The Origin Of Sin

Sin has been with us as an idea for far too long for many of us to even take a good guess at how or where it developed or evolved from. It is, though, known that the concept of sin originated in Judaism. Until the time of its emergence, the world literally was without sin. The idea of an act, though now passed, sticks with you and which can be used to judge you later by the divine, was not in existence before Judaism or in other regions of the world. The closest idea of sin might be the Indian concept of karma, but even karma diverges in its main tenets from sin and constitutes a wholly unique take on how our actions affect our future. We have kept it or it has kept us for as long as it has because of how it has occupied our minds and helped to be the influence that it has for as long as it has. I am not going to say that it is all good or all bad, but I certainly think that there were some much better ways we could have gone about illuminating our behavior that didn’t bring up the concept of sin.

With the birth of Christianity in the first century A.D. and its subsequent acceptance of sin, the idea of what you do as having an affect on your future spiritual life in some heavenly realm was given a huge boost. While Judaism asserted that all people were born in sin from the Garden of Eden, Christianity offered a way out of that sin….in a manner of speaking, with Christ letting you off the hook. While it was an advance, it was not without its failings. The tenets of sin have said that we each will be judged for what we have done, and that there is a heaven or a hell waiting for us.

With advances in medical technology, though, people are being pulled back from the brink of physical death more and more. Since many life-saving measures have developed, so too has the incidence of near death experiences (NDE) risen. Now, we have tens of thousands of accounts of peoples’ experiences, and there is one very interesting pattern that emerges despite the variety of cases, and that is no one is sent to a Hell where they stay throughout their NDE. People can in some cases wind up in a dark place, but they are always pulled out of it, or the experience manages to unfold so that the soul winds up back in the light. Further, there is not a single case where a person has been judged by any outside agency. Every account describes how the person, after their life review, is asked how they felt about it, after which the person is able to reflect and explain themselves. While many in the scientific community want to suggest that NDE’s as experienced are little more than a kind of fever dream of the brain shutting down. Doctors point out that normally under conditions of low oxygen levels, the person isn’t peaceful and doesn’t experience anything that remotely approximates the classic NDE.

Dannion Brinkley who had multiple NDE’s explains that in all of his experiences there was never any judgment of him. The judgment was always done within himself. All of this, he explains, is an inside job. That jives with what Jesus said, as well as many other teachers (Buddha for one) down through time regardless of culture of institution. In one case, a person described seeing their past lives as well as their own life review, and the sense was all of this was one very long and involved process of development.

I know that in my own experience that I had what could be termed a kind of life review while I was still alive, courtesy of the dream state. Others have described these “reviews” of their lives also who have had kundalini awakenings (not all though). It happened not long after I found myself suffused in a brilliant white light during meditation. Not long after that, I had a full-blown kundalini awakening, and in a dream I experienced a shortened version of my life review through all of the main issues in my life that had served to snag me emotionally. I had never had a dream that lasted all night. I hadn’t awakened from sleep drenched in sweat either, but there I was, feeling like I had run a marathon. Did I go to Hell? I did descend into shadow lands within myself in order to acknowledge stuck emotional energy in order to free it. Nowhere have I seen evidence of a desire on the part of the divine presence, the Source, to punish us for what we have done in this life. Even the concept of karma, which is often bent by humans into meaning that the universe is somehow “getting back” at them, is itself merely the result of what we put out setting up conditions for future events….unless we heal and become more aware of how a given energy in our consciousness (often with a powerful emotional component and thus tied very closely to beliefs of all kinds) is creating a given condition for us ongoing. I am reminded of the scene in Jesus Christ Superstar where Judas says, “Just don’t say that I’m damned for all time…” In this world, not even you, Judas (much to the chagrin of many devout Christians).

It seems that when we reach a place in our development when we can really see our stuff, we tend to see it and the inner compass which exists in all of us helps us to know how to feel about our lives and our actions. It is true that people do terrible things, but the compass I mention still exists within all of us. In many cases, our access to this divine conscience is buried, covered over. It is also buried behind tons of false beliefs about what we think is good and what we are told is bad. It is never so simple as that, nor black and white.

One of the great prisons for us concerns sin and what we think sin is. Our beliefs about our sexuality and our nature as bliss has somehow managed to become distorted and wounded. There is, though, the bliss body “beneath” the pain body, and when you can dispense with focusing on pain you can begin to experience bliss. The advantage of this is that bliss can help pain to drop away. At the end of the day, you are either going to let it go or you aren’t. i spent a few years trying to manage or wrest my junk out of me. No. There is a way and it is through radical forgiveness. If you can practice that in an honest way, you can in short order, release the stored emotion that causes you to feel reactive to a host of issues in your day to day life. One of the most curious connections between the bliss body and our trauma is how physical bliss is so closely tied to our sexuality. Sexuality is itself a minefield for all of us, and it requires healing to be able to experience bliss ongoing.

Sin was seen as anything that served to distance us from God. In early Christianity the mystics whose history was largely swept from the stage (the Gnostics) describe this as a state of life or a state of death. Sin made us like “dead” and waking up was what restored us to a new glorious life, freed from the burden of sin in each person. In that sense, this is the best description for sin because how we act and how those actions coarsen our soft insides so that we grow dull and can no longer feel the delight that is the divine, then the idea of sin has a place I suppose…I just wish we hadn’t used it as a tool for control.

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The Case For A Private Teaching By Jesus Gets Stronger

One outcome of my awakening experience was my personal discovery of books from early Christianity that had been largely unknown until a large cache were discovered in the desert of Egypt in 1945. One book purported to be the secret teachings of Jesus to his innermost circle. What I realized, or thought I did, was that these books were describing awakening with a pretty high degree of specificity. It wasn’t only that, but how they appeared to veil the teachings in many cases by using descriptions that made it difficult for anyone not having the experience to even know what the writers were refering to. It was to my mind like a way of coding the teachings just enough that it made it hard to understand. This may have been intentional, but it could also have been the result of not having a specific enough vocabulary with which to do the describing.

This might sound strange, but let me give you an example for what I mean. Not long into awakening, me and a person who awoke along with me (a country apart, didn’t know each other, this all happened from a distance) we both referred to what was happening to us as “it.” That was how sophisticated our vocabulary was. We had no reference point, no context, nor a teaching to guide us. Overnight, innexplicably, we had a tellepathic connection (which was proven numerous times each week). “It” fit though, because how on earth would you describe “this” (we used that term also)? It also kept what was happening to us from prying eyes and ears since who would understand or believe it? There was no real context in which to put it in. When that’s the case, you create a language or vocabulary for it much like people who are dealing with it do today (witness the use of words like “downloads” and “portals” to refer to aspects of the experience). You create your own vocabulary to help describe what is happening to you.

How could it be, I wondered, that these books were described as heresy by certain people within the church when they so clearly revealed a sophisticated understanding of a very rare state of being?

When I first found these books and realized they were pretty clearly describing my state, I considered that it was a conspiracy that they were not just shoved aside, but that in many cases, the books that were part of an unnacceptable take on Christian thought were destroyed. Now however, I am realizing it was little more than a conspiracy of ignorance…and an easy trap to fall for by anyone who was not in the know, who hadn’t had the experience, or wasn’t initiated into the system.

Was it as many scholars have asserted, that these books were jibberish, mere speculation, and could not be tied to Jesus at all? Was it true that as some Orthodox apologists have said, that these people, called “Gnostics” were late-comers? Were they forging documents, slapping Jesus’s name on them in order to give their own “wild speculations and fantasies” more caché?

I have learned that the opposition will say just about anything in order to put a good man or woman down. Maybe this speculation was right, and my initial gut sense was all wrong. There were times when this certainly appeared to be the case.

This question put me on a 15 year journey where I made myself familiar with early Christianity. I didn’t spend years in seminary getting my doctorate in divinity, nor did I learn Greek or Hebrew. I knew next to nothing about the field and I just couldn’t square my sense that these early Christians were on to something of immense importance versus what those in what would become known as the Orthodox church had to say about these teachings. Something didn’t add up.

I have realized that while I lack the background in the history of early Christianity that many scholars in the field have, I have something most (perhaps nearly all) do not: I have the experience of awakening with all of its dizzying effects, signs, and symptoms. I have read at length even scholars who specialize in the Gnostic texts speculating about the meanings of the gospel of Thomas or Philip. My sense from the beginning was that these Gnostics were the real deal, and that these works constitutes a “lost Christianity” as Bart Ehrman has described it. Having said this, I will also say that they go far afield from the words of Jesus as we have come to know them. The difference between an esoteric system and an exoteric one (the Gnostics as we refer to them ate esoteric) is that esoteric systems have much greater production of documents because the followers keep having experiences and writing about them. In the case of these early Christians, they believed that the Christ was revealed to be within a person (some Gnostics considered Paul to be a bit of a hero because he writes in his letters that God revealed to him the Christ which was within him when he was struck by a blinding light on his way to Damascus). For the Gnostics, then, the crucifixion lost much of its importance because they found salvation from the awakening to the indwelling Christ.

I ask you: what teaching by Jesus ever made anything appear to be outside of ones self? The kingdom was all within one, and seeking was done inwardly. Those who “seek him” were seeking a quality that was already there. It is worth noting that this is precisely what most Eastern traditions that describe awakening say. It is also a completely different story that Orthodox Christians have put forward since about 100-130 A.D.

I will say, however, that there were times in my work on this subject where it looked like the Gnostics were a later “invention” or movement and could not be definitively pinned to Jesus. I was, for a time, considering that for as insightful as they were, there just wasn’t a connection to Jesus’s life. I got used to the idea that these were amazing people who spun their own insights into what the Christ was all about. Maybe they were a seperate development that still managed to “get there” even though they came later.

