gospel of Thomas 11

Jesus said, "This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?"

Well, this saying of Jesus is rather difficult to fathom. He must have been in a particularly mystical day, the day he spoke these words. Let's see what comes if we look at it.

This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. Already we're in trouble. There are two heavens. And they'll both pass away – I thought heaven was for eternity. To me, this heaven means the heaven on earth, here, now, available to us, if we live in the moment. It will pass away. The moment will pass, for sure. And also, one day we will die, and this life on earth will be finished. So this heaven will pass away.

And the one above it? In traditional Christianity, heaven is somewhere where we might hope to go when we die. But I don't think Jesus is referring to this. For me, these two heavens are referring to the manifest world – that is the ordinary world we see around us, with all its enormous beauty – and the unmanifest, the source, our essence. This also is a heaven. A heaven of a completely different sort to the manifest world. A heaven of silence. A heaven of spaciousness. A heaven of utter stillness. It is the exact counterpart to the manifest world, where everything is change and movement, everything is in flux. But both these worlds are beautiful. And both can be described as heaven.

And Jesus says they will both pass away. My feeling is he's saying, we will die, we will be finished, experience will come to an end – experience of the manifest world, and also the experience of the unmanifest, of the essence. In so far as that is an experience, the experience of it will end.

Jesus goes on to say, the dead are not alive, and the living will not die. Here again, life and death. The mystic sees life and death in a different way to most people. The dead are not alive, Jesus says. People who have died are not alive, finished. But actually, Jesus may also be talking about people who have not reached enlightenment. They are living as if they are dead anyway. The dead are not alive. The unenlightened are not alive. They think they are alive, but they are not.

And the living will not die. Well, now we are really in paradox. We've just been saying everything will pass away, but the living will not die? Death is rather a strange thing, even to mere mortals who are not yet enlightened. But for those lucky ones that are enlightened, death has become even stranger, but not a problem at all. Psychologically, we have already died once we are enlightened. And in that sense, we do not die at death. Only because we have already died, and there is no longer an I, no longer a me, nobody to die – just a physical body to stop working.

What comes next in the saying of Jesus? In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it alive. See how true it is of the physical world. You eat dead plants, dead animals maybe. And all that physical matter turns into part of your physical being. And your physical being is alive.

And as it is in the material world, with the bodies, so it is also in the mind. We take things that have no life and in our mind, we make it alive. We give something thought energy and it comes to life. The ego is a dead idea, until we give it energy, the idea of I. And then it is alive, causing lots of trouble, and making life miserable. But until we give it energy, it is nothing, it is dead.

What comes next? When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? Wow, now there's a worrying question. Actually, nobody knows what they're going to do when they become enlightened. It's impossible to say. And in fact, this not knowing is one of the main reasons why people prefer to stay unenlightened. Living in darkness, one can just carry on, living in habit, doing the same thing today as one did yesterday. No questions about what should I be doing? No.

And Jesus says when you live in the light, what will you do? Well, I think he's being a bit naughty. It's a trick question. Nobody knows what they're going to do when they live in the light. It's impossible to say beforehand. And even once one is enlightened, it's impossible to say until the moment arrives. And then there is no time to say, one is doing it. So one will do things when one is living in the light. But only afterwards can we talk about it. We can comment on it afterwards. We can weave a little story around what has happened. But we won't know in advance what we're going to do.

And finally, in case we feel we've been understanding him somehow up to now, Jesus finishes off with: On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do? So, even more paradoxical, just in case we still thought we understood him.

On the day when you were one, you became two. Yes, we were one once. We were one with all that is. That is the only way to be one, to be one with existence, to be one with God. And somewhere, somewhere along the way, we became two. We became separate. That much is clear.

This last bit, though, what's that about? But when you become two, what will you do? It's the same question, isn't it? What will you do? And it is a bit more tricky. Because as two, we actually only feel ourself to be half of that, one part of the two. And that's the problem: we feel separate, cut off from the other half, from the rest of existence, from God. And what are we going to do about it?

It is another trick question. In the end, there's nothing we can do about it. The idea of doing comes with this separation. Finally, only non-doing allows that twoness to melt away. Non-doing is the way to become one again. To be reunited. The great yoga, the union. This comes about when we stop doing. For when we stop doing, the doer disappears. And all that is left is the one, once more.