A Voice In The Wilderness: A Revised Understanding Of Christian History

Many Christians today are accustomed to thinking in certain ways about their faith which is based on a narrative that the Orthodox church put forward over centuries. It has been a way of thinking that I have come to call “orthocentric” thinking. It has resulted in conclusions that range from defining the divinity of Jesus, his nature, and the composition of the trinity.

Today, most Christians take these beliefs for granted as if they were always known. In the early days of the Christian movement, there was a broad range of ideas and interpretations about what a number of central themes meant. What hasn’t been clear to today’s Christians were the broad range of beliefs or ideas that existed back then. This often comes as a surprise to many of the Christian faithful. Wasn’t it all perfectly clear from the beginning what the life of Christ was all about?

What the Christian Orthodox movement did was to make it seem as though there was only ever one right way to understand or interpret the life of Jesus. In large part due to discoveries of documents that were suppressed by the orthocentric view, most people didn’t know that there were as many differing ideas about Jesus Christ as there were. What happened was with 1600 years of Orthodoxy able to define and frame the belief system so completely, that would seem like a very strong indication that Orthodoxy was right….right? The story isn’t that simple.

Orthoxy fought and won a war of ideas and the winner was the one who then got to write the history. The history that was written was what agreed with their view. Why this matters is that for Christians who might want to know the deeper story, a lot of it isn’t available anymore. That isn’t just Dan Brown sensationalism about a hidden truth at the core of the church, it is part of what happened if you are willing to discover what we know now about the lost Christianities that existed early on. There was more there, and it showed a broad and deep understanding about the mechanisms within consciousness that made union with the divine possible.

Most believers know little to nothing about these movements because even understanding it required a new or more advanced level of awareness, and here we are with a 1600 year entrenched belief that has been handed down through the generations. The refrain has often been “If there was more to all of this we would know about it.” The problem here is that no, the point apears to have kept these ideas from mainstream Christianity, and of course the church did this very well. Pastors don’t tell their parishioners about it either, even though most are schooled in the ideas that constituted “wings” within the church.

It was easy to push this more advanced understanding off the stage because those in the know about these different ideas were a minority once the tide of Orthodoxy came along. It surprises many people to discover that Orthodoxy was a late-comer to the belief in the beginning. This would be in the time period of the first two centuries after the death of Christ.

Enlightenment has always been a rare bud that blooms ocassionally and few see it for what it is. Why do you think so many visionaries have met their end with such violence? The conspiracy to keep people in the dark about a deeper more esoteric tradition, was one of ignorance. Orthodoxy does not know what it does not know and is not aware of the riches that it took from humanity. It may also be true that the people forming Orthodoxy knew and just didn’t care.

The other strands within Christianity at the time were quickly driven from the stage by the tide of Orthodox thinking, and these movements or groups in the faith that differed from the Orthodox one were both reviled and criticized by early church fathers within the that wing of the church. The orthocentric view won out so that there existed for centuries no other accepted way of understanding what the Christ drama was about. If you wanted to know about Jesus and Christ, your go-to books were the ones that were sanctioned by the Orthodox wing of the church.

The orthocentric view has created the impression that there was only ever one acceptable way of approaching Christianity, and that group went to great lengths to make sure that their view was the one that would be accepted. Part of this orthocentric view includes the idea that heresy was a kind of later outgrowth, a distortion of the original “truth” of Christianity. Origen, an early church father and Christian historian, characterized heresy as that action which took place after the “truth” was known, a “veering” away as he put it, from what we all know is the one accepted group of central truths that animate Christianity and give it it’s life. While Origen in his day struck out against what he believed was heresy, he was later was deemed a heretic himself, an act that was performed after he had died. Still, the idea stuck and his characterization would be taken up by new generations of heresy hunters.

This, though, isn’t true. In 1935 Walter Bauer wrote a book entitled Orthodoxy & Heresy In Earliest Christianity. In it, he poured over numerous letters and other writings from earliest Christianity and found that instead of heresy being a late-comer to the faith, it was instead present even before Orthodox thinking got a foothold in the early Christ movement. The upshot of his work was that Orthodoxy was the late-comer, not heresy. The suggestion here was that maybe heresy wasn’t quite what we thought it was or that we were told it was. But how could that be?

Over and over, as Bauer conducted his detailed survey, he found the language of heresy was preexistant over Orthodox language and thinking. He found many examples that heresy, as the later church would describe it, was more robust and established from the very beginning, which is contrary to the writings of Orthodox writers and historians from the first three to four centuries. Now a believer in the Orthodox view might well ask, “Doesn’t this just prove only that there were heretics from the very beginning?” Not if what these “heretics” knew and believed in was something more substantive than the Orthodox strand understood. Orthodoxy, based on what Bauer dug up, was the late-comer.

It should be noted that “heresy” was itself not a unified or monolithic body of thought but was composed of many different groups with different thoughts on a range of ideas such as the divinity of Jesus, and whether Jesus was a man who became God, or that was a man who was later adopted by God when he was baptised by John, for example. There were the earliest converts to Christianity, for example, who were Jews that Jesus had inspired called the Ebionites. These earliest of followers were branded as heretics by the church. We are told that if we want to get to heaven you better believe in the right things instead of what the heretics believed, or else hell waits for you. It was a compelling strategy because with the fires of hell hanging over your head, people wouldn’t want to chance it. There were groups who claimed knowledge about the makeup of the trinity that differs from the one that Christians know today, which involved a feminine aspect involved in Christhood. This was a more egalitarian movement that saw how important women were in the cosmology of the Christian faith. In the earliest churches women were in top leadership roles as bishops, for example. There are letters of Orthodox leaders complaining about women’s prominent roles in the early church, and wall paintings in Italy clearly show a woman installed as a bishop to her congregation.

Bauer’s work sent shock-waves through the Christian community when it was first published. His work was criticized as going too far and making too many assumptions about what the many documents that he examined meant. However, in 1945, a giant discovery was made in Egypt with the unearthing of a treasure trove of early Christian writings, some of which historians had written about in early Christianity and others no one even knew had existed. While some scholars suggested that these books were not part of a significant tradition, a possible “one-off ” a later discovery of a second fragment of one of the books found in 1945 (Thomas) helped to support the contention that the books had been circulated and used by early Christians and lent support to the idea that the books were more widely circulated than thought.

This find came to be known as the Nag Hammadi Library (NHL), and while they were found in Egypt, the chief reason for their discovery was due to how dry the environment has been there for many thousands of years, which helps to preserve documents just like it does with mummies.

Bauer received considerable vindication once the NHL was unearthed because it showed that there were different understandings in circulation about central tenets in Christianity. In the Gospel of Philip, which was included in the find, it clearly points out that many early Christians considered the Holy Ghost to be female. How this could change dogma was significant. In the concept of the “Bridal Chamber” mentioned both in the Gospel of Philip as well as the synoptic gospels, the bridal chamber becomes a sacred act of union that generates the Christ. Philip also points out thatt Jesus wasn’t just the Christ, but thst he was showing people the way to be Christs themselves. The implications for this idea alone are huge.

This line of thinking also links Christian thought to concepts tied to enlightenment that had existed for centuries in the East…not because Christianity borrowed from them, but because the spiritual acumen of the group that produced the books which described or put forward these concepts was so formidable. What’s more, many of the books in the collection claimed ties to Jesus and his teaching in private.

The books which were part of the find were bound in fine kid leather with tooling on them with both Christian and Egyptian symbols. These books showed every sign of having been important to the monks who hid them. While Bart Ehrman suggests that the books were likely buried where they were to free up space in one of several nearby monestaries, there is perhaps a more accurate theory which suggests that by the time of their burial (around 400 A.D.), the writing was on the wall where books like these were concerned: anyone found holding books that were not accepted by the church were to be consigned “to the flames.” It is much more likely, then, that the NHL exists today because a monk could not bear seeing them destroyed and hid them away for later discovery.

One compelling piece of possible proof that may have prompted monks to hide the documents where they were found in 1945 is found in a letter written by Anathanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who was the first to spell out what books were acceptible and which ones were not: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the letters of Paul. Those books would later form the early corpus of Orthodox belief, with others added later. Anyone found to have books other than these would come up on the wrong end of church doctrine and its burgeoning authority as the “right” way to believe.

In the centuries that followed, Christians were anathematized or excommunicated from the church for heresy. In still later years, some heretics would even be executed in horrific ways. See: 39th festal letter of Athanasius written in 367 A.D. and found at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (www.ccel.org)

Instead of being a movement on the very fringes of Christianity, the books in the NHL show how developed and incredibly sophisticated the esoteric wing’s teachings were. The problem is how their meaning escapes most Orthodox Christians and its descendant Protestantism. I will quote one comment made by a reader online who was referring to the gospel of Thomas recently as “gobbledygook.” It is hard to crack the code of these books and theur meaning when you yourself have not entered into the “light” of the knowledge that a state like enlightenment confers.

