Gospel of Thomas

Let us step back and look at the big picture—this is a mantra we need to consider in our everyday lives and it has been the premise for the commentaries in 77^th Pearl: The Perpetual Tree. Prior to this text, people have had their noses right up against the painting we call our existence. Here, humans have been able to step back. Now, they see the whole painting and the wall it hangs on too. Now, the fog has lifted.

The male inclination to dominate and control has created various religious institutions. They have done much to damage the link the human soul desires with the Source, from where it came. The creature from which people evolved was reliant on a hierarchical community for survival. In this community, there was a structured order of leadership, necessary for the survival of the group. We can presume, from archaeological evidence, it was the males of the ancestral group that provided protection and the main source of food necessary for survival. Although different communities of the human ancestor developed in various ways, these basic structures were necessary. Women would have been burdened with childbirth and nurturing their young, while males built shelter and hunted animals. As time passed, humans began to search for reasons why things happened the way they did. This curiosity is an aspect of the breath of life. It is the pull of God the Father/Source’s Light, wanting to be joined to humans through a conduit, which links all beings of compassion, creativity, and empathy. We now know this conduit as the Holy Spirit. It is identified as the action of the collective consciousness. When primal humans began to create drawings and perform rituals, with dance and music, the (metaphoric) voice of the Father/Source became louder, until that voice became energy unto itself. It then found a place in human flesh—the heart and mind. We now know it as the Soul. This is the same Light that is between the fibers of wood, under a stone, and between atoms, protons, and neutrons. It functions within the quantum field. This is the 77^th Pearl. Since this prehistoric time, there has been a battle raging between the different natures of these two life forms. The dimension of the material universe and the realm of the Spirit have been, and still are, at odds. These realms can both be defined as life, but are very different in their essential nature and structure, yet they are linked in ways humans are beginning to recognise.

How does the Gospel of Thomas (discovered in 1945 at a place called Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt) reconcile the erroneous concept that the universe was created, and then God put humans on this planet? The nature of the Gospel of Thomas is that it was conceived for the twenty-first century—when the sevens have resolved themselves. The necessity for figurative discernment is evident in the gospel author’s opening statement. These are secret sayings; anyone who discovers their true meaning will not taste death. This means the Soul (what humans are) will not be absorbed into the whole—the ubiquitous Father/Source’s Light. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus (Yeshua) tells us that it would be a marvel of marvels if the soul came into being for the sake of the flesh. In this knowledge, we know the thing that constitutes a ‘soul’ existed since before time began in this universe. Yeshua also tells us that we are meal, scattered upon a ‘distant road’ and that this happened unintentionally. This symbolic story explains how God the Source expanded into the abyss, the void. This was not a conscious decision. It was one realm creating another, as a byproduct of its expansion/movement (this was the ‘Big Bang’). Since the woman (the creative aspect of the Source) returned home, we know that the aspect of the Source, which is whole and in Its original state, has contracted back to Its place of origin. Humans refer to this place as heaven. It is not up in the sky, it is a layer, or dimension humans cannot experience with their limited senses. However, remnants of the Source’s Light remain here, in this dimension. In our realm, the collective consciousness (Holy Spirit) performs the function of a linking mechanism, which connects the Source and the Son (all souls seeking the Light). The material constituting this universe, created from God the Father’s dimension, has two distinct properties. The first is that it is not permanent and is inclined to perish. The second property is that it still has, through it, the substance (Light) from the Source’s realm. Yeshua confirms this when He tells people that the Light, which constitutes His Spirit, is everywhere. It is in-between the fibers in wood and under a rock. This is the most precious pearl, the lost pearl, we have found here.