That was before I found out about the work of Walter Bauer who did a study or survey of documents from earliest Christianity, who, in the 1930’s (and before the discovery in 1945 of this cache of early books in Egypt) determined that heresy came first and Orthodoxy came later. Orthodoxy, based on Bauer’s work, placed Orthodoxy a hundred years after the heretics (give or take a decade or two). Source: Orthodoxy & Heresy In Earliest Christianity

Heresy has always been described by the church as that branch off of the “main vine” that represents a divergence from the central truths of the dogma (see church father Origen since he originated this concept). This begged the question: how could this be so in light of what Bauer found? This may have been the result of the church, a group within it, seeking to hide the truth about how things were in the early days of the movement. It could have been as simple as ignorance by another group who didn’t have the deeper teachings (and thus could easily not understand them even when they saw them).

Then there is the troubling reality that Bart Ehrman points out in his book Jesus Interupted which is that most of the discoveries we have made in the last 100 years of Christian documents are nearly all Gnostic (which is used to describe this group of Christians today—gnosticism meaning ‘one who knows’ or who has inner knowledge not attained through books or instruction alone). Ehrman asks pointedly, did the Orthodoxy not have anything to say that there have been so few new discoveries of Orthodox books or letters during the same time period? It is plausible, then, that Gnosticism was far more robust, engaged, and involved in the matters of Christian thought than the early heresy hunters would have us believe. The historical record is certainly showing us this in spades in this regard. In Bauer’s work he points out letters that show that the church gave up trying to convert Asia Minor because the heretics were so numerous and resistant to their message. It would be easy to just say they were deluded and utterly lost, but it hides the fact that this was a situation that had always been described as no big deal by those in the Orthodox wing of the church, something more like a few flies that needed to be swatted away as the Orthodoxy has tried to represent it as. No, “heresy” was much more developed than Orthodoxy was, and at a very early period. It begs the question as to which tradition was the original or earliest one.

When I think about what happens to our leaders today it is easy to see how each side in a political campaign seeks to demonize and dethrone the leader who is in the opposition. Those with the loudest voices wind up being heard and believed. We are well aware of the sentiment that the winners of a war get to tell the history as they want it told.

Orthodoxy won the war of ideas not because their thinking was superior but because they were more worldly and systematic in their willingness to take down what they considered an opponent. You can easily see just how harsh the rhetoric was by reading the writings of these noted antiheretics like Tertulian, St. Justin, and others like them. In fact, we know a lot about early Christian “heretics” because the diatribes about them were so long-winded (and detailed) by those who were opposing them. Christians don’t like the idea that there may have been a larger story here because they have lived with a version of a story they have come to know and love. But to say that a belief system is right simply because we have lived with it for 1600 years or more is not evidence that it is necessarily right or the final word. It only means that one group stamped out another group such that their knowledge base was silenced.

Yes it seems strange and foreign, and yet this is just what archeology has revealed and the voice that was silenced was showing us the very keys to the kingdom. These keys as I call them are a suit of methods that appear in the so-called Gnostic writings mostly found in the Nag Hammadi Libray but that are also found in documents discovered earlier like the Pistis Sophia. These documents describe the same phenomenon as those in Eastern schools of though which describe the process of enlightenment.

I am not suggesting that these people went to India, but managed it on their own and that the “ressurrection” of the soul was achieved by attaining a quality that one culture called Christ while another called it Buddha. As such, this knowledge wasn’t predicated on belief alone, but pointed to a universal quality that every person has regardless of race or creed.

Rumi, the great poet and mystic once wrote about how we all squabble over the names of things and that we try to differentiate the light falling in one place as fundamentally different from the light falling in another when it is all the same source, the same thing. I think Orthodoxy tried to do this in an effort to carve out its own seemingly unique niche when in fact it had discarded important elements along the way that would have enriched it tremendously.

The Mar Saba Discovery

Then along comes Morton Smith in the 20th century. Morton Smith claimed to have made a discovery of a book in Mar Saba near Israel in the early 1960’s that contained writing by Clement, a figure from early Christianity. Clement quotes lines from a book that he calls “Secret Mark” which was, as he described it, part of a private teaching Jesus gave to his closest followers. Clement emphasizes that these teachings were never spoken before the uninitiated, a situation Jesus cautions about even in the synoptic gospels when he refers to swine and pearls, those who were “without.” In this case, Jesus was pointedly obfuscating his teaching so the Gentiles could not understand lest they be saved. The book was intended for the “perfecting” of those who were followers of this Jesus.

Morton Smith took photographs of the document and when he returned later to examine the book again, it had vanished. It has not been seen since. Here’s the thing: forensic examination of the photographs themselves have established that the book is an authentic document of the era. Christian apologists go so far as to criticize the writing as being “too Clementine” which to me may well be enough to prove the point. The writing style is consistent with what historians know about Clement, who has many writings attributed to him. Those within scholarly circles who are Christian apologists set upon Smith in attack after attack, however.

The letter was about one thousand words and had been copied onto the endpages of a seventeenth century book which no one had ever mentioned before. The find shook the scholarly world, although it’s existance made hardly a ripple in popular Christian circles because the letter denounced the group involved as heretical. That seems to be enough for any reasonable believer of the faith, but it raised important questions for many who find the discoveries of this kind to be suggestive of what Bauer had found to be the case and which continuing discoveries like the Nag Hammadi Library texts had done two decades prior, which was whether we have been told the whole story. Here is an excerpt from an article in The Nation about the discovery:

These heretics, as Clement and Theodore saw them, claimed that they possessed a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus, they believed, had taught his followers that they were freed from the law and could do whatever they wanted without sinning. According to one of their Christian critics, Irenaeus, they actually thought they earned salvation by “doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts.”

The Nation, Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith, January 8, 2009, Anthony Grafton.

It is worth noting that as a result of scholarly research we now know that it was Mark’s gospel that was the earliest of all the gospels. While Clement denounced the teachings in Secret Mark, he did not say that this Mark didn’t exist. Here we have a proof that books like Secret Mark were later destroyed by the Orthodox church, with copies that have yet to surface. Consider what would happen if the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of today were against you, what would you do? Would you perhaps hide away the books that you do have in order to preserve them? If your books were unapproved of, they would be destroyed with fire.

While some scholars like Ehrman have suggested that the Nag Hammadi find may well have been an effort on the part of local Christians to free up space in their libraries by burying the collection several kilometers away, I am reminded of an email from Elaine Pagels recently that the burial of the NHL documents is well within the same time frame as the letter by Bishop Athanasius, written in 365 A.D. which spelled out what books were to be acceptable for use in the church. Every book Athanasius mentioned in his list is contained in the New Testament today. It was Athanasius’s letter that would set the die for all that would follow. Anything else would come under scrutiny and risk being remanded to the flames. Remember, before the printing press, books were copied by hand in what could take many months to complete. Burning one book or two could end an important thread within the early movement. Back then, in the first century, stories abounded about the life of Jesus, an oral tradition, that was only later written down after Jesus’s death.

This article is helpful to gain the full scope of the issue about how the New Testament was formed.

My thesis has been and continues to be that Jesus was a man who attained awakening. The books attributed to his private teaching happen to also describe what is known in India as kundalini. While there isn’t compelling evidence that Jesus had gone to India, there is no good reason to suggest that in order to awaken he would need to study under an enlightened guru either. It’s possible he got instruction locally from John the Baptist, or the Essenes. We just don’t know because for as a man as famous as Jesus is, there is a huge gaping hole that is unaccounted for in his life in terms of time. I never studied under a guru and managed to trigger the first initiatory steps into awakening on my own. Likewise, it is quite possible that Jesus did the same. All he would need would be a quality of intense curiosity and a drive to seek. I suspect that this is just what Jesus meant when he said seek and ye shall find. He sought, and he found. But what did he find? He described it as a world that was within each person. At no point does Jesus ever say that his kingdom was outside of himself. All of this was an inside job. So meditation would have been part of it, something Jews of the time were well familiar with. The right kind of meditation would do it, nothing fancy, but something that would serve to achieve a first release of inner emotional material followed by inner inquiry.

It turns out that I did precisely what the heretical Jesus prescribed, which was to remove what keeps one divided within the self. This is actually a prescription Jesus mentions in the gospel of Thomas and mentions in the gospel of Phillip. The way I achieved this was through a conversation with a holy man when I felt a long-standing frustration guilt, and frustration with the universe, afterwhich everything began to change. I unburdened myself of a giant knot that had me tied up for decades, it was almost like an insurmountable impasse for me at the time.

I suspect that the story of Jesus’s baptism was like this or served a similar purpose for him because in the Gnostic texts he is teaching about how to attain the kingdom by resolving what divides you within, and a teacher always relays to his or her students how they achieved it themselves. The elephant in the room is if Jesus was God why was he going to John to have his sin removed? Why did Jesus need baptism? He obviously felt like he needed it, and instead of seeking the God, according to Orthodox scripture, which had always been within him. It’s a huge leap around the question that Christians never seem to ask. I think that it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and actually makes loads of sense once the private teachings are known and taken into consideration.

With John, who claimed he could relieve the burden of sin through ritual washing, or baptism, Jesus was relieved enough of his own burden for the first flashes of “the light” to begin showing through. Jesus also spent forty days fasting and praying in the wilderness near where John was located. I will point out that this is the same approximate time that the Taoists prescribe for awakening the secret of the golden flower, their take on the awakening process. Similarly, in Hindu practice the number of 40 to 45 days comes up a lot for a time frame. It takes some effort to break through the veil of the earthly self to attain to the “heavenly” one (regardless of what tradition you ascribe to). Orthodoxy glosses over this precisely because it knows nothing about these practices. Then, when presented with the very means to do so, they cried foul heresy. The kingdom thus was found and then lost within a few short generations. The apostolic era came to an end not because of some God-ordained event with dubious reasoning but precisely because people no longer had access to the teachings that would have kept the era chugging along nicely. All of the signs of the holy ghost, and of awakening, were gone because the knowledge had exited the building.