Today, though, Christians aren’t used to referring to the Gospel of Thomas to glean from it teachings which, the author who wrote the gospel contends, are the private or secret teachings of Jesus. No Christian is used to reading the Gospel of Philip and pointing out how its descriptions of the Christ are incredibly similar to ideas in Hindu, Tibetan, and Chinese writings. That’s not to suggest that the Christians writing these books had been to India, but that they had uncovered the Christ as a potential that exists within every person on the planet, and as such was not subject to belief in the same ways many beliefs put forward by the Orthodoxy depend on those beliefs. Additionally, the Christ was only ever found within, not without, something that Jesus was known to teach even in the Orthodox sanctioned Gospels.

Paul says he was shown the Christ within himself. This is a critically important point. If you are exhorted to seek him, then the seeking must be done within. How many can say that they seek inwardly to find the Christ hidden within themselves? What methods were laid out on how to do this in the mainstream view? It amounts to accepting Jesus as your savior. You must look to and believe in the cross. Did Paul believe? Not at all, not in the beginning. He was busy persecuting Christians. Belief was not what brought Paul into the tent, nor did it bring me either. He was converted when he found the Christ within himself. He said so.

Being able to see how the Nag Hammadi Library offered a substantive and sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms at work in regards to enlightenment was made possible for me because of an awakening process that began in 2006 and “completed” with a full initiatory process that culminated in early 2007 with a full kundalini awakening. With little more than the symptoms and phenomenon in hand in my direct experience, with no teacher or guide to help me, I discovered the NHL and saw that they were describing my condition. You should understand, though, that when I use a word like “kundalini” to describe or to place my experience, I didn’t know about it at the time. Further, kundalini is NOT a spirit or even a religious belief held by the Hindus. Instead, it is an observed phenomenon which experiencers sought to describe and explain. At the time my symptoms were so startling that I considered that it was possible that I could have a brain tumor! I soon realized that whatever had happened to me as the result of a very simple meditation practice, was not only benign, it was transformative. What I did was to inquire within to find the Christ within. I didn’t know that this was what I was doing since much of the effects found in awakening lay buried under layers of beluef and programming.

I did not find a person, I found a level of consciousness that upended my life, began setting it aright, and instituted a regime of inner transformation. I can see, though, how some might attach this to the man Jesus. Jesus himself makes it seem like he is the Way by stating that no one comes to the father but by him. In the esoteric wing of early Christianity this was true because Jesus was the only one who attained to this new level of consciousness, so yes, he was the only game in town. I will also point out that while he was thought to say he was God in the synoptic gospels, what he said in one important case was “Does your scripture not say ‘ye are gods’?” The implication here is that the state Jesus was referring to was one that anyone could attain to. It is also something supported in Philip as well. We can do even greater things than Jesus because each of us can learn how to reach this place within.

The problem, though, is this type if teaching doesn’t appear to be well fleshed out in the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. There are many hints of something deeper but what they are we barely know. Jesus did say that to know you had to inquire within (by “knocking”). While some might want to interpret this differently than I have, I would ask you to consider where else would a Christian inquire? Jesus explained over and over that the kingdom was found within. You don’t knock on a real door, you knock on what seems to be a door within where this new world exists.

It may be that we don’t have the details because Jesus didn’t teach to just anyone. He hid his teachings inside parables so that those who were “without” would not be able to understand. Here we find in Mark and Luke a startling example of a private teaching at work where, teaching by the lake, he explains to his followers how he hides his teachings from all but those who has been “given” to know the secrets (of the kingdom). It’s really quite remarkable.

When I awakened I found myself encountering an intelligence which I knew was the Source of all life and existence. It was only possible with this new level of consciousness, that I could sense directly and vividly an intelligence which was a part of everything and that tied all things together in a way that felt like family. What I found was that what I had experienced was in harmony with what the gospel of Thomas and Philip (as well as others in the NHL) had to say, which was that Jesus was making his followers into Christs. I decided to read further into the NHL and this in turn led to a 15 year research project where I scrutinized the books that were found along with the books that are a part of mainstream Christian thought, mist notably the New Testament. This has led me to letters and accounts going back to the earliest days of the movement.

I came across the NHL for the first time a few months after my awakening and saw for the first time someone describing what had happened to me. These weren’t Sanscrit texts but the Gospel of Thomas, Philip, and many others. Hard to understand without the inner knowing or “gnosis” that awakening brings, I am convinced that the authors deliberately sought to keep hidden the direct meanings contained in the documents in order to protect the uninitiated. Still, their meaning was consistent with awakening in both Thomas and Philip as well as in the other documents which modern Christian scholars have dubbed as Gnostic in character.

The more I looked, the more evidence I tended to uncover that supported my thesis. Yes, this work is hampered by a kind of information black-out in some ways but in other ways there are important clues that I have found that makes a case for not just an alternate or deeper understanding of Christ, but also that it was possible that Jesus did have a private teaching, something that the Gospel of Thomas proclaims at its beginning.

One of the suspected authors of Thomas and Philip according to scholars is Valentinus who lived in the second century. Valentinus wrote how he had a vision of the risen Christ. At that time, he knew about Paul’s own vision of the risen Christ.

Valentinus explains how he had gone to a direct disciple of Paul, a man who had learned directly from Paul who was named Theodas. When Valentinus spoke with this disciple he learned from him that Paul had a private teaching which he reserved for his closest followers. Valentinus goes on to say that he was taught in this private way by the disciple.

The elephant in the room, for me at least, is if Valentinus was the author of Thomas or Philip, was it the result of having received a more esoteric teaching which he himself was ready for? Did Valentinus go on in his own way to produce writings perhaps based partly on the teachings of the disciples and with his own inner knowledge about the “body of Christ”? Did Valentinus have access to other Christians that were sharing privately these teachings? Did he just make them up as some Orthodox apologists contend?

While some might point out that this would amount to forgery, let me put this activity in perspective. At this time in history it was not uncommon at all for books or letters to be forged. Back then, a student or disciple would sometimes write after the teacher had died as though the teacher had written the document. Christianity has many of these forged documents as examples. Many are not included in the New Testament, but there are documents that are known forgeries that are still in the NT today. How do we know this? Because the content in some cases deals with issues that belong to a later date, after the death of the teacher. Take for example some of the letters of Paul. In Timothy and Titus there is content in them that simply did not exist during Paul’s life, so we know that someone else other than Paul wrote them. Someone forged the documents and in the process achieved a way to drive how the church might later be organized, for example. Additionally, in the case of Timothy, the writer makes Paul into a mysogynist, something that does not appear in any other of his other letters (not even once). If keeping women out of the church leadership was so important to Paul, it would have been repeated a number of times to the churches in other areas that he was known to write to. Today scholars tend to agree that five, possibly six, of Paul’s letters were written by someone other than Paul.

To loop back around to heresy once more, an important fact has remained throughout the last two hundred years since new documents from early Christianity have emerged (thanks in part to archeological digs and efforts searching libraries and monestaries). If heresy was the unimportant movement that the orthocentrics would have us believe, why are ALL the newly discovered documents always heretical documents and not Orthodox ones? I contend that the narrative or picture we have been given to believe is in fact not the true one, not completely, not by a long shot.

Additionally, Orthodoxy represents a more literalist and authoritarian take on Christianity. The heretics proposed that you didn’t need a priest to get you there, you need only to discover the Christ which is in you, something that would have eroded the power that the Orthodoxy went on to seek to increase over time. What did the church do in its earliest days? It grew and gained the attention of Emperor Constantine who made it the state religion. The heretics, as they were called, were driven from the stage despite how closely aligned many of their teachings were to the documents the Orthodoxy championed: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (Matthew 7:7) It has ever been thus!

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Jesus The Occultist

The word “occult” means to hide. When I place my hand in my pocket, it is occulted in the same way that when the moon crosses the path of the sun, it occults the sun in eclipse. Today the term “occult” has been made to refer to witchcraft or black magic. Occult means only to hide.

It is fair to say that Jesus was himself an occultist. I am not saying this in order to stir controversy, but to point out that he did do this in his teaching practice. Absolutely, no doubt about it. If you doubt this is the case you can find the evidence in the synoptic gospels themselves.

And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked him of the parable. And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God, but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables. That seeing that they may see but not perceive, and hearing they may hear but not understand lest at any time they be converted, and their sins be forgiven them.

Mark 4:10-12

It may be a bit much to take, realizing that Jesus was only speaking openly to a Jewish audience and with those who had already been prepared to understand his teaching and not others (Gentiles). This situation is communicated in Luke 12:41 with Peter asking about whether Jesus will teach to all (openly and not in parable so as to hide the meaning of his teaching). Jesus only explains or decodes his parables when he is with an elect or prepared group of people (and as we see in Mark, this means not Gentiles).

A lot is said about this by Christian apologists who try to explain why this might have been done. An early writer and bishop of Alexandria writing under the name of Dionysius (see: Salmond, S. D. F, et al. The Works of Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius of Alexandria and Archelaus. T. & T. Clark, 1882.), explains that the church regularly seeks to keep its teachings secret, even from those within the church who are members when they do not themselves fully understand the mysteries. This is done so as not to “blind” those who are “lost” or without the full knowledge or understanding (referred to as gnosis). Jesus uses the word “maturity” to signify this level of comprehension as does Paul in some of his letters, too. This maturity involves a capacity to understand what is being said in a deeper more full way. It is not uncommon for the deeper teachings, the more mystical ones, the mysteries as they are called, to be hidden from view.