The Gospel of Thomas solves the age-old questions, which have plagued primal man for millennia. It also releases people from the premise of a patriarchal god, which is jealous and vengeful. God is not a single entity we must ultimately answer to, as a child might have to answer to a parent. Such ideas are derived from a primal understanding of relationships in this world, overlaid onto relationships within the Spirit realm. Recognising that this realm is unlike the realm of the Spirit dissolves this harmful premise. It allows people to see what they are, for the first time. In the Gospel of Thomas, we discover that humans are like Jesus. They are all made of God the Father, which is the Source of everything. When people become wise, aware of this link, then they become an enlightened, connected Spirit. The results of this link come through the conduit we know as the Holy Spirit. It lives in the heart and mind of conscious beings, capable of compassion and empathy. These traits are the anatomy of the Holy Spirit, because they are about connection and linking with the other. This is what UFO/UAP researchers have noticed about people who have come in contact with this phenomena and the beings that pilot these craft. Communication is usually non-verbal, rather, it is telepathic. The quantum field, where the Light of the Source flows as one continuous stream, is where the Holy Spirit functions, linking minds at an instant. This is the collective consciousness.

If one is a Christian, why should the Gospel of Thomas be given credence? There is an innate problem with the Bible. The Old and New Testament have been linked through the proclamation that the prophecies of a Savior had been fulfilled in Jesus (Yeshua). Although Yeshua did little to prevent these assumptions through His actions and His words, in the Gospel of Thomas, His purpose was more personal than the one presented through the Old Testament. The problem occurs when we realise that Yeshua’s teachings were not about fulfilling prophecies, which limited what He set out to do. Yeshua tells us that He is the new wine and to place His teachings into old wineskins would spoil them. When Yeshua spoke to His followers He would refer to His ‘Father’. People assumed He was referring to ‘Yahweh’, the God of the Jewish community. The mysteries in the Gospel of Thomas have revealed threads of knowledge, which demonstrate that Yeshua was instead speaking about a great mystery. This knowledge came from a Divine heritage. In Thomas, the Father’s Kingdom is described as actions, which tell us It is the Source of all things. These actions are metaphorically described as either a male or female, which become representations of what the Source has done or what It is like. When we link these threads in the Gospel of Thomas, we are given definitive answers. In the New Testament, the authors have tried to create a biographical narrative, which turns Jesus into the Christ. It is primarily the Christian orthodoxy that holds onto the premise Yeshua will come back to Jerusalem, forming a renewed kingdom on Earth—at this time, all the dead shall rise again. These are myths absorbed from the Torah, which became the Old Testament. They do not constitute what Yeshua’s teachings were about. They are tantamount to peoples’ fear of death and their feeble attempts at explaining an end-point, without understanding the beginning and middle.

We see a truth appear when we cast our minds back over human history, considering how most communities have given a living human being the characteristics of a god-king. People desired a leader who had superhuman qualities, qualities that surpassed the limitations of this material world. This is a reflection of the human psyche, which is connected to the whole. This psyche knows there is something more than humans can experience in this physical universe, because we are linked to this quantum field. This desirable, super-human quality reflected the need to connect to something imperceptible. It is how the New Testament authors could link the pagan myths with the Jesus miracles. Buddhist teachings are quite clear when it comes to the concept of worshipping a deity. The Buddha never presented himself as a deity, yet, a significant proportion of followers will worship and pray at the feet of a Buddha statue. This is the same message Yeshua gave to His disciples. It is reflected in the humble actions we see in the New Testament and in the statements we see in Thomas. However, most Christian faiths call Jesus the only Son of God and, at the same time, God. Catholics venerate statues of Jesus and Mary, as well as the preserved remains of saints—perhaps because these are more tangible. These people miss the point and want to make a man, like Jesus or the Buddha, into a god. It would seem as though it is easier to do this, rather than to try and comprehend their teachings. This is why people, seeking to establish a religious institution, have marginalised the Gospel of Thomas. A part of its content falls into the category of the too hard basket. However, Yeshua wanted it this way, for a very good reason. He knew that giving pearls to these people would allow them to be destroyed, because of their inclination to create an institution. Institutions, by their nature, have a pyramidal power structure. In most religions, we have at the apex of the pyramid a god, then the clergy of various ranks, and the people at the base. The Gospel of Thomas does not fit this pyramidal structure; it can only fit into a perfect circle. In a perfect circle there is no apex or bottom. It is whole, it is one. In this circle, there is no space for a super-human godhead, because everything in that space is connected and whole.

