find that at the core of your being, the essential part of who you are, your essence, is this source.

And then Jesus makes an interesting point. When you see this, how much you will have to bear. And this is one of the great jokes of the spiritual path. We all think that realising the truth will be great, wonderful, we'll be so happy. And in a way that is true. But the moment of realisation – it's the biggest shock you will ever have in your life. And it's not easy, to realise that everything that you held to be true beforehand, is not really true, not in any absolute sense. It is purely a conditioned truth. It is a relative truth. And it is unimportant.

Everything that you believed yourself to be, you will understand: that is not who I am. It's a shock. And that's why Jesus says how much you will have to bear. But it is a shock worth facing. For with it, we come to dwell in truth. Not even dwell in, we come to be truth. And life takes on a whole different quality from that moment.