Every single tradition, Christian or not, does this in order to protect people from gaining something for which they are not yet prepared. Traditions with an esoteric wing (in essence nearly every tradition that I can think of) have this as a feature because of the power associated with these “innermost” teachings (they are more than simple rule-following and may include how to cultivate new states of awareness). For example, for a very long time certain methods for reaching enlightenment were shrouded in mystery and kept from public view in India because it was known that prematurely exposing a person to these powerful methods could bring a person prematurely to enlightenment before the person was ready for it. I have personally observed a case of an individual who “forced” awakening and it did not go well for her…at all. It is not out of the realm of possibility that Jesus recognized this and operated in the same way. You mean Jesus resisted saving people? Absolutely. But wait, doesn’t that go against most of what we were taught since the beginning of time (or at least the way we now count time)?

There is a disconnect between what many are told about their faith (Christianity in particular) and what actually happened. Most Christians I have spoken to have ben of the opinion that Jesus taught and spoke openly to the multitudes, but the evidence shows differently. While Jesus spoke openly, yes, he did not speak openly in such a way that those “without” the additional teaching and inner initiation could understand. Technically he taught to all, but his purpose was not for everyone to understand or to become saved. This is to my mind an important factor when we reassess Christianity at its very roots because of the existence of documents that date back to earliest Christianity that speak of a private teaching and how important it was to teach privately. This would be documents which the church itself disputes as being tied to Jesus’s real teachings, the Nag Hammadi Library.

One possibility, which I explore in the manuscript I am currently researching on Jesus and the Gnostic texts, is the theory that Jesus taught this way as a recruitment tool. You teach by parables because there are “dogs” (see Dionysius) or swine amongst you. However, you might also get people who come up to you to say how they enjoyed the teaching but what did you mean by the parable of the candle? What was that all about? What I contend is that the quality necessary for maturity and being prepared to know the truth is a deep sense of curiosity. For most who hear the parable, they might get some comfort from it, but not everyone would want to know more. Clearly people were not pressing Jesus to just go ahead and explain himself plainly, nowhere do people do this except in a more private way.

When you are dealing in mysteries the reality is there is a very small number of people who are going to actually pursue understanding the teachings at a deeper level. it seems a little silly for the church to say Jesus didn’t teach in private when he certainly did so, and it also isn’t that much of a stretch that he might have had more teachings which were hidden from view even from those who would form the basis of the orthodox strand within Christianity who did not themselves understand them (as in the gospel of Thomas or Philip for example). They seem to be so far removed from the kinds of things that the orthodoxy is used to hearing Jesus say that they tend to reject the teachings out of hand even as there is evidence that such teachings may have in fact existed. A number of the gospel writers said that there was a lot that Jesus did and spoke about that weren’t being included in the gospel accounts, and the gospels themselves really aren’t that large in size for a person who was considered to be so important. Its curious, isn’t it? You would think there would be many more writings about him than they are. In 1945 with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library documents, we may well have gotten some of them, even if the Church was unable to accept them at such a late date. That said, these documents are from very early Christianity, so it wasn’t like they were created centuries after Jesus was off the scene.

I am surprised to learn just how many people who consider themselves Christians actually think that Jesus taught openly to all people. He didn’t do that in fact. He hid his teachings from Gentiles. Only later was the Word taken to the Gentiles through the efforts that Paul made to export Christianity beyond Judea.

The idea then of Jesus having a private teaching is not so hard to understand, and yet the church railed mightily against gospels which purported to have been collections of Jesus’s private teachings (the Nag Hammadi Library is a trove of this “secret” or private teaching). Additionally, one of the foremost purveyors of these secret teachings, according to scholars, was a man named Valentinus who lived at a time when he was able to speak directly to a disciple of Paul, and he was a disciple who had learned directly from Paul while he was still alive. What Valentinus wrote in a letter was that he went to this disciple because, I presume, he had a vision of the risen Christ (much as had Paul). When he spoke to this disciple of Paul we was told that Paul had a private or secret teaching only given to his innermost circle of disciples and he says further that he was then schooled in this teaching. Now bear in mind, Valentinus was not a fly-by-night person. He was highly respected and was a devout Christian. He even was in the running for being chosen for the position of bishop of Rome back in a time when Christianity was still an underground movement and either frowned upon by Rome or outright prosecuted for being an illegal religion (depending on which emperor was in power at the time).

While many want to say that there was no secret teaching, there remains some evidence that this was in fact the case both with Jesus as well as Paul. No controversy, only understanding why this was done the way that it was. It makes for a lot of conjecture alla Dan Brown style writing, but it seems that this was done for very good reasons.

It is worth considering in order to get a better understanding of the history of Christianity and how some of the leaders of the Church conducted themselves.

The Gaian Mysteries Of Gnosis – The Bruce Codex

Today we have a little-known document that describes what many scholars in the field of religious studies regard as an initiatory rite attributed to Jesus. It describes something that is being spoken of widely today amongst many who have themselves experienced awakening, which is the Ascension of Gaia. In this remarkable excerpt of the “Hymn of Jesus” it shows that in early Christianity they were describing a nearly identical phenomenon in operation within human consciousness in our present day amongst many (although not all) who have experienced awakening. From Chapter three of the Hymn of Jesus:

“The living Jesus answered and said : “Blessed is the man who has known these things. He has brought heaven down, he has lifted the earth and has sent it to heaven…”

What I find so interesting is that virtually no one that I have spoken to about the Gaia Ascension mythos today (most commonly described as “ascension”) knows anything about this obscure, but incredibly important document. Nor are they aware that we have been here before, talking about the same phenomenological concept separated by close to two thousand years.

The document in question is the Bruce codex which contains Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopic manuscripts and was found in upper Egypt by a Scottish traveler, James Bruce in about 1769. The first translations of the text began in the mid-1800’s. The passages I include are based on the translation of Carl Schmidt, and republished with additional contributions by Violet MacDermot.

This edition of The Bruce Codex is long out of print, but may be found in research libraries. It is also included, with material related to the find and its translation and other particulars HERE.

What interests me so much about the Hymn of Jesus is how it is clearly a series of initiatory rites with words spoken much like how a mantra is used, which is used to alter consciousness in order that one may move into that state where one awakens or is open to the same level that the Master has achieved. Indeed, the codex is consistent in how it is structured in this way.

Without getting into deep theological debate and the history associated with early Christian belief, most scholars see works of this type as not having been written by the actual witnesses themselves and that they came later as a result of stories that were told about Jesus and his life. This is as true for the “Gnostics” to whom this codex is attributed as it is for the more literalist Orthodox wing that ultimately won the “war” of ideas and belief to become the one that was most widely accepted. It is worth pointing out that all of the synoptic gospels were written not by witnesses but were in their earliest form, anonymous. The church later attributed them to certain writers, and they all were written some time after Jesus was no longer on the scene. Also, there are synoptic gospels that do not agree with one another also on some very important points. Discrepancies, yes, and most are small, but others are bigger and they affect how scholars look at these books in terms of the belief that these were eyewitness accounts (which they were not despite how the Church has represented this point for centuries now). We know, for instance, how certain conversations could not have taken place in some gospels because of how Aramaic was structured and used, that some word usage was specific to Greek as a language, which is what was used to write the first gospels (instead of Aramaic, which was the native tongue of the people involved in the Jesus stories). We have no copies of these Gospels in Aramaic.

We know stories were added to the synoptics gospels (most likely by scribes) and we also know people were forging documents, like a number of letters by Paul for instance, all of which remain in the New Testament to this day. Everyone was taking the Jesus story and running with it and inserting their own ideas in order to push this movement in the direction THEY wanted, and this is true for ALL branches of Christianity. In fact, as writings get farther away from Jesus’s life tend to have the biggest and hardest to believe miracles in them (and are not included in the New Testament). They just kept getting bigger and bigger as we go along. All of this to say that what was once called “The Way” was subject to interpretation with all comers. What is interesting is the depth and the truth realized in writings like what is found in the Bruce Codex, as they are themselves depictions of real human experiences that do describe aspects of the enlightened state. Different perhaps from the New Testament that you grew up with, but at one time were treasured by early Christians (and bear close similarities to other traditions that had some of the most sophisticated understandings of enlightenment in the world despite the fact that these early Christians had no known contact with those other cultures from the East).

With that, and against that backdrop, the first chapters of the Hymn of Jeou (Jesus).

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The First Book of JEOU

I have loved you. I have wanted life to be given you; the Living Jesus, who knows the truth.

Chapter 1

This is the book of the gnoses of the invisible God, by means of the hidden mysteries which show the way to the chosen race, leading in refreshment to the life of the Father – in the coming of the Saviour , of the deliverer of souls who receive themselves the Word of life which is higher than all life – in the knowledge of the living Jesus, who has come forth through the Father from the aeon of light at the completion of the Pleroma – in the teaching, apart from which there is no other, which the living Jesus has thaught to his apostles, saying:  “This is the teaching in which dwells the whole knowledge.” The living Jesus answered and said to his disciples: “Blessed is he who has crucified the world, and who has not the world to crucify him.” The apostles answered with one voice, saying :  “O Lord, teach us the way to crucify the world, that it may not crucify us, so that we are destroyed and loose our lives” The living Jesus answerd : “He who has crucified it is he who has found my word and has fulfilled it according to the will of him who has sent me.”