If Jesus had awakened, the libertine attitude shown in the works of some of the Christian mystics like the Carpocrations that Clementine was speaking out against in his letter mentioned earlier has a very good chance of being true. Awakening pushes you beyond the normally accepted mores of the time by virtue of the fact that the energy of awakening vivifies and stimulates the body in new and novel ways. The Hindu describe it as a libidinous force, a creative current that leads one to new levels of bliss that are experienced and described as orgasmic. It’s not that it is literally so, but that this is the only way to aptly describe it so it can be halfway understood. Awakening absolutely impacts the master glands of the body resulting in high outputs of all sorts of hormones. Kundalini a sexual energy? I have always felt that the energy of awakening stimulates all sorts of things, including libido. Kundalini does much more than just stimulating libido.

Many people who are awakened know about the futility of skirting issues. No, the energy seems to push us to leap headlong into the cleansing fire that is the holy ghost, the feminine aspect, what in India would be called Shakti or the Ida current. All of this is consistent with awakening, and there is no reason to think it wasn’t the case with Jesus.

The problem with the Orthodoxy was that none of the secret teachings made any sense to them. How was it possible that by finding the savior within, the Christ, one washed away ones shame of human sexuality? Or guilt, or any other issue that represents stored emotional material that awakening can help the person to clear? Awakening can do this, though. It cleanses and returns you to a renewed mind and state of being. It is a salvific force.

It is now more likely that Jesus did have a private teaching and that the synoptic gospels represent only a thin slice of a larger picture. While Clement railed against this “Secret Mark” as heretical, I ask the question: says who? On whose authority? Why should I pay any attention to someone who was never included in the private teachings of a realized master? Even when Jesus says “No one comes to the father except by me” Christians don’t consider how that statement could mean something significantly different than what they assume it does. In Jesus’s day he was the only person around who had attained to the level that he had, so yes, Jesus was the only game in town. Like any great teacher, if you wanted to get there quickly, you studied under him like any teacher anywhere who had a grip on the esoteric or hidden things.

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!

Mauro Biglino – Translating The Old Testament Literally = Aliens

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana#/media/File:The_Celestial_Chariot_(6124515635).jpg

Now for something completely different. Following disclosures by the U.S. government of some of what it knows in regards to the U.F.O.’s (rebranded now as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon or UAP’s), it may help to learn of a project that was undertaken by a linguist that may have shed some light on our ancient past as it relates to the ET presence on the earth.

Mauro Biglino was tapped by the publishing arm of the Vatican to perform its most up to date translation of the oldest versions of the Old Testament in existence. This work, which took some years to complete, included 23 books total. Some books the Vatican decided not to publish since they went against long-standing beliefs concerning what people have long-believed to be the “real story”.

Biglino was familiar with the process that other linguists have performed when translating these documents in the past. A system is used that assumes that certain words in Hebrew result in specific types of translations. In Hebrew there are no consonants, which means that the reader must bear in mind the context of what is being said in order to arrive at the correct words intended. While this isn’t a problem for the bulk of Old Testament reading in Hebrew, there are instances where words can be changed. Biglino thus went to work making a literal translation rather than using the standard program for translation that had been in place for a very long time. While the Vatican approved and printed 17 of his translated books, there were others that they did not publish. In those unpublished works, our understanding of what was written is brought into question, with the result that the Elohim of the Old Testament reads more as beings that came from the sky, who mingled with people of the Earth, and who were involved in the affairs of humans for many generations.

Using his knowledge of other languages like Sumerian, he goes into the Sumerian creation myths and finds that the stories told are startlingly similar in them as those in the Jewish tradition, often bringing up similar people (sometimes with different names) serving the same roles from one culture to the others. In The Jewish tradition there are angelic beings called the Watchers that show up in the Sumerian tradition, for example. In some cases, stories in the Sumerian tradition do not show up in the Jewish one, but bear so many similarities as to the nature of the characters described that Biglino suggests that these may well be the same people, the same story, describing how humans were created by a race that came from the stars. Sound impossible? Judea and Babylon are not far removed from each other, and Jews were taken into slavery by the Babylonians during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. But, we are told that the Jews had Genesis well before this time. Was it possible that the two cultures had previous contact? It does not seem out of the question.

When Biglino has debated Hebrew and Christian priests on this matter, many have agreed that his translation work is accurate, what they don’t agree with are his conclusions.

From a video presentation Biglino has given explaining some of these issues he says: “Actually the Bible says that we were made using a certain amount of material which contains Elohim’s image and that has been cut out. Now everyone today knows what we are referring to when we say that we take something that contains the image of an individual that has been cut out, it’s the DNA. With all probability this biblical tale is the summary of the Sumerian tablets tale, in particular the “Enuma Elish” that is when the Sumerians tell about the beginning, but where the Sumerians are much more precise than the Bible, because the Sumerians who never thought of creating a religion. They never built a temple, never talked of Gods,the way we mean it, but they spoke of those people….with respect because they were much more developed technologically.” (see video below) Is this merely a coincidence, an appearance, a conflation? If so, then in Biglino’s work, these types of things happen a lot. After a while, it can begin to strain credulity and it gets harder to not see that the Jewish stories and the Babylonian ones weren’t taken from the same root story, which describes how beings called the Annunaki came to earth, described the solar system and the planets within it, and where earth was located in that order (really!) and performed a process that sounds remarkably like cloning or a hybridization of earthly beings (primates) into the species known as humans.

It all sounds incredible, impossible, and this is why you should listen to Biglino explain what it was he found when he translated the Bible in a way it had not been translated before. Biglino suggests that the reason why we have the stories that we do is in large part due to how the translational method has hidden what may be the real truth which has been right under our noses the whole time.

In one tradition, they were beings that came and developed a breeding program, describing what sounds to modern scientific understanding to be a cloning process, or taking a primate and blending their own DNA to produce a being (human) who would be bred as a worker inside gold mines that the Annunaki needed for their home world. What is so interesting about the Sumerian stories of the creation of human kind that it is hard not to see it as beings from another world coming here for a mining expedition. What is curious is how in the Sumerian stories, they describe the use of the gold that they mined, which was suspended in their atmosphere to enact a change in their climate or planetary condition. At first the Annunaki were able to find gold easily, but later had to dig for it and this was where the breeding program came into play. In the Hebrew tradition, much of this material is left out. Biglino describes how the two traditions are describing the same story, with one being an abridged version. Biglino explains that once the literal translation was made, the story was quite different. Instead of one God who created humankind, it was instead a group of beings, and not all of them were on equal standing with one another. Yahweh, for example, was put in charge of a relatively fringe group in a desert region. He wasn’t given the best people or the best location. To hear Biglino explain it, the story takes on a very different implication.

When you read the Enuma Elish and see how similar it is to the Genesis account, what I came to realizing was that these two stories may well have come from the same earlier story which people in the region had been telling for many generations. What makes the Enuma Alish different from the Genesis story is that it includes much more detail. Same story, one shorter, the other longer. The longer story describes how these beings, the Anunaki, came to Earth and began to create a new species of creature on the earth. The story reads almost like a record of all of the failed attempts, pointing out that when the efforts at creating a being (a human) weren’t working, the head Anunaki offered his own (genetic) material from his body, thinking that it would somehow be the answer. But, this turned out to be disastrous. If the Anunaki were divine beings it seems that all of this fiddling would not be necessary. The account reads of numerous failed biological experiments: one being upon being made urinates constantly until it becomes dehydrated and dies. Another has its organs on the outside of its body. Still another does not have eyes. In each case the humans are created in what looks like a vessel like a bath which is situated in the ground. In all cases, humans are made using the blood of the gods. When you look beyond the talk of gods and goddesses, the story reads as a group of people who came who wanted a work force who would serve them. The deeper you go into the story, the more details that surface that look….well…consistent with physical beings instead of gods. Biglino points out how the Anunaki asked for humans to make burnt offerings because their chief god liked the smell, that it was favorable to him. He goes on to explain that during the Apollo missions, the material from the suits was used to create a scent that astronauts were provided with in order to get them used to the smell of space. It turns out that when astronauts were coming back into the capsule from being on the moon that there was a smell that was often described as smelling like burnt meat. Biglino asks the question, did these beings like this smell of burned meat because they were space-faring beings who had grown accustomed to it? In the Jewish tradition, the Elohim (which is plural not singular—itself a paradox since YHWY says that there are no others “beside me”) are told that they are the “Chosen” People. In modern day abduction literature the ET’s tell many abductees that they too have been chosen. When Biglino translates the encounter that Moses has with the Elohim on the Mount it begins to read like an ET encounter in which a heavy object which flies, comes up to the Mount and shows itself to Moses. Moses is told that he has to hide in a cleft in the rock or else he might die from exposure to something coming from the object. In the traditional translation this is because the glory of God is so great that it can kill a person. But how can a spiritual quality physically kill a person, Biglino asks? This reads as a physical effect that causes a physical outcome. What is interesting is that when Moses comes down from the Mount, part os his face is burned from his sighting and his close proximity to the craft. He has a cloth covering his head as it was in the full sun and he later felt poorly enough that we then went into his tent for the rest of the day. Moses sees the Elohim because he tells the voice in his head which has been speaking to him that he needs some proof as to the reality of the being and what it had been telling him telepathically. He explains that he needs to be able to tell the people below that this phenomenon is real and he isn’t just hearing voices in his head. You can perhaps understand his position: he is their leader and now he is going on about how he is hearing this clear voice in his head telling him what to do. Up until now the voice has led them out of Egypt, but humans are humans and require continuous proof if they themselves are not witness to it.

Here you can see his presentation from which the above quote is extracted:

The complete presentation can be viewed in the next video (below). It provides a lot of the background concerning the work that Biglino was tapped to do for the Church and how it proceeded. He also explains how he searched the roots of the words that he translated literally, which will help to explain how his translation take on a very different meaning especially the earliest books. If you would like to skip to the most relevant material, go to the 10:00 mark in the following video, which is where he goes into the translation and meaning of RUACH, the beginning of unwinding this translational tale.

