gospel of Thomas 62

Jesus said, "It is to those who are worthy of my mysteries that I tell my mysteries. Do not let your left (hand) know what your right (hand) is doing."

In reading this verse from the Gospel of Thomas, I am a little perplexed. The first sentence feels very clear to me, and the second sentence I cannot make any sense of. So I will separate these two sentences and speak about each of them in turn.

In the first sentence Jesus is saying, I tell my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries, and there are two aspects to this. One is that only some people are ready to hear the mysteries. All teachings of enlightenment are mysterious. All the greatest masters are mystics, they don't try and make it rational. Once we enter this space, the space of truth, everything is paradoxical; nothing is rational anymore. It is the rational, logical mind that has been holding us separate from feeling our truth.

So Jesus is saying, what I have to teach is mysterious. It is not logical. It is not rational. So expect things to sound mysterious. And in the same sentence, he's basically saying not everyone is worthy of me telling them the mysteries. And what he means by worthiness – it's not that some people are bad and they're not good enough, no. Just some people are not ready to hear the depth of mystery that is at the core of our existence. So what's the point in talking to people who are not ready to hear what Jesus has to say? There's no point at all.

So he's not even going to open his mouth to utter anything, to someone who is not yet ready to hear it. That person needs to live their life a little longer first; needs to try other ways of finding fulfilment and contentment, and see for themselves that it all leads to a big mess. Only when we've given up on the typical approaches to finding happiness are we ready to dive into the great mystery of life. This is what Jesus is saying, not everyone is ready. Are you?

Are you ready to set aside your controlling urges, your demand for everything to be logical and rational? Are you ready to set that aside and dive into the poetry of life, swim in an ocean of not knowing? Are you ready to bathe in a great trust, a trust that existence itself – which you are a part of – is flowing the way it should, the only way it can, the way it will? And you are not in control of that. This is what it means to lead a spiritual life, to be truly religious. It is a total surrender, into an unknown future. And with that surrender we find that we are living in the present moment, fully, with alertness and a deep awareness that life is mysterious. So the meaning of this first sentence by Jesus seems clear to me.

But moving on to the second sentence, I'm not quite sure what he's getting at. He says, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Sounds like the left is not to be allowed to know what the right is doing. And this to me sounds like a fragmentation again of the self. The right is doing something, the left is not to know about it. I can't make much sense of it. I mean, the right may refer to the logical, rational part of our being. And the left may refer to the intuitive, instinctive, feminine side. But to me, part of the spiritual path is a great integration, of everything that we are: the left and the right; the irrational and the rational. And this integration requires the exact opposite of what Jesus is saying. He's saying, don't let the left know what the right is doing. I say to you, the left and the right should be doing together in an undivided way, whatever they are doing.

So, as I say, I don't make much sense of Jesus' second comment here. Perhaps you can make more of it.