Chapter 2

The apostles answered, saying : ” Speak to us, O Lord, that we may hear thee. We have followed thee with our whole hearts. We have left behind father and mother, we have left behind vineyards and fields, we have left behind goods and the greatness of kings, and we have followed thee, so that thou shouldst teach us to know the life of thy father who has sent thee” The living Jesus answered and said : “The life of my Father is this : that you receive your soul from the race of understanding mind, and that it ceases to be earthly and becomes understanding through that which I say to you in the course of my discourse, so that you fulfil it and are saved from the archon of this aeon and his persecutions, to which there is no end. But you, my disciples, hasten to receive my word with certaintiy so that you know it, in order that the archon of this aeon may not fight with you – this one who did not find any commandment of his in me – so that you also, my apostles, fulfil my word in relation to me, and I myself make you free, and you become whole through a freedom in which there is no blemish. As the Spirit of the comforter (Parakleiton) is whole, so will you also be whole, through the freedom of the spirit of the Holy Comforter.”

Chapter 3

All the apostles, Matthew and John, Philip and Bartholomew and James, answered with one voice, saying:

“O Lord Jesus, thou who livest, whose goodness extends over those who have found thy wisdom and thy form in which thou gavest light ; O light-giving Light that enlightened our hearts until we received the light of life; O true Word, that through gnosis teaches us the hidden knowledge of the Lord Jesus, the living one.”

The living Jesus answered and said : “Blessed is the man who has known these things. He has brought heaven down, he has lifted the earth and has sent it to heaven, and he has become the Midst for it is nothing.” The apostles answered, saying :   “Jesus , thou living one, Lord , interprete for us how we may bring heaven down, for we have followed thee in order that thou shouldst teach us the true light.” The living Jesus answered and said : “The Word which existed in heaven before the earth came into existence – this which is called the world – but you, when you know my Word, you will bring heaven down, and it will dwell in you. Heaven is the invisible Word of the Father; but when you know these things you will bring heaven down. As to sending the earth up to heaven, I will show you what it is , that you may know it : to send the earth to heaven is that he who hears the word of gnosis has ceasedto have the understanding mind of man of earth, but has become a man of heaven. His understanding mind has ceased to be earthly, but it has become heavenly. Because of this you will be saved from the archon of this aeon, and he will become the Midst, because it is nothing.”   The living Jesus said again :  “When you become heavenly you will become the Midst because it is nothing, for the .. . .. rulers and the wicked powers (exousiai) will you and they will envy you because you have known me, because I am not from the world, and I do not resemble the rulers and the powers (exousiai) and all the wicked ones. They do not come from me. And furthermore he who (is born) in the flesh of unrighteousness has no part in the Kingdom of my Father, and also he who me according to the flesh has no hope Kingdom of God the Father.”

Chapter 4

The Apostles answered with one voice, they said : “Jesus ,  O Lord, are we born of the flesh, and known thee according to the flesh? Tell us, O Lord, for we are troubled.” The living Jesus answered and said to his apostles : ” I do not speak of the flesh in which you dwell, but the flesh of and non-understanding which exists in ignorance, which leads astray many from the of my Father.” The apostles answered the words of the living Jesus, they said: “Tell us how non-understanding happens, that we may beware of it, lest we should go . . . . . . .” The living Jesus answered and said : ” one who bears my virginity and my . . . . . and my garment, without understanding and knowing me, and blasphemes my name, I have . . . . to destruction. And furthermore he has become an earthly son because he has not known my word with certainty – these which the Father spoke, so that I myself should teach those who will know me at the completion of the pleroma of him who sent me.” The Apostles answered and said : “O Lord Jesus, thou living one, teach us the completion, and it suffices us.” And he said : “The word which I give to you yourselves….”

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Chapter three is, I think, incredibly relevant to the Ascension mystery as it is being spoken and written about today amongst those who write about the “ascension” phenomenon. Is it not true that this is being seen by many people today as a global phenomenon in which the earth, we sense, is being brought to a finer vibration, with the implication being that Gaia itself is being transformed as well as life upon it? Or is it just us? And how far removed is this idea with the ideas contained in chapter three which describe the process of bringing earth into heaven and heaven into the earth? What kind of change would this represent? Is this simply too big of a leap for us to even imagine what a world like that might look like so we speak about it in mythic terms, long on theory but perhaps short on facts? Perhaps new turnings are always like this; it cannot be known until it has been created because so many factors depend on what are selected which will determine what that recipe ultimately brings us. While some argue against freewill, perhaps this is our one possible proof of that freewill, which is that the outcome might not always be foreseeable until we have acted, something that is an act that is collective, a collective leap into the unknown.

Scholars will likely point out that this writing was created some time after the death of Jesus since the argument can (perhaps rightly) be made that it was possible that Jesus himself did not know while he lived that he would in fact be crucified. While modern Christians would argue that through the prophetic tradition he would have known all along that he would come to be a sacrifice on the cross, careful examination of the Old Testament documents suggests that the passage in Psalms which most point to as evidence of a crucifixion show evidence of having been altered (Psalm 22:16). The issue at hand with this passage is that the Jewish version of the book says “lion” where the Christian version says “pierced” which results in a completely different meaning. In the Jewish version David is surrounded by “dogs” and “lions” who are at his hands and feet, but the Christian version reads that dogs compass him, they pierce his hands and feet. Lion was changed to pierce and, as the argument goes, it completely changes the meaning of the passage from David being savaged by his enemies to his waxing prophetic. The result being, that someone forged this passage in early Christianity in order to support the appearance of prophecy from the old tradition to the new. There is a lot of disagreement on this one point, however, as one document in the Qumran discovery in the 1940’s (and which scholars think were just prior to Christ’s ministry) has “pierced” in one version of Psalms. But, as Rabbi Singer has pointed out, this passage is not mentioned in any of the synoptic gospels nor is it mentioned by Paul not even once, who was himself often quoting Jewish scripture, and if such a prophecy such as this existed, he would undoubtedly have been mentioning it as proof of Jesus being tied to Messianic tradition. This only comes along later, Singer argues, probably in the second or third centuries. At any rate, as a result, this may mean that this hymn as written probably was a later creation. It may or may not have been directly tied to Jesus. It is possible that there was an original document that then got “embroidered” with the crucifixion story added in. What it does show is that these ideas of how we can bring heaven and earth closer through an inner act of inner transformation or awakening were present at an early phase in the development of Christianity. While these particulars are not themselves clear, what is clear for me is that this concept of bringing heaven and earth together was in development and it shows a keen awareness of how an aspect of evolution may very well operate when dealing with human consciousness. I take this side track into the architecture of the Christ experience to point out that for the Gnostics, while Jesus was incredibly important as the way-shower, they took the ball and ran with it. For them, the apostolic age did not end as the Orthodoxy had decreed, after the first initial group had died out. A gift had been given in the form of awareness, a form of knowledge called gnosis such that what they were calling “Christ” could be conveyed to others who then would become Christs (this was the case made in the Valentinian School and the Gospel of Philip spells this out unambiguously). As a result, the gnostic production continued while the Orthodox became static in the sense that no new documents were produced (after Act, some letters, and John’s Revelation).

In my personal experience I was aware of acting as a channel for a fire from heaven which was conducted by the masculine while the feminine acted as the receptive agent which was involved in the other side of the creation of phenomenon which is the nurturing side, the “bringing forth” of the resulting mixture which comes about as a result of “the two” that actually create the divine third, or Christ. One could not operate without the other, and while the masculine could be seen as initiatory, the feminine also was initiatory as well in that without her, the process of synthesis to a higher awareness was not possible. The two existed as a single unit, a co-creative matrix where one is not above the other, but each were co-equal and necessary.

I will point out that the Gnostics spoke of the trinity as a family unit consisting of a masculine and feminine quality that met and came into union “in the bridal chamber” and it was out of their ecstatic union that a third quality, a child, was produced. This was the Christ. The upshot in all of this was that this was an inside job, not something that one seeks outwardly. Even Paul, who describes his encounter with the light on his journey to Damascus says “when it was the good pleasure of God … to reveal his son in me” he does not say “to” but “in me.” It was a quality that was already there. He also says that he was anointed (initiated) by the “Christ that liveth in me,” he does not mention Jesus (he didn’t meet Jesus in the flesh). This was not something that he was given, it was something that he was made aware of. This, by the way, is how most of the Eastern doctrines treat enlightenment, which is a state or potential that is in all people. The Buddha, which we often tend to think of as a person, is in fact a term referring to a quality that is in all people. “Buddha” is a field of awareness and everyone has a Buddha within, slumbering until awakened. In like manner, Paul associates this quality with Christ as something that is revealed as existing in him. “For neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians).

Gnosis.org has an excellent collection of writings on the topic of Gnosticism. It represents the “lost” story of Christianity. While the orthodoxy will say otherwise, the information contained in these old texts supplies insight into the nature of enlightenment and forms the body of knowledge that always seemed to me growing up to have been missing from the church, which is how to achieve union with the divine. Hard to read, the writings were shrouded in language intended to obscure their meaning, these were texts intended for a select audience, for people who were being “perfected” or “prepared” or “the elect.” This is what both Jesus and Paul referred to as “maturity.”