It is worth mentioning that in India they have detailed descriptions of flying craft called Vimana. These devices are described not in a mythical fashion as one might expect with a chariot of the gods, but instead reads like a users manual. No allusions, no parables, no mythic language. One such vimana is called the chakra vimana. Chakra means disc. Flying disc. This is the same description made of ET craft. What gives? According to Biglino, similar craft are described in the ancient texts like the Bible but their meaning has been hidden behind the way in which the translations were made to turn ET’s into gods. If you watch the video you will see how Biglino dives into the device that David uses when he fights the giants. Biglino explains that this device is described as a communication device that brings the Elohim to David whereupon he is taken up into a flying object and taken to the Temple where others get out. Biglino goes to Ezekiel and the object he describes there is drawn by a technician at M.I.T. and the result? It certainly sounds and looks like a flying ship, and not altogether different looking than the description of the Indian vimana.

There is also very compelling evidence of early Christians being aware of an ET presence, which they called the Archons. This is largely contained within the mystic writings of early Christianity and were pushed out by the more exoteric wing of Christianity which would today be known as the Orthodox church. In 100 A.D to the mid second century, however, the mystics existed alongside the exoteric-minded followers of Christ. In their books, specifically The Hypostasis of the Archons (p.161, The Nag Hammadi Library, John Robinson, ed.) and the First Apocalypse of James (p. 265, The Nag Hammadi Library, John Robinson, ed.), the Archons are mentioned in some detail. In the Apocalypse of James, Jesus is explaining how beings called the Archons, Described in the Hypstasis as looking like an aborted fetus, come in threes and attempt to take souls by theft. Only by performing a series of declaratory statements can one escape their efforts to take the person. In the Hypostasis of the Archons it is explained that these beings exert a form of synthetic reality called HAL which makes it seem as though they are like gods (but they are not), and also that these beings are often involved in wanting to interbreed with human women. The Gnostic Christians, as may be clear, were not fans of these beings, but how they describe them suit the modern abduction literature in some pretty amazing ways. In the modern ET literature (Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber to name a few) it is widely known that the ET grays perform their activities in threes and are able to take a person “by theft” or, that is, against their will through a form of mind control. In the modern abduction stories abductions always take place with three of the alien grays (there are some instances where this does not happen, but the “three” grays are a regular occurrence in the literature).

It is worth noting that books like the Hypostasis of the Archons were scrubbed from any mention in ancient or modern Orthodox Christianity. It was only in 1945 that these and over 50 books from this line of early Christian thought reemerged in an amazing discovery in the desert of Egypt near the town of Nag Hammadi. This was the same year that a giant trove of Jewish scrolls were discovered in Qumran near the Dead Sea. What is so interesting about this mystic strand of so-called Gnostic writings, is that they describe the process of awakening and its many effects. What these early Christians caught onto was nothing less than what the Hindu describe in their own texts as kundalini. It is interesting how when given some of the most sophisticated documents pertaining to the process of enlightenment, the church has chosen to remand them to obscurity. I will also point out that there is a high correlation between awakening and encounters or awareness of ET or other intelligence which could be called “galactic” in character (not human) which those awakened report communing with or having a sense of connection with (some suspect that they have had past lives AS ET’s, and this turns out to be somewhat common in the abduction community, too).

Further, when the Gnostic Christians began to explore the spiritual dimensions which were opened to them with their practice of seeking, they found what many find: a presence which underlies all things, is wedded to every molecule and resides within it, and is a silent presence that observes creation. Encounters with this presence were described as a pure white light in which existed a consciousness of a being that was pure love and compassion. Just entering into this light in meditation would change a person. They then saw how the God of the Old Testament was at odds with what they had themselves uncovered. They then created a myth to explain why the God of the Old Testament was so different from the God which they had discovered and it played out this way: The world was created from a failed attempt at creation, what is called a demiurge. Sophia, the feminine aspect of the divine went off and tried to create a world on her own without the father. This explains why the world is the way it is, because it was “begotten” imperfectly. Sorry, ladies, it seems men from the past can’t help but heap blame on women. While the story of the demiurge seeks to explain why things are they way they are, I observe that this was done in order to make sense, to do what many people do when faced with contradictory accounts in Biblical stories both Old Testament and New, which is they seek to harmonize them in some way that then makes sense. In the early Christian harmonization the God of the Old Testament is jealous and wrathful because he wasn’t really God at all, but a being that arose from an improper creation. Well that explains it! The real God was there all along. Me, I see people who were looking at an imperfect being, which could have been a physical being, an Annunaki from elsewhere, who acted like a god or who was raised to that status over generations in the old stories. When I awoke and began feeling the presence in the Light, I had a similar reaction: the God from the Old Testament does not cohere to my own direct experience. Was that “god” in the Old Testament even a god at all? When Jesus brought the “new covenant” was this equal to his pointing to the old God as being at odds with the God which we find when we seek within and which other cultures might call the Tao or Brahma, The Great Mystery, etc.?

Could it be that in our past we had contact with races from other planets, races that took an interest in us, perhaps even creating us using local planetary stock along with their own D.N.A.? In the abduction literature, those individuals who claim to have been taken onboard ET craft to be examined and who had sperm and ovum extracted, among other things, have reported that the ET’s told them when their captors were told that they had no right to be doing what they were doing said, “We DO have a right. We MADE you.” Now a human living today, unaware of our ancient past as far as the Annunaki and the creation myths are concerned, this might be impossible to hear, but given what Mauro Biglino and others have to say on the subject, it might be a relevant retort.

It might seem impossible to splice D.N.A. from a completely different species from another planet to that on another planet. However, consider that the universe is a very old place and it is not out of the realm of possibility that life here could have been seeded not just by comets, but by space-faring civilizations with an interest in spreading the genome far and wide. In billions of years it is not out of the question that what we think of as our D.N.A. could be part of a much larger subset of a D.N.A. spectrum that has a lot more in common with life on other planets than we might want to admit. Just the fact that nearly all ET’s are described as a “five star” (one head, two arms, two legs) arrangement could reveal that evolution of life beyond our planet may well have proceed along more similar lines than we might believe is possible (either seeded far and wide or a factor present in cosmic evolution). All ET’s are upright humanoid looking beings which, in some cases, have very different features, yet they tend to have all of the same features that we do (but in different proportions—smaller ears or noses, larger heads or eyes, etc.), but it is this kind of similarity that poses a unique question. Are they a version of us, or we a version of them? Or, is it just possible that cosmos-wide, all of nature, terran or not, there might be a preference for advanced life to share certain traits that wind up being common?

Most believers recoil in the face of the possibility that their cherished notions might be part of a different story. I have always been interested in the “marginalia” of our world because as is often the case today’s myth often had a way of becoming tomorrows certainty. The universe is a much stranger place than we could ever imagine.

~Parker

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.

Kundalini: The Sacred Marriage Of The Left And Right Brain

if you search articles in neurophysiology or neuroanatomy, you will see a raging debate about something called “hemisphericity” which implies that you can have one hemisphere more dominant than the other. Well yes you do, in some ways, and in other ways, no.

THIS article explains that you CANNOT train one hemisphere to be more dominant since the brain is so involved in cooperating between its different regions and “sides” that such an idea is impossible (and debunked in the 1980’s).

Everyone, from winners of the Nobel Prize in physics to the artists behind the Archibald Prize, used both sides of the brain when performing any task. In fact, the idea that people can be classified as left- or right-brained was debunked in scientific literature in the 1980’s

https://theconversation.com/mondays-medical-myth-you-can-selectively-train-your-left-or-right-brain-4704

The problem, I think, is that we are dealing with an incredibly complex and also nuanced biological machine we call the brain. So many regions responsible for different functions, we think, based on the data so far collected. Something gets lost in translation, I think. And while you might be using one part of your brain for one type of function, you might also be using other parts as well. If your body is in motion, well, you have the motor cortex in on the game, too. Lot’s of busy-busy. And to my mind, based on the research I have been doing over the years on the brain, I think some scholars and researchers tend to get lost in the details….because let’s be honest, there are a lot of details when it comes to our grey matter.

The same source goes on to say:

Despite this, left/right-brain training programs appear to be gaining popularity. This is puzzling because there’s no evidence indicating that you can train just one side of your brain. Such attempts are doomed because the two hemispheres are heavily interconnected and constantly communicating.

Ibid

Again, there is truth in what the writer is saying, but there is another side to all of this and it has everything to do with how we do indeed train ourselves how to utilize the abilities that appear, thus far, to be seated in one hemisphere in the brain. You might wonder where I am going with this and how this is tied into kundalini, but give me a minute.

When I was in art school, I was keen to be the best that I could be as an artist, and part of this was to learn how to use my mind to its fullest as it related to the creative process. Betty Edwards had come out with a book entitled Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain a decade previously, and we were beginning to know a few things as it related to the (visual) arts where the brain is concerned. In this seminal work in the field of art, she explained how many people often use the wrong side of their brain when creating artwork, or in creating likenesses of people in portrait work, sculpture, or landscapes, for example. The problem, she explained, was the left brain is reductive in its approach, meaning that it tends to create abstractions and stores “ideas” of what an object looks like, not really the real thing. The left brain is great for making cartoons, but it’s terrible for creating real-life likenesses (“abstraction” means to take those details that you feel are the most important and isolate them—such a left brained thing to do). This is one reason why many beginning artists are so bad at making a realistic likeness, which is due in part to their drawing on an inner image of what they think something looks like rather than what is in front of them. It is a very difficult habit to break in our species it seems.

Over and over, Edwards showed how art students would draw an eye and a mouth all in the same stilted manner, making almonds for eyes and sardines for lips. But look more closely; do they really look like that? “Draw what you SEE!” was the admonition by my teachers. Of course, do that, but you have to get out of the part of your mind that tells you what it is that you THINK that you see. And what are the implications of being in that abstract left brain process? You are in fact living in the past. You are drawing on an inner image of what it is that you think you are looking at. You wont EVER see what is in front of you so long as you let the left brain continue its dominance in your thinking and doing.

This has everything to do with enlightenment, I promise, and it can show you the folly of trying to use the “rational” left brain in the process of enlightenment. But hang on, I am going to string you along a little longer!

