gospel of Thomas 26

Jesus said, "You see the mote in your brother's eye, but you do not see the beam in your own eye. When you cast the beam out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to cast the mote from your brother's eye."

Here Jesus is talking about our tendency to see faults, to see faults in each other. A mote in your brother's eye – that is, we see a fault in someone else. But we do not see the huge fault in ourself – the beam in our own eye. And it's true. So often we can see the faults in other people, small faults. And yet even glaring faults in ourself, we are unaware of. Or if we were once aware of that fault, we have pushed it into the unconscious part of the mind. We have lost touch with it. And the faults which have become unconscious do a lot more damage than the conscious ones.

So Jesus is reminding us with this little saying, that we should really look for our own faults first. We need to clean up our own act before being critical of others. When you cast the beam out of your own eye, Jesus says, then you will see clearly to cast the mote from your brother's eye.

There's a huge lump of wood in our eye. And it's interesting that here Jesus is talking about our ability to see. See, when we have a fault somewhere within us, it does distort the way we see the rest of the world. So if someone has a speck of dust, a mote in their eye, a small fault somewhere in their psychology, then it will distort a little bit the way they are seeing the world. But if ourself, we have a huge lump of wood in our eye, if we have a huge glaring fault in our psychology that we have not yet cleaned up, then our own vision will be so distorted that we won't be able to help anyone else. We're not in a position to do so. We can't see clearly. Everything we see is being distorted by our own defect.

And of course, we project this unto other people. Anything that is unconscious within us, we see in others. It's a distortion. It is not really in the other person, or at least not to the extent that we like to think. It's within ourself.

So the real work is to cast this beam from our own eye, that is, dig into our own psychology. See the big mess that is there. Bring it into the light of awareness. And with that, and with time, and perhaps a little bit of discipline, we can clean up the mess. We can cast the beam out of our own eye.

And when we have become integrated again, when we have realised our own integrity, then we can see clearly. And from that position, we can help other people. We can see where their little difficulties lie. We can help them to see their own way forward. But only after we have done the work on ourself. Until then, we're just going to cause more trouble.

So follow this simple advice of Jesus. Sort out your own difficulties first, before being critical of others. And afterwards, you won't even be critical of others. You will just want to help them from a compassionate point of view. It's a different energy altogether.