When Jesus speaks to his disciples about not speaking to Gentiles and others outside their group, we may well have been seeing the secret doctrine at work. What I wonder is why is it so hard to consider that this indeed may have been the case? With so many awakenings today which often include the elements contained in those secret teachings, it’s hard to see that this wasn’t happening and that the new generation of Christs today have managed to achieve something that in the past took years to achieve, if ever.

Releasing Barriers

Twelve years in and I have had enough water under the bridge to see how all the work I spent clearing away the dross has impacted my life.

I can say that for as challenging the early stages can be, sticking with it has its benefits. Awakening led me to an undeniable awareness that I had made many compromises in my earlier life that came back to bite me once I could no longer live the old way. Not living the old way simply no longer was tenable once awakening came. This wasn’t just caprice, a desire to be different, but was itself a fundamental return to a basic ground state that had become, to some degree, self-evident.

What was interesting to me as awakening got underway was that the mere presence of awakening in me was showing every sign of affecting those in my life who didn’t align to the presence of my own truth. I thought this curious effect was my imagination at first, but as awakening proceeded it was clear that as I released old karmic material, it served to unsettle others who did not fit this truth, what the Polynesians call “Pono” which means correct alignment.

I should explain that this was not merely the result of my behaving differently in front of others, but that there were deeper subconscious reactions taking place around me that were tied to my own inner work. I have described in previous posts how my then-spouse would go into emotional meltdowns as I privately released inner blockages in my own field of awareness, a reaction that I was able to see was causally tied to what I had been doing just the day before. I observed nine times in a row that this took place over a three month period, each resulting in her going into a temporal meltdown each time. These events continued beyond the nine, but I stopped counting after nine times because I felt I had already met the burden of proof for myself at that point.

This was the crazy world of my awakening, an awareness of this underlying truth of what we all are that began to emerge even though I was living in a toxic environment that favored slumber and dysfunction of those around me. To see how they sought to demonize it (awakening) and me, I saw graphically just how off they were. I was able to see how deception and dishonesty was raised in order to attempt to keep the old regime up and running. It was sad back then, and hard to take because I was the butt of these efforts at keeping the lid on a poisonous can of worms. This helped me to see how buried we can all be in beliefs that limit us all. I would lose an important reationship with a child who was swept up in this web of deceit. It sound so cloak and dagger saying it this way, but it was just as if a child’s mind had been swept up in a net of belief: all-encompassing, and enclosing on all sides with untruths an gaslighting. My eyes were opened wide to how humans do business here.

After a serious injury the same year that awakening came, I was unable to work and the economic debacle of 2008 the following year made clear that this was a major turning point in many ways for me. Like it or not, I was being put into an environment where my eyes would be opened more and more by having time to myself to reflect on my life. If you knew me pre-awakening, you knew someone who worked long hours trying to grow his business who had his head buried in the sand. With my seventy-hour work week suddenly behind me, I had to see what was now clearly in front of me.

In a psychic reading many years later, this time period was described as my being made into a sacrificial lamb. This characterization seemed odd at first, but as I reflected on what this reader had told me, it made a lot of sense in the end. This is what we ALL do when someone presents us with a view of truth we are not ready to face: we dismiss and sometimes even demonize it. We literally begin to project the falsehoods of our own inner deceits on others as if they belong to those people. It’s so strange how we do this, isn’t it?

I was to focus on awakening. I did. I was able, in the end, to spend time on it alone. Life made it happen. While things might have seemed dire to others, I had this feeling like everything was going to be alright. That was one of the most important time periods in my life. My time in the wilderness.

I was able to see that the life I thought I had didn’t fully conform to reality. I was blinded by hope instead of illuminated by clear seeing. I spent easily a year free from the life I thought I had to reflect and absorb what was happening to me. I wish everyone could do this, just take off a year and meditate, commune with nature, and be with people of like mind.

Like clockwork, whenever something was needed, the universe provided. When I thought about finding work someone I didn’t know contacted me about a job that was perfect for me. I landed the job and it helped me to develop my teaching skills, an important step in the next phase of my work. But before that, I had been carefully cared for even though it didn’t seem that way to others. It allowed me an unprecedented gaze into the mysteries of this phenomenon that is awakening and how it was slowly but surely taking me apart and putting me back together again.

I learned that those to whom I was connected were not really able to see me for who I was despite the innextricable deep soul ties that we had. I saw that what probibited this clear knowing was always their own inner baggage. I myself also had my own baggage, and awakening, while clearing me of it, did not clear all of it in one magical twinkling, but was instead a process. Storms of energy would sweep through, and each time less and less remained. More peace took its place each time, but this was gradual. It was fast by any other standard, but still it was a process. I was able to see how someone so close to me could know so little while inserting so much into the narrative that didn’t belong. We see not what is there, but rather by way of our own inner dialogues which we take as the truth. Say this to anyone when it seems to matter and they think you are mad.

I learned that when people aren’t ready to face truth, they will project. It does no good to point out the truth. People are only ready when they are ready.

The mere presence of connection does not mean that there is a purpose or destiny in it, only that there is something in me that is not fully resolved at a karmic level, and that these karmic entanglements are at the heart of the soul connection phenomenon…the twin flame or whatever your term dejour is for it.

Awakening plus karma is a combination that makes it possible to feel and see the other’s soul. The soul, unimited, perfect, standing outside of time can feel like it can be almost anything to the earthly man or woman because it already is. This leads to a deep “fall” into love that feels cosmic, destined, and more intens than anything you could ever dare imagine. In fact, this mixture is so strong it can lead a person (like me) to fall deeply in love with someone I wouldn’t normally be attracted to. People wrongly assume that bliss only serves lofty divine things. It is lofty because it does not divide or judge, but offers itself to all.

In one case for me, a connection was forced. You might think there is no way this could happen, but it absolutely did. It was true that I had known this person before this forced coupling took place and I had no underlying fascination with this person previous to this event. How this went down showed me that a soul connection is not destiny but in fact can be manufactured when the right ingredients are present. It is made all the stronger by a preponderance of karma that can be passed to the other person in this entangling of twinning process.

While others get lost in the foreverness of these connections, I saw that it instead was simply a mechanism for unlocking soul potential and that this had little to do with destiny at all. I know this throws cold water on the entire topic, but I can say if it happened to me, I am not merely an anomoly. In fact, I found an entire community of people who suspected that this phenomenon was not all as it seemed. They attributed the phenomenon to an outside agency or force that had less than perfect intentions. I don’t agree with their take on the phenomenon either, since I see as many holes in the argument as there are in other “twin” descriptions out there today. I think I fall into a middle way that states that the universe is neutral. Our actions serve to form our destiny, which is also to say that each of us can change what lies before us.

Entanglement (“twinning”) is a phenomenon that can occur when all the right set of requirements are met. The universe does not care if the ingredients are positive or negative, only that they are present. If so, an entanglement can take place. The ingredients that are used determine the intensity of the entanglement. The ingredients can be our own innability to see the truth and thus whatever that karma represents in specific feeds into the entanglement. The problem, though, is you can have a direct line to a person’s soul while the personality is itself extremely polarized from the higher self to the point where earthly self and higher self bear little resemblance to one another. This happened to me.

My experience was with someone who resisted her transformation instead of embracing it to the degree that she could have. Still, awakening is difficult for all of us and we do what we can do. All of this opened my eyes to show me that even those who awaken can languish for years in the remaining karmic tangles they have set for themselves. I no longer needed to be their helper or savior. I also didn’t need any more deceit in my life, how one needs to make lies to cover their own unhealed condition. In fact, I was much better off alone instead of marinating in a desire to quell lonliness.

I found that true love arises out of aloneness, in owning our solitary state while seeing how everything is simultaneously wedded together even at the subatomic level. It is the higher levels in us that need the work, not the more fundamental ones.

By seeing how this person tried to blame her troubles on the world and me, I got a clear view on the depth of inner deception we can build around ourselves, even as we awaken. I had in my own way done similar things a few years before, but now I was rushing the exits. I had a little more perspective by this time.

I had been, for my part, unsettled by a lot that went down during awakening, unsure that I’d ever get back to my business again. Clearly, awakening could not be bothered about what I wanted. I was going to take this time to slow down whether I liked it or not. This resulted in my reaching states where I could tap into streams of pure information that I was able to use to further my development. These states came as blissful epiphanies where it was like I was being attended to by a cosmic librarian who would show me to books that would teach me about a host of subjects I knew litle about. In some cases, this “librarian” would push me in certain directions. Sitting by a river on rocks, my mind flipped through the pages of a world of living information existing as energy and described by the Hindus as the akashic records. Edgar Cayce had said he used these to perform his readings. Curiously, the way he described how he achieved this was exactly how I found myself accessing them. This techique is so simple, most don’t seem able to use them perhaps because it hasn’t occurred to them. I’m happy to convey this method, but it isn’t in the compass of this post.

In one instance, I was shown how matter is created from energy. This helped me to see how two complimentary energies served to form physical reality. The bottom line, the lesson, was that the universe was not just alive, but that it was based in play and bliss. It showed that creation is a cooperative unifying event that happens inside of us along the line of the Ida and Pengal currents and that we can also create in groups a well as with a singular other.