By the way, you can pick up a very inexpensive copy of Edwards’ book here at Thrift Books in case you would like to be better at drawing. The book has a lot of very good exercises that actually work if you want to be better at art.

There was something about art making that I always found curious, and it had to do with what we call inspiration. It was always this elusive thing. I knew enough about it that I could lay my hands on it when I needed to. I understood it intuitively, but it wasn’t like it was something that I could force. In fact, it was the opposite of forcing. I had to bid it come. I had to be receptive to it. And that was the point. Inspiration, I found, was not something that happened in the way the logic circuits of my left brain worked. What was even more interesting to me was that I often bumped up against a very interesting outcome of the inspired state when things got really intense, and that was that i often would wind up feeling sexually aroused when things were really cooking. I can remember staying up late into the night working on piece after piece. Inspiration would breed more of itself in those solitary hours as I worked in the studio. I felt funny because I had never heard of this before. Was I weird? Was it just me? I later learned that I wasn’t alone, that a number of other artists and writers commented on the coincidence of the sexual with the inspired state. The writer Anais Nin wrote about it a good deal, as did other artists. Maybe it was natural. I felt like it must be. I suspected that the channels that carried creative energy and sexual energy might not be all that different. They might in fact be the same. Our idea of creativity might actually be the stumbling block. Some of the great artists had a charisma and were notable in their sexuality often (although not always). I always felt like there was a connection here even if I was too young to know enough to say definitively.

Fast forward twenty-five years or so, and I wake up after using a meditation technique a friend I met through an online forum who had passed it on to me. I have yet to meet him, but we had a lot of very lively conversations through email back in 2006. The result of my using this meditation method was that I inched closer to awakening with it. Suddenly suffused in a brilliant white light during meditation, I was flabbergasted, and after which everything picked up steam in the strangeness department and in a few months I “popped” and the cosmic egg was cracked. I didn’t go into this thinking that I was going to try to awaken. Back then “awakening” wasn’t that much of thing, not like it is today.

I had no idea what it was that I had. I considered I could have had a brain tumor (yes really). I didn’t speak about what happened to me to my family for close to a year. I was concerned that I could be carted off to the hospital or institutionalized. As a result of this, I spent a lot of time observing what was taking place inside of me with this new energy. I had a keen sense that I had stepped into something entirely new and I was very much on my own now. It was exhilarating and lonely all at once. I sensed that whatever this was that had happened, it was permanent. there was no going back to Kansas, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. There was no being normal again. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. It was both death and rebirth, caterpillar and butterfly. I had no resources upon which to refer to. I studied the phenomenon closely as it unfolded within my mind and my body. I wanted to know as much about as I could summon so I could take my notes and see if they compared to any other experiences other people had had so I could get a better understanding about it. It is interesting what happens when you rely on yourself in this way. As you ask, so shall you receive. Miracles tended to happen, small ones, inexplicable ones, sometimes on a daily basis. I would later learn that these were called synchronicities, a term coined by the Swedish analyst and researcher Carl Gustav Jung.

One of the important aspects of the awakening process for me was how I felt like some new state was being brought online, activated, and it was different from the way I normally had felt. I also saw how similar the awakened state was to inspiration, something I was very familiar with. In fact, I would say, they were identical in terms of how they felt and behaved, the only difference between the two was a matter of degree. One was much stronger than the other (can you guess which one?). I wondered if this wasn’t me shifting into my right brain more, or that perhaps what kundalini amounted to was breaking the bonds that kept the right brain constrained because this unrestrained portion seemed to emerge almost out of nowhere (“almost”). I began to feel that human beings were in fact left-brain dominant by nurture, even artists like myself. I suspected the entire race was this way, that we simply had developed this way as a means of survival. Linear logical things are extremely good for getting stuff done, no doubt about it, but I think that we as a race were (and are) moving out of that old paradigm so things are shifting now.

When I learned that what I had was kundalini, I saw how the Hindu’s use the imagery of the man and woman, how one side was depicted as the feminine, and the other masculine. These images were created for a reason, and I had already felt the twin energy of what felt masculine and feminine rise up through my body. They were speaking to me about my condition.

I got to watch this curious phenomenon in myself for months, close to a year, even, before ever cracking a book on kundalini. When I saw the merging of the masculine and feminine and on the correct sides of the body, I realized, they were describing the same thing I had been experiencing. They had images painted on the foreheads of yogis called a Tilak and it was shaped exactly in the same way as my third eye awakening proceeded. I actually can feel when my third eye opens, it creates a force of pressure that is exactly like the Tilak. They were on to it, and while I searched article after article, no one really was able to explain why the Tilak was shaped this way. I knew it was shaped this way because that is how it FEELS when the third eye is fully activated (more than just a small round dot in the forehead—this was a process that proceeded over a three day period in order to completely open the third eye, a chakra that spread all the way to the back of my head in bands horizontally and in a dual-forked energy vertically moving upwards, corresponding to the Ida, Pengala, and Sushuma nadi (energy channels — the feminine, masculine, and cosmic, respectively).

They say kundalini is the coming of the feminine Shakti. When I felt this take place, I recognized it as the part of my mind that I often used when making art. It was the same, but it was also much much more present, more powerfully present once the cosmic switch was flipped. Before all of this, I had to search for “her” and then I had to wait quietly, in a receptive state. I had to become that feminine trait that was in me in order to reach the inspired state. I began to consider that the cosmic light switch was using the mind to overcome the resistance we all seem to have to shift out of the logical confines of the linearity of thought that have so predominated our thinking for so long. To open up to the right brain was like a revelation. It felt like letting the genie out of the bottle, literally, as if it had been held in such tight confines for so long. And why does it feel like that? Because everything in the left brain is small, it is highly focused, linear and logical. We just don’t realize how caught up in that part of the brain that we are. The more that I slipped into this very large space that was the “feminine” I felt like I was set free. I also felt disoriented for a time, and sometimes would go scurrying back to the familiar prison of the left brain. This is most popularly called a “contraction” in awakening circles. Every time I did this, I felt a strange pain, the painbody so many were talking about. I made it my mission to break out of painbody once and for all. It took great effort, an effort at letting go of so much that I thought was important (but was really useless baggage).

I didn’t have any proof that my theory was correct, though, and to be honest, it seemed like the whole of science pertaining to the brain was against me. I went searching, and what I found was one brilliant gem, the work of Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor who, in her now famous TED talk, described how as a neuroanatomist, she realized one morning while getting ready for work that she was having a hemmorage in her left hemisphere. She knew it was her left because her language centers began to shut down. She had trouble understanding English, she had trouble even reading the keys on the phone to try and call someone to help her. This took her about 45 minutes to do, to call out to tell a friend that she needed help. As she recounts her harrowing ordeal, she found that another brain state started to come online, one that she had never experienced before, a mystic state where everything was connected: samādhi. She stood there, tears streaming down her face, describing how incredibly beautiful the experience was. She also proclaimed that, because of the shut-down of her left hemisphere, she was able to have a unique view into a state that is normally only experienced by yogis or gurus or by people like myself (and perhaps to you if you have experienced this). Her talk, entitled “A Stroke Of Insight” was the last nail holding down this idea that I had based on little more than my own observations that this comes about by way of letting go of the tightly held control that the left brain has, probably has had in people, for centuries.

Not long after this, I looked into the concept of the left brain acting as a brake against the right brain, and as if on cue, researchers were finding new evidence for this in fact being the case in the months prior to my thinking about how this appeared to me to be at play in the awakening process (how it overcomes this left-brained dominance). I read about people whose corpus collosum, the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, which had been damaged in utero through disease, exhibited some unique traits of superconsciousness, but which also kept them from being able to fully participate in society because they had limited communication between their two hemispheres. It was amazing to watch and to read how these people have incredible genius and yet had trouble tying their shoes are making up a grocery list or coping with the rigors of linear life in our world. I saw an analog with their ability to calculate numbers; I had answers come into my mind with lightening speed often, vast amounts of information, a storm of it, processed in fractions of a second. I sensed that my experience was tied to their same abilities, except because I had two intact hemispheres that could “talk” to one another, I could call on both sides of my mind, not just one.

When I began to catch on to how early Christians were talking about a unitive state that caused something to “rise” (see the gospel of Philip) and how people would go from being “dead” to alive, I felt like I was seeing how they were describing awakening. The more I read, the more I saw this pattern in their language emerge. It was curious, too, because these Christians were branded heretics and stamped out over a period of about two to three hundred years. In truth, the effort continues to this very day, but the main part of their work was done between about 200 to 400 A.D. more or less.

In their earliest writings these early Christians spoke of the “left and the right” of the “father and mother” coming together in the bridal chamber and out of their union came the Christ. While Christianity and Judaism before it had a notable and solid use of “left and right” meaning the goats and the sheep, the bad and the good, it certainly appeared that these Christians were turning these old conventions on their head (in the same way that they were turning the creation of Eve from Adam as that moment when our whole being was cleaved from its primal natural state into one that was responsible for our Fall even further because of some bite into Knowledge). Further, in the Gospel of Philip he goes so far as to say that those who do this aren’t just Christians, they are Christs. Whoo boy, nothing gets the Orthodox in a lather faster than insisting that the Christ dwells in all people and that this state of being comes about through the feminine and masculine coming into union with one another (the father and the holy ghost or sprit). Further, the feminine was revered by this group because it was she who brought so much wisdom, the ability to see deeply into things, to know (gnosis), not to simply believe (which is a poor substitute for knowledge) and to even heal.

Ideas like this sound strange to us today because we have about sixteen hundred years of entrenched belief behind the notions that we think of as Orthodox (a compound word from the Greek meaning “right thought”), but for those early Christians whom we call Gnostic, this was the authentic path to becoming Christ. And precisely because of this constellation of the feminine, masculine, and the indwelling Christ (which was treated in the same way that the Buddha is in the East which is to say that the Buddha is not a person but a state of mind that each person has within them, but is in slumber…..or more accurately, the person is slumbering before their own inner Buddha), was why this was too much for the Orthodox wing of the church to handle. Hadn’t Eve been the one who brought down the whole house of humanity? Hadn’t it been Lot’s wife who turned to look back even though she was told not to? David can go on for chapters in Psalms about how many people he has killed and no one bats an eye. Never mind that he was transgressing against the Law of Moses.