The first of the Synoptic Gospels written was the Gospel of Mark, approximately seventy to ninety years after Yeshua’s death. The other gospels followed and were derivatives of Mark. Scholars assume there is one other reference that was used. It has become apparent that this other source was the Gospel of Thomas. It is the purest link to the living Jesus, because the sayings are presented as quotes and not as part of a narrative. The Gospel of Thomas is a contentious document, both in its nature and in terms of its point of origin. Some scholars argue it predates the Gospel of Mark; others argue it came after. However, the nature of these sayings, as direct quotes, gives them authenticity and gravitas. They are not written into a narrative form, by an author who was influenced by their Jewish or Greek heritage. If we consider the very nature of the Gospel of Thomas, we notice how it is an authentic representation. The Gospel of Thomas is ambiguous in its references. It was meant to be difficult to comprehend. If we accept that previous religious texts were documents meant to give clear instruction on the way to believe and avoid purgatory or hell, we realise the Gospel of Thomas is very different. Its cryptic nature is evidence of a greater purpose, a purpose that overturns past notions of God and the origin of the soul. This gospel was not aimed at creating a community, based on a common faith, built on rituals and dogma. The Gospel of Thomas is a document about the nature of what we really are and how we might come to this realisation. It is about the intimate connection we have with God the Father—the Source of all things. It is the way we come to understand that we are Jesus’ kin. In this sense, the Gospel of Thomas is unlike any other Christian text which claims to be derived from Yeshua’s teachings.

To illustrate the political and polemic undertone of most of what we see in the New Testament, one only need look at how the author of the Gospel of Luke vilifies the Jewish people, as the instrument of Satan. Through this, we see that there was tension between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. The author of Luke was a gentile. The marginalisation he would have felt, from the Jewish Christians, influenced his views of that community and their role in Yeshua’s execution. The Jewish Christians had already cemented Yeshua’s role as the Messiah, based on what they knew from the Torah (Old Testament) prophecies. This was before anyone could establish a faith like the one Yeshua would have envisaged. Yeshua tested His disciples often. He could see that there was an innate problem with the contemporary culture He was born into—they were sexist, misogynist, and narrow-minded. This, coupled with their inaccurate knowledge of what God was and their community centred on a patriarchal religion, made it necessary for Yeshua to leave His teachings with one who would not be affected by all of these obstacles. Thomas’s reply to Yeshua’s question, regarding what He was like, allowed Yeshua to see that Thomas was different. Thomas replied to Yeshua by saying: ‘my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.’ While the other disciples chose predictable comparisons for Him, derived from their contemporary faith, Thomas’s reply saw that a new language was required—a language he (in that time) did not have. This made Thomas the one who could receive the secret teachings. The other disciples would have seen these sayings as problematic, if not heretical. Not understanding the mysteries Yeshua spoke of, they would have been left aside, for ones that made sense to them, ones they could use. We see a plethora of appropriated sayings from the Gospel of Thomas in Matthew 13, placed in a context that denigrates their broader and enlightened meaning. Such an impassioned use of Thomas is the end point, which we see in much of the New Testament. However, other followers of Yeshua, in the early Christian communities, recognised the importance of the secret sayings. As a result, we see the Gnostic Christians appear alongside the early orthodox believers (those who only accepted the canonical texts).

The word ‘Gnostic’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘knowledge’. The premise for their faith was based on the search for knowledge. This is proof of the fact that the Gospel of Thomas is not a Gnostic text. It is the catalyst which started the Gnostic approach. The first part of the Gospel of Thomas invites people to find the meaning in the secret sayings. This is what the Gnostics attempted to achieve. Their practices were influenced by the declarations we see in the first two sayings in Thomas. Gnostics believed that by gaining hidden knowledge, they would attain the life Yeshua spoke of in the Gospel of Thomas. The aim was to gain this secret knowledge, which gave them keys to unlock the various gates preceding Heaven. The Gnostics could see that the rejected Gospel of Thomas had very important wisdom within it. They attempted to decipher the cryptic sayings through various meditative processes. It should be noted that the Gospel of Thomas is absent of Gnostic mysticism. However, it does have unconventional concepts within it. This unconventional knowledge was the purpose for Yeshua coming to this world. The Gnostics did not have the language to understand what the ‘secret sayings’ meant.  As a result, we obtain from them complex mythologies, which evolved through a process of scriptural meditation (an intense meditative internalisation of the text, to gain its wisdom). These mythologies prove to be derivative of this realm and the traits of men and women, which is unlike the realm of the Spirit and therefore inaccurate. This is not dissimilar to the way the ancient Greeks and Romans gave every aspect of life such as love, hunting, or drinking the position of a god. We see this similarity through the Gnostic explanation of creation, where Sophia, representing wisdom, creates a demiurge called Yaldabaoth. This creator god turns out to be imperfect, because Sophia did not consult with the self-generated one before producing the demiurge. Gnostics claimed that this was in fact Yahweh, from the Old Testament. The myth explained his tendency to be jealous and violent. These human traits and behaviours, played out in this creation myth, signalled the absence of a language that could disclose the mysteries in the Gospel of Thomas. It is a language people have access to now, in the infancy of the twenty-first century. 77^th Pearl: The Perpetual Tree is this new language, applied to ancient wisdom delivered by the multi-dimensional being, Yeshua.