I was shown the role that the three brains have in learning how to utilize awakening to its best effect. These brains, the light explained or showed me, were the reptile, mammal, and primate brain all present in us as beings on the planet. It explained that no part of this system could be ignored, and explained how best to use each part of the brain in order to realize the best process. Denying their presence was a disastrous way to go, it explained, and it showed how to balance thought and feeling across them in order to harness them in what could be a new synthesis of consciousness where there is less fragmentated behavior. All parts had to present. The brain had a way to mirror higher order consciousness by kowing how to use what gifts we were bestowed with.

I was shown in another epiphany moment how the energy body and the neurophysiology are in some ways mirrors of each other. I was shown the role that the “zero point” energetically has with the way that the brain and body are arranged in order to mirror a very similar principle in brain wiring or mapping.

I am pointing these things out in order to illustrate how fleshed out all of this information was and that all I needed to tap it was a deep open bliss state coupled with a focus or desire to know more even though I knew little on the topic. I mention this because you can do it also. This was what a psychic who did a reading on me described as my ability to speak from the master realm. If I can do it, you can too, but it requires an ability to keep your mind a total blank slate or else you will fill it with information that does not belong. You have to constantly feel as though you are empty and constantly grasping for the material. You always do this blindly, always unassuming but excited in the heart that soon, its life/information will fill you. There is no determining or chewing or digesting in process as far as trying to determine what it all means as it is coming, you just soak it up first, then roll it around in your head later. No expectation of any outcome. This got easier the more I could trust the process.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t have changed anything. For years I lost my creative groove. I lost confidence and then discovered how easy it is to do that when surrounding yourself with toxic people. I had been using my creativity as a way to gain approval. Yuck! It all crashed and burned and was ressurected to what it is today, which sems to be much healthier and much more stable and dependent on no one’s say-so. It was me handing my power to another. Shame on me.

Now, over a decade later, I have recreated my lines of work in my business. I literally have all new work including the old standby’s. I am utilizing the internet for marketing, building community, and growing my business. This is a third incarnation of my business, first on a retail model, then wholesale, and now using the internet to do both. The thing is, it’s working. The steps are modest but each one is a step forward instead of backward. I have as many new designs created as designs that I had originally before all this happened.

For me now, I am using this new alignment of purpose less tangled from past karmic issues to help to manifest in a whole new way. While a yogi or yogini often would go on retreat, but we often do not have such luxuries. That said, I think that it would be brilliant if we had a Western inspired retreat facility where those awakened might attend to their new state with the right kind of support that such a state deserves.

~Parker

Inside A Teacher Awaits Your Heart

I have been so busy. A new direction and new work, so much to do, so little time. From my drafts vault. Enjoy, lovelies! Spring is close!!

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COPYRIGHT, Stafford Art Glass

Let reason go. Turn to cosmic mind, the ineffable state, what we have called She, our feminine side. Here, reason must be lain aside. Quiet your mind. Calm body. Return to the primordial state…to that before pretense began. By abandoning this part of the mind, the rational and reasoning mind, a much larger one can be felt and utilized. A great teacher emerges who is the best of your teachers. The teacher resides in the center of your chest. It can bloom like flowers in Spring and are just as beautiful.

I experienced awakening as the rise of two energies that later joined in pure union to give birth to a transcendent state of being, a sacred third. I saw how this was a trinity. It took years to tease its secrets out. That alone led me to a great discovery and uncovered my roots in the past within esoteric Christianity in the early fourth century A.D. I lived then and was responsible for hiding documents that would have otherwise been destroyed by the creators of “orthodoxy” which was known as a great lie, but it had the big guns, the power, the money, the control. We were heretics and we were run out from every corner and center. It is how things are here; people prefer the lie than the truth.

For me, I experienced the mystic Trinity as originally intended. It’s heresy now. My how things have changed. For me, the Teacher is the Christ within. It creates awareness so that I can find problem areas where the presence will bring them up and heal them…an unwinding process of sorts. I enter by way of ecstacy. What remains I offer up to the Source of all life.

Somehow, for whatever reason, I have come to a place where devotional practice feels magnificent to my heart. It short circuits a desire to control things and as a result, leaves only what I can change or effect now. I continue offering up what remains in me to be finally taken into the light. There is a trigger for this one; I am confident that in time it will be found, felt, known. In finding that In attracting highly devoted people to me who are themselves very devoted, heart centered, and hard at work on coming closer to the divine within.

No one can truly know your journey. As a result, its important that if you walk this kind of path that you have people who love and respect what you must do on your journey. Life is too short to swim in waters that lack this love, forebearance, and understanding. I came to see how others painted their own troubles into my life. I once met someone who was convinced they knew me in the South in the 1800’s. The inner teacher had shown me, years before, how I had a life at that time that was completely different from their supposed memory. The quiet moral is we often make our inner struggles the subject of projections because the truth is not yet available to them at the time. Always trust your instincts but be careful when strong emotion plays around difficulties emotionally because here is where projections happen. Listen to the Teacher within.

You know, I have found when I need an answer I can ask my heart. I can feel it give a thumbs up or down depending on the answer. It’s like….a dowsing rod. You get used to feeling the answers come this way and you get used to what a “yes” feels like was opposed to a “no” answer. You can feel it in your field. You must get quiet in order to hear it at first. If you learn how to tune this in you have access to something that is impossible for anyone to lie and it not be not known. There is a part of you at least that knows the truth. I say water that seed and let it grow and flourish inside of you. You will be at odds with the world but you will have a much better world living inside of you.

Who could believe this except yourself? Why expect anyone to understand? It is a juicy secret between you and the universe. Beyond scripture lies the truth…which is beaten up with pages missing….too many edits and messing with the text. The Teacher is from the immovable race. It lies in truth within your heart.

More

I was not satisfied with the teaching in church….I knew there was more. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was wanting. I knew this above all else, beyond the explanations of others that I was merely “prideful” or unable to take the teaching as truth. No, there was more, I knew it beyond all else.
When I awakened I was lucky to have seen how there WERE teachings by Jesus himself which he passed on to his disciples in books that spoke directly about a process whereby one entered the kingdom. These were central teaching that acted like a key to understanding everything else Jesus was teaching in his ministry. The problem was that these teaching were demonized and anathematized by the church. These were part of this something “more.” I knew that in fact Jesus was teaching his followers about awakening and that the truth was hidden or obfuscated in numerous ways. History offered up her secrets and laid bare the many ways that contributed to our losing these central teachings. What is so amazing to me is that these teachings are actually the lynch pins in understanding all that Jesus taught about. It’s pretty incredible to look at all of this and know that this went down in the way that it did.
I once wrote about this issue and had some of my friends asking me why I was so critical about Christianity, or why I hated the church. It’s too easy to feel that way when dealing with this issue and to me, it is an easy way out of actually examining things closely and asking some very fair questions. But it’s not out of a deep hate or any of that. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I want a religion that offers the keys to self realization, of actually knowing what this kingdom is. Truth is a curious thing; we can have all levels of it and still be missing key points.

I have done the hard work of inquiring and looking. I have poured through the texts of the New Testament as well as those that were not included, from apocrypha to the Nag Hammadi. I have studied issues surrounding translation, how the contextual nature of Aramaic actually does matter when translating to any language, as well as what biblical scholars are saying that pastors dare not touch. More than this, I awakened and saw that the only books that helped describe my new state of being were the words of Jesus teaching his followers about the kingdom, which fit my experience perfectly….but also happened to have been deemed heresy. They had been cast aside and had never made it into canon.  The more that I read, the more it became clear that what we got was a version of the truth, but not the full truth.  I’m not even suggesting that this was some sort of conspiracy.  It may have been simply a conspiracy of ignorance acted upon by those who had less than the full story.  But even half the story is better than no story, and it wasn’t as if we weren’t getting truths.  We just didn’t get its heart, and this, dear readers, is the hardest one to swallow for some of us today.  It is covered over first by some 1700 years of tradition and then it includes a whole new dimension of thinking added, a great mystery that has been hidden from all of us (for whatever reason).

Since my experience in awakening is the same exact phenomenon as others who have awakened, and it’s all described in the same way by nearly everyone, and is being described in these cast-away texts, it begs the question; isn’t it possible that something very important was missed? And perhaps, then, might this missing piece be important to know the fullness of this man’s great insight and teaching? If you found out that the teaching of Jesus was incomplete, wouldn’t you, as a follower of Christ, want to know? I’m asking you to put your pride aside and get curious and be simple like children, ripe for hearing what might just be really big news.

Awakening, which is the kingdom, brings a renewed way of using the mind. If you can teach yourself to forgo mere rational thought, you can activate more and more of your capacity for understanding, which is truly liberating. It requires humility because there is so much to give up in order to see in this way. There is a blizzard of biases and beliefs that rage in such places, and the very religion that was created to support these teachings has essentially continued to demonize the concept of awakening in some quarters. Once these biases have been cleared, though, the mind becomes a luminous field of awareness in direct proportion to how much bias has been released. But it isn’t just that, it’s letting yourself be shown, led, taken by the presence of the indwelling divine and it’s child which is the Christ consciousness. Others call it Cosmic Consciousness, or Cosmic Mind. It is all the same and emerges in the same way in each tradition because this is what we ALL are, rather than the beliefs we hold. Remember how Jesus said the kingdom is within you? That might just be an important clue to all of us. It’s what’s inside-this does not happen outside of any of us. Where, then, do you think you will meet God?