When I felt this triadic quality in myself, I thought how perfect that was: as above, so below. We make babies through union physically and we make a new level of consciousness inwardly with the two like-male and like-female parts of ourselves, an engine for enlightenment, with these two qualities which are in ourselves. This was much more natural than the Orthodox way which was an all-male club. It just seemed more perfect, more in keeping with how we are actually composed esoterically. And what better way to fold the feminine into our spiritual lives here on earth by making her the mother? The Gnostics believed that two people so awakened to this inner seed of light in themselves should have babies because that light be would all the more be kindled in their progeny, the result being an elevation of the spiritual quality in humanity.

If you want to see mysogyny in motion, you need only see how Christianity stripped itself bare of any kind of decency in what it did with the early Christians which we now call the Gnostics. To do that, you have to dig into the texts (history) because you wont see any evidence in today’s church save for cries of heresy whenever such a thing is brought up. You have to look at what the heresy hunters had to say about these people in order to know what they were fighting against. It all sounded strange to them because they didn’t understand, they didn’t have that seed of light in them which would grow like a mustard seed. And yet, traditions throughout the world describe a means of reaching an exalted state of being that required no belief, just a few very simple methods for turning the attention inward and which often involved the union of opposites within. Meditation techniques work as well as they do because it is there in such a place of quiet mind that you can begin to glimpse the lightening strike that is the realization of who you really are inside. No two worlds could have been more different though: one was literal and linear and cramped and stuck-up sexually and the other was ecstatic, vibrant and full of inspiration and light where the masculine and the feminine merged in order to form a “ladder” by which your own consciousness could ascend into the heavenly states simply and in a natural organic fashion with those two working together, not against one another. This is the core of the secret, and the mystery of the divine marriage within. The failure of the Orthdoxy was one of awareness, knowledge, and imagination, three elements crucial for navigating the numinous.

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then you will enter [the kingdom].

The Gospel Of Thomas, James Robinson ed., p. 129

I use the above quote because during what I later learned was a temporary “kundalini flash” a few months before the full rise of the energy, I wrote a piece that contained a passage nearly identical to the quoted passage in Thomas above. I posted it online on a forum. My friend who gave me the meditation technique pointed out how it was similar to Thomas. The only problem was I didn’t know that Thomas even existed. I really didn’t know, and I read it for the first time in the Fall of 2006 online. My jaw dropped to the floor. They were describing an arrangement by which one reaches a state of inner unity where the spark of awakening is kindled. I would later realize that none of this was an accident, and it had unfolded in the way that it had in order for me to realize something very important about earliest Christianity (and my role in it in the Fourth Century). It was known that there was a quality that was like a man and woman, and that they were arranged as if one was on one side of the body and the other on the other side of the body, very much in keeping with how the Hindus described it. This wasn’t an article of faith, but was instead the very thrust of the Gnostics which was they knew. They didn’t need to believe because what they had was the indwelling awareness that made union with the divine possible. And you know what? They were right.

Today as I worked in the studio, I entered into that familiar place I go where ecstacy waits. Nowadays, I don’t have to be deep in meditation, all I have to do is open to it and there it is. I have learned that this state, like the inspired state, is one where I let myself be seduced, to surrender to something higher where I then rest in a state of deep devotion and love as I go about my work. I can listen to a radio show, I can get distracted, I can even get frustrated now and it comes right back. It didn’t used to do that. All of this took time to cultivate, and I have largely done it on my own. No guru, no teacher, but a series of events and people who all had something to teach me as they came and went. Others are also doing this in their own way all across the world as more and more of us continue to awaken all on our own. Ripe. Vibrant. Alive. Awake.

What the Orthodoxy failed to see or grasp was how important our sexuality is spiritually. The reason why it is important is for the same reason why awakening happens in the first place, which is a union of opposites brought together in a rare moment where often there is a roar of sound, a sudden riotous vibration, or a flash of light (as was in my case). When I give myself completely over to this ecstacy, my mind opens like a flower opens and new faculties show themselves. I do not have to have any article of belief, but I know something divine is at work. Yes, there is nothing that compare to it except the orgasmic, but with a difference; it is as if the electrons go into a glorious precession that acts as a waveform that unites my being and in a state like there, wherever I put the beam of my awareness, impossible things begin to happen. I might think of someone and know something I can only know was true only later, or I might peer into the core of matter, or I might gain insight into something that I need to do, this insight being like a vast bundle like how a dream is often untangled or remembered after a night of dreaming. People call this today a “download” and certainly the term is apt because sometimes it can take hours for me to feel the bundle unwind. I often will remember that I had had a dream about this issue years ago, different state of mind are touched on, and none of this process is in the least logical but is driven instead by what I sense is a superconsciousness and intelligence that I rarely possess in my day to day except for when I am in love with the universe and it is in love with me. All of this sounds like what a mad person might say except that as a practical mystic, I have always sought to try and note my experiences, jotting them down when I can, to see if there is any correlation later with something in physical reality. Many times I have seen things there was no way for me to see and known things that had I told a physicist, they would just assume I was lying, that I had read a journal somewhere. I know that this experience, this ecstacy, opens us to our greater potential. And while I really take no joy in writing about it because of how it is often frowned upon because it seems boastful, I only mention it here because doing so is like me shaking your arm and pointing to the phenomenon because I know that it is possible for you to do the same. “What I do you will do also, and you will do even greater things…”

Kundalini has been described as a “libidinous” force, sexual in character, and while this is true, that it sparks sexual energy, that isn’t all that it is. I have found that everything that we have in the body exists first in spirit, that everything we are emerges out of consciousness, not the other way around, and as such, what we think of as sexual energy here on earth, which makes new life, there is a higher dimensional aspect of our sexuality which is connected to our spiritual selves, that part which survives physical death and which exists in all time. It is this aspect, which we call “sacred sexuality” which is, to my mind, nothing more than the spiritual compliment to our sexual selves. It is this part of ourselves that allows us to have union with the divine. And while some will cry heresy, I can tell you that when the moment comes when you do reach union with the divine, it will be that part of you which surrenders like one surrenders to a lover, that will make such a union possible. I can also say that when you do touch the divine, the divine will have zero shame about any of this, unlike ourselves who try to point fingers and try to make a beautiful thing an object of shame. Some of us, it seems, have a lot of growing up to do. This isn’t a mental exercise, but is instead something that encompasses parts of yourself that you may not have even known existed before. Instead of feeling shame, you will come out of that cloud of light renewed, healed, revived. Each time you step into that state, it seems as if some bit of the hard crust falls away and the mind is opened more and the logic centers go quiet because none of this is the domain of the logical. The only thing it can do is to write down what it is that that happened to you, and it will always do so poorly because language exists in the left brain and this experience cannot be contained or compassed by words.

In awakening, it is known that those who are too logical have a very hard time of it. Taisen Deshimoru, the Zen master, who taught in France said in The Ring Of The Way that monks who are “mental” were the ones who had the hardest time with Cosmic Mind. You just can’t get there with the left logical mind. You have to use the part of the brain that specializes in the holistic, the nonlinear, and that is the right brain. In fact, Dr. Taylor came back from her stroke describing the brain in just this way, despite what all of the researchers might want to say (she was there, she saw it happen in motion as a trained researcher in the field). The biggest lesson that I learned was how to stop trying to understand everything logically, to learn how to FEEL (this is not to be confused with emotion—feeling is a capacity that we have like intelligence is a capacity that we have intellectually for example). When I did this, I shifted more into the right brain process and moved into the much larger realm of awareness. The logical mind was never intended to grasp the mysteries of the cosmos. It’s job is to learn how to build a ladder to the stars, not contemplate the meaning that is behind them. It is the feminine in us that alone has the wisdom to open us to ever-larger realms of awareness. And to be clear; the two work best when the feminine is given the room she needs while not being silenced by the left brain. The feminine must now find her voice in all of us. In the process, we will all grow wiser because of it. We might even help stamp out mysogyny and begin to craft a new way to be in the world. The Gnostics had a word for those who had discovered this inner feminine and masculine trait in union: syzygy. Some have referred to it as an androgynous outcome to enlightenment, but I have not seen it this way at all. Instead, I experience it as a highly cooperative and dynamic state where two rely on each other for what it is they themselves do not possess, and which, I will point out, is very similar to what two people fall in love do, which is to admire and even lean upon those opposite traits in their beloved which they do not have. In the process of this that is spiritual and individual, it fuels the outer process as well (how we relate in the world). I know what it is like for a woman to love a man and I also know what it is like for a man to love a woman. My own gnosis has shown me in those moments of ecstacy how it must be or can be if we just learn how to develop or cultivate this form of inner and outer cooperation. I can dream.

The left brain reflects on what is known or what it think it knows. The right brain does not, in my experience, have this facility. Instead, it does the opposite; it looks much more impartially at what is happening in the present. There is a reason why so many, since Buddha first mentioned the power of being fully present, have gone on to write books about the awareness that happens in the present moment. Ram Das wrote “Be Here Now” and Tolle wrote “The Power of Now” and they are both saying the same thing that Buddha said first. This is a right-brained activity, this ability to be in the present. But more: quiet the mind so that you can begin to sense what is beneath all of the mind-chatter. It is there, they all insist, where the greater awareness lies. It is not something that you do, it is something that you are and which your thoughts keep you distracted from perhaps ever finding. The left brain will always be in a prejudiced state, and it is this part of us that seems to be running so much of the show when it comes to awareness. It think it knows, but it is only basing its thoughts on conjecture based on what has happened in the past. To know this new state you must be open to what can be, not what has been. I contend that when you can reach into this silence in yourself you are quieting the mind and that this allows you access to the parts of you which are not wed to time and space. This is the same space that is written about by the Gnostics, the Pleroma, the fullness. We are all related, we are all family, from the largest to the smallest. It is an unimaginably large family, but knowing your place in it will forever alter any sense that you have that you are ever alone or set adrift or singular only. Even in the synoptic gospels Jesus reminds the Pharisees that their scripture did say “ye are gods.” What the Orthodoxy could not imagine was that we all are. Did they just want Jesus to be that beacon of a light on a hill that we all seek to give ourselves to? Was it all just a way to herd the sheep into an ever-tightening space spiritually for control? Or was it just a conspiracy of ignorance, a failure of imagination?