In 2017, a hypothesis about human existence became popular among many reputable people in the global community. The concept suggests this universe is a computer simulation. This is an interesting notion, but a rather egocentric one. It is comparative to the way the Gnostics explained this life as being created by a malevolent deity. This new hypothesis would explain this creation as, ‘the dice that have been cast, now let us see what happens.’ It explains the negatives people encounter as tests in the simulation. If we take a moment to indulge this idea, using what we have learnt from the Gospel of Thomas, we see this hypothesis in a slightly plausible context. A computer capable of such a simulation would be something humans could barely be able to comprehend. The material, from which such a computer’s component parts would be made of, would be a type of light. The circuits would be composed of, and function with, this light. It is not a machine, like people might envisage. It is a thing that has always existed. In this respect, the hypothesis of a type of computer, or entity, which has the capacity to elicit existence in various forms, is feasible. To test the aspect of the hypothesis that states this is a simulation, we would need to ask the question: why? The word simulation suggests something that is designed as a prototype of the final intention. Through the problems or errors that occur, improvements can be made. This notion comes from a human weakness, pride. Humans cannot imagine that they are just one of a myriad of life forms in this universe. This train of thought supposes that, surely, all this must be for humanity’s benefit. If it fails, or the human species perishes, the computer will run a new, improved simulation. The fact is, a computer, device, or entity capable of this kind of creation, would make it perfect in the first place. Its consciousness would be so evolved it would see all the possible problems, designing the creation accordingly. Through the Gospel of Thomas, we have seen that perhaps we could see God the Father/Source as this consciousness, made of Light. However, this existence is not an intentional simulation. This is human narcissism speaking. This universe was created from a place that (unintentionally) expanded into the void. In the process it created physical matter. With it came the Light. It is still here. It is finding its way back to the dimension it came from. It is in all the beings whose soul emanates empathy and compassion for the other. The collective consciousness (Holy Spirit) is the anatomy of the Source. It is found in the minute spaces between a breath and a thought.

In 77^th Pearl: The Perpetual Tree we have seen extraordinary revelations. The unearthing of what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit actually mean has been a powerful discovery. It reveals the dynamism of The Trinity. Catholic theologians explain the Trinity as three persons, yet they are one God. Through 77^th Pearl: The Perpetual Tree we have learnt that this definition, for the most part, is inaccurate. The Father is the one who is everywhere at the same time. It influences the creation of all matter as a mechanism by which Its Light may be realised. It is the Source. The Son is representative of the Soul, as it is the Father’s Light, brought into an instance of motion, through the flesh. In this way, the Son (the soul) is like Yeshua. People who are on a journey to become an enlightened Spirit become His kin. The collective consciousness (Holy Spirit) makes the process of unification possible. It is the Advocate and Comforter for humanity. The Holy Spirit is above all else, because it binds and connects the Trinity. In this sense, we are one entity through the action of the collective consciousness (Holy Spirit).

This realm is like an oyster. The Soul has entered, but because it is foreign to this finite realm, it becomes wrapped in flesh and experiences both suffering and beauty. From within this oyster, souls grow in stature, to become two with the Source, through the action of the collective consciousness. Likewise, the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have formed a glistening pearl, which have enabled the Light of Yeshua’s wisdom to shine through 77^th Pearl: The Perpetual Tree.

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