This more asks me to continually to let go of my familiar moorings to here and as I do, new understanding floods in, mysteries become knowns, and the universe resolves into a greater and greater miracle. But no words can contain this more…you just have to go and see for yourself.

All of this is like a seed that grows into a sprout, then a plant, and then a flower. The flower opens more and more and this flower is awareness. This is how awakening proceeds; it is the smallest of seeds that grows in stages. More and more, it opens, revealing still-deeper layers of comprehension. To get there, I lay aside all rational thought and allow my mind to go blank. Yes, blank. It is here that absent thought a great and ineffable presence grows that is a love unlike any other. Everything I could ever wish to know becomes available in that “space.” If you believe you can’t, you probably won’t….but if you consider it possible, then it becomes possible. I wish this for everyone because it reveals our own foolishness and opens us to wonder and awe. The world so needs this right now.

Until next time….

Early Christianity And The Wild One

 

I started a project yesterday that has been nagging at me for years that involves my encounter with early Christian texts and what I have found was an effort to change the teachings of Jesus in order to appeal to a specific group of believers.  While I’d love nothing more than to have a real cloak and dagger story for the sake of excitement, what we have as historical documents is scant.  But the fix was in even during the life of Jesus in terms of who would tell the story of this man’s teachings and what that story was going to look like.  
I know I am going against 1600 years of ingrained belief and programming, but it is a story that deserves to be told.  Jesus was deep into the forces of awakening and taught about them, but either those in power wanted to hide them away, or they simply could not understand what a certain strand of his teachings even meant.  Having said this, those who had these deeper teachings were hunted relentlessly in an effort to not allow these most important of his teachings to see the light of day.  Whether by design or by ignorance, this was the result.  And this, I now know, is a fact.

 

For me, the story begins when I was young and had trouble with the church and its teachings.  For me, my trouble wasn’t as vague as some people’s problems with the church often tend to be.  In my experience, I had this very strange and unexplainable sense that the church had hidden something of great importance from the public. It is this hidden element within Christianity that made all the difference in knowing God intimately, directly. The only problem was I didn’t know why I had this sense growing up.  But like so many people I knew who were church goers or grew up in a family who went to church, something just didn’t add up. 
The story gets interesting when I began looking at early Christian documents that had not been a part of the canon of the church. I did this after a friend  saw a piece of my writing and suggested I look at a certain book because, as he explained, what I had written bore similarities to this early book.  
I was at this time going through a six month period that was for me, the time that I was waking up.  For me, it was a gradual process with a number of steps.  Clearly, I knew something was up and that I was somehow being prepared for something.  What it was, I didn’t really have a clue.  
When I first read those passages in a book that stretched back into antiquity two thousand years, I felt a familiar stirring inside of me and wanted to know more.  It would take going through a full awakening, though, for me to be able to pick out the passages that were clearly talking about awakening.  Scholars, though, described these passages as “strange teachings” and this showed clearly to me that even they didn’t understand what Jesus was getting at.  How could it be, I wondered, that I could see these for what they were and no one else could?  
In writings by a follower of Jesus, a church developed in the second century called the Valentinian church or school. They explained that only those who had attained the light would be able to understand the teachings.  Otherwise, they would seem like strange incomprehensible teachings.  Could it be, I wondered?  How could someone without a deep background in scholarly study of the Bible like me identify what they were talking about was related directly to awakening?  
Because of how the church and our world has evolved, we tend to look to learned authorities for confirmation about what is true or not true.  But these authorities are part of a system of being and thought that is part of the problem, which is of course the same problem that the early church had to begin with when they suppressed the teachings to begin with.

 

At the center of this story is a Wild spirit that if known, brings about revelation, self knowing, secret knowledge, and healing.  This is the story that should have been told.Now that the beginning work has been done, the rest is going to be more scholarly work with research and historical accounts.  Dry stuff for me, but the story is so compelling and so interesting that I think that it will turn into an interesting read once I am done with it.  Finger crossed!
This is ultimately a work of devotion in the hopes that it can help bring a paradigm shift in thinking by placing something wonderful and wild back in a central role in an understanding of the forces of awakening that are  redemptive in nature.

The Reason For The Season

I will tell you straight and true that I do not think of Christ’s birth this time of year because with the consciousness he sought to impart, which has awoke in me leaves me at odd ends with the way followers chose to tell the story and how it lives ever-present in me. The Christ within has a different story to tell me.

When I think of his birth, I have never seen a child born in Winter but who was carried on the promise of Spring. Christ, my Christ, was a life cast in a message of rebirth, renewal, and boundless vigor, hope, wonder, and expansive possibility. For this is how Christ has healed as it has entered my life.
As a result, I can’t think of his life beginning in the dead cold nights, even though the fables say it so. I am his close companion and he says he is as much a he as he is a she…which is the deeper mystery no one dares speak for fear of being called a heretic or blasphemer…

Historians point out that there was a supernova that occurred in the Spring of his birth year. It was a bright star shining for a time in the night sky that may have been the portent the magi used to get them looking for a king not of our world, but the one who sits with his queen enthroned in a kingdom few seem to describe well, apart from the bliss they heap upon those who enter the secret bridal chamber. But so scandalous was that idea that no mention of it was to be found in the canonical Gospels. I could almost forgive them for not knowing. It was, though, the only apt image to describe what happens when that dove descends.

It’s that it’s a reality that isn’t seen or known well, that it’s less about being prim and proper as it is about a sensuality that is explosive…and I have always been left at odd ends when I hear words like the pagan Rumi instead of Mark or Luke echoing in my being.

So I am thrilled to let Christmas be….to let the event it has always been just BE, which is a way to break up the cold night in order to share good food and celebration with family and friends. It’s just that it’s an earthy festivity to do this and stop pretending we even know what our fables try to tell us is even true…

The mystery of Christ runs so deep and asks so much of us, but it asks only once it has penetrated to the very depths of us and whispers how it is there to take us whole, in order to redeem us in the great incandescence that is the love of the Source, our tripartite God, our Trinity where the goddess is shrouded as the holy ghost….and we go eagerly, consumed as we are from the start.

So like a pagan I enjoy Christmas for its earthy pleasure whilst feeling Christ alive in me rioutus and sensual, still and deep, using all of me to reveal the greatest of mysteries to me that I can scarcely explain or describe….
So I don’t. Or if I do, I do so so feebly that it’s like a joke that I even try. For me, it’s almost enough to sink back into that incandescent depth and have a sip of wine. Well, almost enough.

I await what I know was your birth in Spring, which is the same as my own. Born on the cusp of when everything turns green and springs into life and leaps up in promise and unbridled joy, I find your physical echo firm and sure, simple, and quite lovely.

So you can call me a sinner or lost soul if you must, but I am hardly moved by lessons so poorly formed in our past, the fables hardly pass the test for truth, or even poetry. I meet my Christ in Spring as we both run naked in flowering woods unafraid and with no spit of shame, just like the children he described when he was alive and staring onto our world. He says it was as though  whispered  because it was in his day a blasphemy; I am one with the father and the mother….
These two, who merge in us and create the sacred third, the cosmic consciousness, the Christ consciousness have as their means a union of their seeming opposites to birth the transcendent in us.
They are the cosmic lovers who beget us when we each become Christs. We come about by way of their begetting, their cosmic love which we come to know as our own birthright. This was the good news so many sought to change and fudge and clean up because of shame. We come about spiritually by way of a spiritual begetting. This was much to big and too shameful an admission for the early church fathers to admit so they hid it and chose a version of the truth. Winks.
I try to make peace with this past as I live in the vibrant wave that fills me and has remade me, and continues to do its work as my devotion only deepens for its great work.

That is how lovely my Christmases are….

When It Speaks To You

Some time ago when I began to utilize my awakening to understand it better, I found myself being plunged into these worlds….worlds that were right here in front of me, the inside of things.  Over a period of several days I found myself caught in a reverie whose content was fueled by this energy moving in me. Intelligent, it would seem to begin to show me things.  I wrote a piece back then about how this thing “spoke” to me.  It didn’t really speak, but rather communicated through the movement of energy, in the silent syllables of feeling, the shape and form of bliss, the penetrating power and the enveloping loveliness of this presence that was, for me, two-in-one who were creating a third energy, which at the time I called the child. I would later see in Gnostic texts that this was precisely what the early Christians were talking about and which the later versions of the institution had either weeded out or had watered down.  It spoke mutely, loudly, somehow with nothing but its beautiful body of being and taking my hand, it took me deep down inside of itself.

“Look at the trees” it said.