Contained within these two parts of us is all the wisdom and knowing that we need to navigate them. You literally have access to vast amounts of information that is part of what the Gnostics called the Pleroma (Koinē Greek: πλήρωμα, literally “fullness”). It is here that the sacred marriage of takes place. It is firstly within, and can be bolstered by others who are likewise centered and known to themselves. Staring into the awakened can be like staring into the same infinite that one feels within ones own self. This is also where the “deficiency” that the Gnostic Jesus spoke about was resolved. This idea that we are not good enough, this feeling that we are set adrift, sinful, bad, and unloved. All of this is washed away or redeemed in the Pleroma. And Jesus was showing the way.

Even as I say all of this, you cannot get there simply by becoming more aware of what the right brain can do for you. Something else needs to happen, and unfortunately, even the yogis of India, for as good as their systems are for explaining all of this based on numerous observations by monks in the past, cannot explain what happens when we awaken. The energy rises, they say….it is aroused, they say. But by what means, exactly? The Gnostics explain this simply: by becoming one with ones self, to become known to one’s self, and then by going as deeply as one can in silence, you can then touch on that place where the union of the opposites creates the spark that cracks open the wall separating you from a super-conscious state. “Remove what divides you” said the Gnostic Jesus, something I read six months after I had done exactly this very thing which I knew at the time was the first step into self-initiation into the mysteries of the kingdom. Once there, it is a self-sustaining font of energy which gets busy clearing the “knots” of emotion, the samscaras in the Sanscrit, of the stored emotion which is out “baggage.”

It is a quantum leap, but once you reach it, you have it forever. Its power may wax and wane over time afterwards, but its force will purify and clear you so that you can be a vessel for both the divine and who you really are. In many ways it has felt like my whole body became a sensing organ, a body of awareness. Was this new mind tapping into the wisdom of the body? Do all of the neurons scientists have found existing in our organs also provide thinking potential, as vessels for awareness also? I am afraid we don’t know yet, but I have a sinking suspicion that there is a connection whereby what we think of as the brain extends itself in awakening to include the body, and expresses its twin character of like-male and like-female qualities of what the Gnostics called “the left and the right.” When I say all of this I also know that awakening itself is a fairly simple thing, but it can take years to get there. It seems you have to want it badly enough, because who else could stick with its relentlessness, its intelligence, long enough to allow the changes to take place that makes a broader awakening possible?

Achieving this state could be done through years and years of preparation. What I know is that it is possible for it to happen much faster than that. I would suggest that you don’t do that, though, since getting yourself ready for it can be of immense importance. It is true as many in India have suggested, that this is in all truth, a more deeply fundamental state which is less something that you reach for but is instead something that you already are. It seems to be activated, but it is more like waking up to what you already are. It is your get out of jail free card. I ask; are you really ready to be that free?

FiNalLy!

In the past week we had ourselves a nice snow storm here in the mountains. The temperatures have dipped down low enough that it has kept the snow melt at a minimum. There is a feeling of so much that is on hold, and I don’t mean just getting out and running errands or doing things that I might otherwise be doing if the snow wasn’t there. The snow has a way of muffling sound with its soft powder acting like a noise suppressor or absorber. It does close things in, and many things come to a halt. It is in such a place, a few days ago, where I began working on a project that I have been researching for a decade and a half. In fact, the project is as old as my own awakening process is. That project is about the ties that earliest Christianity has with the phenomenon of awakening. I have gone through this, through all of the books available to us now, the history, the archeological digs, what we know about kundalini from other cultures which used to be knowledge that was only known to a select few. We are in a different time now and the doors are opening. I need to get started on this.

I already have an unwieldy manuscript that I began writing a couple of years into awakening that I felt could serve as perspective on the experience, a kind of memoir of sorts that was started before this book concept about early Christianity was begun. The problem for me with this first manuscript was that at the time I was trying to write it, I was so deep into altered states, doing release work, and being swept away by this powerful force in my awareness, that it was really hard to write a book that had a cohesive feel. It grew to 750 pages…..I spent months editing it down to 180 pages, only to find I had lost the heart of the work. It was frustratingly difficult. Then my friend and gifted intuitive Ali said when I was getting ready to gas up the car on the way to the airport, “Don’t you have a second book, Parker?” As I was getting ready to get out of the car to gas up I quickly said, “No I don’t.” She did that thing she does which tells me she is scanning something. She looked out across the lot to the road into the distance with that look. Ali is never wrong. I know it is tricky when we speak in absolutes, but Ali’s ability to dig into something she knows nothing about is astounding. I know that might be hard to believe, but it is true.

At the time, my mind wasn’t on another book, my mind was on this book I had been wrestling with, this memoir. She added while she sat there musing, “My guidance is telling me that you have a second book…” I knew what she was talking about, but I wasn’t thinking about it as a book. It was an idea for a book, something I hadn’t told anyone else about. The last thing I wanted to do at that point in time was to start a new project. I then admitted to her so her own inner intuitive abilities wouldn’t be jammed up in her head, “I have an idea for a book, but it isn’t anything I have started on.” She continued looking out into the rain as we sat parked under the canopy of the gas station, adding, “My guidance is telling me that your second book needs to be your first.” When I heard this, I was stuck with the idea of getting this first manuscript into a better state before I could begin contemplating this concept which I hadn’t even started on, beyond just research. “I don’t feel like I can begin another project right now, I have so much to do on this first one!” She took in a breath and steeled herself a bit, she knows how I am. I am hard-headed and I can be difficult to deal with when I get in this kind of space. “My guidance tells me that this is THE book, Parker, that it needs to be the first one, then finish your second one later….how about you just put this book you are working on aside for a bit and give this second one they are telling me about a try?”

I was dismissive and impatient with all of this. I was stuck wrestling with this first project that was at that time in front of me, which had so many arms. I wish I could have been more patient with her ideas, which she was getting in an authentic space where she nearly always hits bullseyes. What I did do over the next nine months was I promised myself that after digging into a major edit, I would try to put it aside to see what would come up in regards to this second project. One edit turned into about half a dozen, and this process took nine months. I have close to a dozen variants of that project saved on my computer. I finally just walked away from it, cleared my head and forgot about writing at all.

Only after I did this, did ideas begin to slowly filter in about that second project. I didn’t put word to paper for years but instead immersed myself in study and research into a field that most Christians think they know a lot about and have some very strong opinions on. I’m not a historian on the subject, and while I have spent a good deal of time in academia both as a student as an educator, I didn’t get my degree in divinity. I had a lot of work to do, a lot to learn. Luckily, I was able to begin learning what the last hundred years or so have turned up since archeology became a serious field of study. The earth has given up her secrets and we now have more information on the history of Christianity than we have ever had, short of the documents that the church has held in their collections (which has formed most of our thinking before this period in our history). The problem though, with what the church has held and what the earth has offered up, is that what we keep finding are not books or fragments of books that are Orthodox in nature, but heretical ones. Additionally, the more work that is being done on this front, the more the subject of heresy keeps coming up in the historical record, and not in the way that the church has used it, which has been to put down any story that it felt stood at odds with the standard they were bearing. I am not using “heresy” in this case to mean what is not true but what has been labelled by the church as not true. You perhaps can see where I am going with this.

What we know now is that essentially the Orthodox church chose books that it agreed with, that it understood. It put those books forward….but there were other books. While it is true that there were many books that were deemed by the church as non-authentic, such as stories of the early life of Jesus clapping his hands and making something he made out of mud turn into birds and fly away, there is the issue of a body of work that was completely suppressed and nearly destroyed in order to keep those stories from coming forward. The church will say that those books were heresy and this is why it acted as it did. However, what scholars are seeing in this last century is that this was more about choosing what stories you wanted put forward in order to formulate doctrine based on those narratives that the Orthodox wing of Christianity thought it understood. There were some very important books that were simply dismissed out of hand because (I suspect) they were so poorly understood. They were poorly understood because of the nature of the writings themselves and what it was that they were intended to achieve. What this body of work did was to pull back the veil on consciousness to reveal a capacity that all humans have for realizing the divine within. As I will show in my book, what they were on about was revolutionary for the location, the religion that it came from (Judaism first, then Christianity later), and the culture from which it sprang. It wasn’t a bunch of incoherent gobbledy-gook, however, despite how some have received these newly discovered texts and gospels. In some important cases, these books represent some of the most sophisticated writings having to do with how to reach enlightenment and to achieve a full activation of awakening, something which the Hindu call kundalini and what the Taoists call the Golden Flower. It doesn’t help that the scholars who first examined these books (Thomas and Philip to name a few) were not versed in world religion or philosophy because they described them as being influenced by Hermeticism. To say this is like saying I was influenced by the Hermetic teachings because I had awakened even though I was completely unfamiliar and unschooled in that strand of philosophy that emerged in Egypt. But the fact that these books were found in Egypt doesn’t mean they are Egyptian in character. The only thing the discovery reveals is that the dry desert of Egypt helps to preserve documents on papyrus very well (as many texts that are not Christian that have been unearthed there attest to). There is a lot to cover in this book, the least of which is how Orthodox Christianity developed ideas over time which appear to us today as having always been there. No, Christianity evolved like all religions evolve. It was the Orthodoxy that put forward the idea that what they had to say about Christianity and Jesus himself had always been from the very beginning when in fact this was not the case at all. Rather than trying to tear down Christianity, I am seeking to correct the record using historical evidence, archeological discoveries, studies of the texts both within the so-called Gnostic strand as well as the Orthodox strand of the same religion. While that will be looked at askance by many, there is evidence that now exists for why this second look is necessary if we are to understand Christianity and how the victors in the battle of the “truth” got to tell their story while another deeper story didn’t get to be told until 50 years ago when the Nag Hammadi Library began hitting bookstore shelves after a protracted period of translating the codices.

