gospel of Thomas 108

Jesus said, "He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him."

As a spiritual teacher, as a master, there is a delicate balance to be achieved between claiming that one's teachings – listening to one – is the way to free yourself; and on the other hand, stressing that you yourself are divine already: your freedom is waiting for you, you yourself, to allow it.

Jesus often veered towards the stronger assertion of the teachings. For people who need to follow someone into the light, this is the way to teach. But it doesn't sit so comfortably with modern Western style, where every individual has a certain sovereignty from the beginning.

Anyway, Jesus said he who will drink from my mouth will become like me. He is enlightened. He is at one with God. He is a buddha. And what he's saying is, those who drink from his mouth – that is those who listen to his teachings in an open way… But not just listening and thinking about it. This is why he uses this poetic language, he who will drink from my mouth. You need to imbibe truth, not through the rational mind, not through trying to build a nice logical story out of it. That's not where we find reality. That's not the abode of truth at all. If that's your style, if that's the way you want to live your life, become a scientist. There's no harm in it. But you won't reach your spiritual enlightenment that way.

To free yourself is to free yourself from your own concepts, your own ideas about existence, and about yourself, above all. We are trapped in ideas; we are trapped in the thinking mind. And to go beyond that, we have to learn to listen to life in a different way: not through rationalisation, but through a more intimate, direct contact.

So, if we can somehow listen in that style, then we will be drinking from the mouth of Jesus. And if we do that, we will become like him. We too will become enlightened. We too will become one with God.

That's why Jesus goes on, I myself shall become he. Jesus and God are no longer separate. And if you pursue your spiritual search, your spiritual endeavour, to the very end, then you too will be in no way distinct from Jesus, from God. God will become you.

You have to set yourself aside, of course. You have to stand aside. Your ego, your idea of yourself, has to see that it is causing misery, and just step out of the way. And then what happens? Then, of course, in that vacuum, God will come. And he will fill the vacuum. He will become you.

Then Jesus says that the things that are hidden will be revealed to you. It's so paradoxical. Only really the Tao or Zen Buddhism plunges into this paradox fully. But in the Gospel of Thomas, we can see Jesus touching upon it from time to time: the things that are hidden will be revealed. In truth, nothing is hidden. But we have put blinkers on ourself. We are looking through veil upon veil of our own beliefs, our own restricted idea of who we are and what life is about.

We impoverish ourself in this way. And we do it because by making everything small, ourself included, things can become familiar. And there's a certain comfort in feeling that we know: that I know who I am, in some intellectual way; or I have created a little philosophy about life. These are all mind games. And they are tiny things. We create a tiny garden to live in. And it's not even a garden. It's a dead place, like a backyard that has been concreted over, made safe. But it is dead.

And when we step out of that tiny space, when we set aside all those little ideas that we have about life, and just see it as it is, everything is revealed to us; in a moment, everything is here. Yes, it all had been hidden from us, but hidden by the walls of that backyard that we had built ourself.

God is here all around us: in the song of the birds, in the stark mountain top, in the call of the child, in the buzz of the fly. Everywhere, God is calling to us, God is wooing us. How long are we going to hold out against that? How long are we going to ignore those calls? How long are we going to say things are hidden from us, when we ourself are hiding? We ourself have put a blindfold over our own eyes. And then we feel something is missing in life. All we need to do is remove that blindfold and everything will be revealed to us.

In principle, we can do it alone. But in this little saying from Jesus, he's suggesting that listening to his teachings is one way to discover everything – everything, everything that is, is waiting for us.