I looked at the trees, not really sure where all of this was headed.  Focused, I felt as if I was meeting it “there” and it grabbed hold of me like a lover on a first date, slinking out into the night to the river where she bade me to slip into the cool dark waters of her mystery. I was seduced, it seemed almost to smile this energetic presence flowing in me, for it was in the openness of my mind and heart in this place that it could fill me with all of this juiciness, its being, what it is, and what we all are.  I was pulled gently but assuredly down into the trees, into a limb, a leaf, then into cell structures, then past those into a great expanse that opened up as the level of the compounds and elements emerged….atoms….and then we broke through that level into subatomic particles until I reached a place where there was virtually nothing else there except something that contained the very essence of this energy within it.  I was shown a particle that was for want of a better word an anti-particle.  This anti-particle did not have any mass.  It was both “matter” in a kind of conditional way since it was both matter and energy, and so  this odd hybrid thing  literally formed the entirety of the universe. Here I was shown an energetic principle that was startlingly similar to the energetic principle in the world I knew with the energy. These particles were paradoxes. One would be charged negatively (feminine) and one positively (masculine) and they worked like keys and locks. They worked to create vast amounts of energy.  Within each particle, though, was the negative and positive, but each particle, if I can even call it that, had both charges but with a dominance that led to one polarity or another. Within these particles was the entirety of the universe.  It was almost like dna that didn’t just hold the information for one body or even one species, but for EVERYTHING.  I could not wrap my head around this, but it was very clear that these things, whatever they were, were the basis for everything.  They were the smallest and yet were the biggest even though this had nothing at all to do with space.  That was kind of heavy, but somehow made perfect sense once you know just how interconnected the universe is.  When you awaken to cosmic consciousness you become aware of everything.  I also know that it is hard to identify anything specific sometimes in this vast bliss-field, but it can be done through focusing attention just as I had done.  I was curious, I wanted to know how “it” worked, what “it” was….life the universe and everything.

These particles formed alliances or sorts.  They would merge into a wave form and this might serve to be an event, it might also be a bench, or rock, or particle of air.  How on earth they were able to do this, I cannot explain, but all of this was connected to a vast choreography that was going on at a pace that was so fast that we here at our level just cannot even glimpse the effect of what it is that they do.  What these particles did was to enter into our world from a place that is everywhere. They entered in an orderly fashion that seemed entirely random and yet, they slipped right into the correct spot for one terribly brief fraction of a fraction of a moment before disappearing again to emerge somewhere, someplace else.   They simply would wink into our reality or world and then expend their energy, much like a static charge.  Once this was done, this particle would then wink out only to be replaced by another particle in the exact position it left. This was perfectly timed, and thus the world took on a sense of permanence or solidity. This was subatomic, but may have been far smaller than what we consider to be subatomic now (as readily discoverable things within an atom for example).  I somehow “knew” that when the energy was released, the particle winked out of our reality and would find itself in another reality….where it was I do not know but my mind felt, intuitively,  that it had to do with densities of energy or space….and that there are different densities of dimension somehow….and that depending on how the energy was expended would be a determining factor in where that particle would wind up going next.  If you followed one of these particles, it would be like swimming through a continuous stream of water that has different densities and thus requires different energy output, a shiny particle that would glint in the sunlight and then seem to disappear only to reappear moments later somewhere else. One area or current might expend all of its energy while in another area, it would somehow gain energy due to its constantly changing polarity.  Almost as though it was first yin, then yang, then yin, then yang again.  Something LIKE this.  How on earth this manifests from a physics standpoint, I cannot say, except that it would probably not be something that is entirely observable or understood except that these particles simply appear to emerge from nowhere and go back into nothingness. Except they don’t just disappear.  They would just SEEM to do so from our limited perspective.  They do this incredibly fast.  I had the feeling like a second was slowed or stretched out far enough for me to comprehend or see what was going on. This second was itself stretched to something that was in the range of minutes, perhaps a second was half an hour worth of time.  I don’t know how fast this makes this particle, but it was slow to them at that level of space while being incredibly fast to us normally. And these particles exuded their own form of awareness.  I think they had very little sense of ego, that or they didn’t care if they showed up as phenomenon, energy, or form, or all of the above and perhaps all at once. This began to get complicated as I considered multiple parallel universes all happening and connected yet different. Do the particles in us resonate with those in our counterparts in other realities and times?  They do, they can, and this can also happen in all of matter. Walking on water, for example, if this was indeed an actual event in the physical world.

All along, these danced with the most sublime bliss and joy.  These were the creators.  They helped to support or form our world.  Maybe they did not create the reality, but they became the construction crew that supported it….built the trees, the air, the people…..nanosecond by nanosecond.  As they moved in and out of our world, the world almost seemed to shimmer just a bit….a shimmer that we do not detect but take for what is real. We have an effect on what some of this shimmering stuff does and is the core of a great secret that I think could help us move mountains….

What I also saw was that these particles would dance in response to the energy in my body.  I knew that I could affect reality from the most basic level in a certain way…..this was limited, though.  I could not get in the way of anything that had to happen, but I could, shall we say, collaborate with these energies or particles in building bigger and bigger waveforms built out of these particles.  These particles, it seemed to me, were consciousness, energy, that could slip in and out of energetic states to create the barest nub of mass or physicality. Just a nub.  Barely noticeable.  Like one small krill in the ocean is seen as perhaps entirely inconsequential, and yet as they swarm, they become some of the biggest masses of life in the ocean and thus support vast lifeforms. Well, okay, not a perfect metaphor or analog, but maybe you get the idea.

All of this is terribly dry, I know, and none of it was experienced that way.  Here was the force I felt in my body as the “two” currents of masculine and feminine, the Shakti and Shiva in absolute love with one another (in my body….) and they were there in those particles, doing their dance of creation.  And atoms did this because they were formed from this stuff.  Cells did it because they were formed from it. The consciousness of the cell rode the wave of the energy and its phenomenon when it chose to be an event, just as we ride upon the great wave of cellular life to know our reality.  And then, at the mass scale, we are all rendered back into a single cell, the earth, as the collective cell of earth struggles to find its own form of fulfillment.  Ad this cell swings through what we consider vast space in a sea of other star cells and planets…..everything different at each level and yet entirely the same inside in principle. Spirals in atomic forms, spirals in water, spirals in weather, spirals in planet formations, spirals in galaxies….So all of this was charged with this energy.  What was in me was in it.  It was everywhere.

IN this experience was the holographic nature of everything.  Everything is seeded with it, a kind of cosmic dna.  NO, none of this is dead matter, and while you might consider I am off my rocker if you have not experienced it, those who have awakened have no doubt experienced similar things. It’s certainly not the drug of kundalini. I know this because reason told me that if the energy in me could connect to perfectly with everything, then I would see evidence of how my own thoughts and will was causing an effect on this world of the incredibly small. It was here, the quantum world where I discovered the missing link between the very small and very large.  There IS a continuity between these worlds and I write about it in my book (that was a not so subtle way to tease you into giving it a read once it is published…only because it has been so much work).  Once you understand this and you know how the energy in you must be balanced in order for this to take place, you will find uncanny events begin to take shape.  We do this naturally, but imagine those who awaken learning how to effect things in a “thy will be done” sort of way, acting as conduits for divine energy, which is nothing short of cosmic energy which is everywhere!

It is everywhere. IN everything.  As you awaken, you awaken to the intense bliss in flowers, how they yearn to release pollen and to be fertilized, to feel the growth, the cyclical nature of energy and life…..all of life, even “dead” matter yearns in this same way.  Surely it does.  I know it does.  the universe showed me through these incredible events that involve the entraining of these subatomic particles that form everything.  This is, I believe, the basis for what we have termed magic.  We do not understand it, so we called it miracles or magic or the will of one god or another down through time.  For those who were fearful, those of us who held its secret in us were often persecuted for it.  Thus, for a very long time, many feel the collective caution of not speaking out for fear of being not just ridiculed, but having our lives ended. Now for as severe and hard as this might all seem, it is actually connected into this very ancient of knowledge, and is tied to the one side of this energetic spectrum that has been missing….which is the yin, the negative charge, the feminine, the dreaming womb of the All.  It is precisely as she has begun her trek back into our own individual awarenesses that the seemingly impossible becomes possible.

You can call me a dreamer, and I would smile and say thank-you, for in my dreaming SHE emerges rich, powerful, beautiful and potent.  What she will offer us is something we cannot even begin to imagine.  Like a baby growing in her womb, the child which she births will do great things.  Last this child was spoken of, it was a he, but this child is not a he or a she.  It is the product of both, a transcendental and transformative power that comes from woman and her consort man.

You can know similar things….you just focus yourself in that energy and bid it come.  Let it take you, just surrender to it and then feel the yearning to know.  Then allow it to take your imaging centers, your imagination, and utilize it.  It will SEEM as if it is being imagined at first, but it will have a solid core of something more than just imagination within it. This is slippery for some people, but at a certain level of reality, the seeming imaginary actually is becoming actualized.  In the astral realm, for example, thoughts become solid objects.  The more energy that you give them, the more solid or permanent they seem to be.  Just as dreaming is threaded through by the imagination, it is the servant of the soul in communicating information from various places within you.  In symbols. Even my experience was itself something of a dream whereby I was led along by the energy using a certain facsimile, symbols, to express a deeper reality. You just have to trust and ride the wave of bliss.  This is the gateway of Gnosis, of knowing without having to learn it. You glimpse the fundamental order of the cosmos, an experience that happens to every person who awakens like Buddha, like Jesus, his followers, and also like you and me. All of us.  And for those who are not yet awakened, the Buddha sleeps inside because we all have it.  It is what you are.  Your fundamental nature.