This book will be a story about two competing camps and how their perspectives were very different. One was an outer understanding stripped of a deeper knowledge and carried elements pointing to this deeper knowledge, while the other was representative of a deeper knowing, both of who we are and how the divine works in us. The two diverged in degrees over time until the two were only partially related. When you look at the two camps today, they look almost completely unrelated. Neither camp had writings that were “perfect” in the sense that there are transcription errors, or deeper doctrinal issues that keep scholars busy at work printing books on the subject. They are both, though, speaking to the same phenomenon but with a different understanding. It is a bit like holding a piece of string that is white on one end and blue on the other. The two look completely different at their most extreme ends, but they are in fact all the same string. One camp, the Orthodox one, fought very hard to dismiss this other camp and did so by flatly stating that what these so-called Christians were on about was sheer heresy, nothing more. The Orthodox church had books that proved it. But what was actually going on was a war over ideas and values about the very foundation of human spirituality. The Orthodoxy won out and they continued to choose the stories that agreed with their particular view, and they had the resources to press their view, making their imprint on humanity appear as though it had always been the view, and never-mind those dirty heretics. This is the perspective we still have today as codified by the Orthodox view, and it only looks like it was always that way. Billions of believers think so to this day. It wasn’t always that way, however. Not by a long shot. Yes, in light of what Orthodoxy has put forward, this other camp which got buried in this conflict looks very strange and incompatible….heretical, even. Like I have said, though, the earth keeps offering up her truths and we have learned a lot in a pretty short time.

Many cornerstone concepts of Orthodoxy were created. To the casual observer, this isn’t obvious at first. The effort will be to show what new knowledge we have from our most recent discoveries and see how it compares with the historical accounts and what Orthodoxy has put forward, at least in part. An example of this is the divinity of Jesus as the son of God. This wasn’t something that was known about from the get-go. This only came along later, it was a development that grew with each generation. We know enough about when the synoptic gospels were written and scholars today can trace the development of the ideas surrounding Jesus’s divinity and identity as human, as God, or as someone who was adopted at God’s son (these ideas were all existing at the same time early on) for example. Some of the synoptic gospels don’t mention Jesus being God. This was something that the church came up with and put it into the belief system and then said “world without end, amen” and that was that. You also wont know the full story if you don’t go looking, but given how belief itself works, who is going to bother to question their beliefs or what they perceive is the foundation of their faith? This is one example how doctrine was formed and how human a process it was. There were other ideas that some take as an article of faith today that are just like this.

The camp that lost out was a group of Christians who formed the esoteric wing of the faith which we call today the Gnostics. They didn’t call themselves Gnostics, though. If you asked any one of them they would have said that they were Christians. These people and their teachings seem strange to us today in large part because we have been fed a steady diet of Orthodoxy, the outer-most understanding of the deeper principles within Christianity. Some of what the so-called Gnostics have on offer cast new light on our spirituality and they also reveal discrepancies with regard to the Orthodox view. One example is that Orthodoxy essentially says that you need to accept Christ into yourself, to accept his act of sacrifice in order to be saved. The so-called Gnostics, however, pointed out that Jesus was teaching his closest followers how to BE Christs. Like all esoteric traditions, though, they veiled the teachings in order to make them inaccessible for all but those who were in the process of being initiated into the deeper teachings and experiences that led to an innermost realization which they called gnosis, or knowledge. For these Christians, you didn’t need to believe in the crucifixion and what that meant, instead it was the knowledge that would save and free people. What is so interesting about this process and these teachings is that they describe in identical form, but using different vocabulary, identical concepts contained in other esoteric traditions the world over. There is no evidence that suggests that there was contact between the cultures of India and Judea during this time. While modern scholars suggest that the Gnositc texts have ties to Hermeticism, I suggest in my book another possibility and it is informed by my own experience with awakening.

The book will do its best to make the case for the Gnostics and why their work deserves a second look. It is a story about how the kingdom was found, then lost, within a century or two. Part of the book will be my own experience, notes taken from my journal in those first weeks and months after awakening happened and the observations that I made at a time when I had no idea what was happening to me. I will show how what I observed as the central symptoms of the experience match those in the Gnostic texts as well as parts of the Orthodox ones, and how this then reveals at the least that the Gnostics had grasped something that is incredibly rare and difficult to reach for the average person. It will show how a school sprung up around this knowledge which was later put down by the tide of Orthodoxy that came after the “heretics” came onto the scene, not before. We know this because of careful research that has been conducted by numerous archeologists, a linguist, and other researchers. I will reveal that while the early church had these heretical teachings at its earliest core, the look and feel of the church was also very different in its earliest days. The beliefs were different, too, as the ideas that would become the Orthodox view would evolve over time into what many of us know today.

Concurrent with the later tide of Orthodoxy came an effort to marginalize the role of women in the church. Hand-in-glove with this effort was also an effort to marginalize knowledge of the true source of the Holy Ghost as a feminine quality of the divine. As above, so below. I will show that the early church was a very different animal from the one it is today, and how it is that we are all poorer for it. The book isn’t out to seek converts but instead may well be a cautionary tale about what happens when we allow an authority who is less capable than ourselves to call the shots. Augustine, who was one of the early church fathers, once said that he would not believe anything unless the church itself said that it was true. Most people just want to be told what the truth is without ever really examining it and doing the vetting themselves (“The kingdom is within’). The Orthodox story is a great one but it isn’t the only one and isn’t the whole story given how much that we now know. It is just one strand of comprehension about a drama that played out while Jesus lived on earth. We now have evidence that women served as bishops in early Christianity. So much for the writer of Timothy (which most scholars today explain is a forged letter attributed to Paul) telling women to shut up in Church and submit to their husbands. For Timothy, a woman could save herself by bearing a man children. Yes, the early church was a very different animal than it was just two hundred years later.

I am not writing this book in an effort to fuel controversy, however. My purpose is to show how the Gnostic texts are tied to an authentic phenomenon in consciousness and how it fuels a transformation of the personality and self. It will also show the discrepancies that are contained in the Orthodox view and how what it said does not mesh with the facts. Many Christians believe that the Bible is a perfect document given from God. That notion itself is simply not true and I will show how this is so. From miss-translations, to outright forgeries, the story has been massaged and changed in key ways in the Bible. The book will be an effort at laying out the facts instead of resting on just what those in Orthodoxy have said was the truth (“trust us” they have said, “what we tell you IS the truth!”). Trust but confirm. The book will be about how two different camps were addressing two ends of the same string and that both have something to tell us about ourselves and our ability to reach the divine that is found within (“The kingdom is within you”).

What I will also be doing with the book is bringing contemporary voices into the divide to help illuminate how awakening is the same thing that early Christianity was teaching about privately to those who were prepared for it. My hope is to add enough voices to help to paint a picture and make the case for why the Gnostics had something important going on in regards to understanding the Christ drama. My hope is to be able to assemble numerous first-hand accounts of contemporary awakening stories. To that end, I am interested in your story should you be interested in contributing to this project. One aspect of this book will be to point out that awakening does not require belief in any religion in order to achieve it and that those who were on to this rare phenomenon were themselves probably not well understood in their day and that much of the deeper teachings of Jesus were lost for a very long time. It is my sense that awakening was precisely what Jesus was speaking to when he was quoted in both Philip and Thomas and that he was showing a way for a person to know themselves better and their place in the divine drama. To that end, accounts will not be tied to the religion as much as they will be tied to the phenomenon described in the Nag Hammadi Library and how this was fed into the ministry of Jesus. I understand that for some people, there is a concern about remaining anonymous, so any material that you provide me will be treated in the manner which you have requested. The effort here will be to shed new light on an old story and how Christianity as we know it might need a second or third look. If you are interested in finding out more, you can contact me, Parker Stafford, at info@staffordartglass.com.

Awakening & The Gospel Of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas, along with the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip,  were key books that I discovered early in my awakening that related to me the body of esoteric knowledge that Jesus taught to his disciples.

These books are so new to modern Christianity that their effects on our thinking are only recently being felt. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices happened in 1945 by a local man living near the town that the codices were named after. The same year the Dead Sea Scrolls were also discovered. The codices, though, were not fully translated and published until the early ’70’s. The differences between these two finds, though could not be greater: the Dead Sea Scrolls were written very much in the Judaic tradition as mystical treatises from a group of people who were the Essenes, while the Nag Hammadi was mystical thought based on what would become a break from the Judaic tradition into new realms of experience.

Reading them for the first time in 2006 was an epiphany for me. Growing up, I always felt that there was more, and that something more was missing from Christianity. I didn’t know what this something more even was, nor did I know why growing up that I had this deeply held sense about how Christianity had been hiding something. Sounds a little crazy, right? As I have read this collection of books that began with Thomas, I felt immediately as though I had found it. Just like any book I could feel where it was “off” or when a distortion was creeping in. When the writing was hitting the bullseye, it felt as though I was reading a buried truth inside of me. I saw how, for as useful as science has been, it had done the exact same thing religion had done; it taught us to pay no heed to our own experience (in this case, an inner reality was reduced to mere chemical signals and with religion, our broken state could not hope to allow us a clear view to divine reality).

The Gospel of Thomas was the first book that began to illuminate as well as unravel both what I was taught and what I suspected deep down was a different story about Christianity. Maybe you, too, have had similar misgivings-like something just doesn’t seem quite right about it? I guess I grew up questioning and found it odd that there was invariably that moment in conversation where the other person would say, “You just have to believe!” I never outgrew that need to question, and consequentially never became a follower of anything…..not a religion or philosophy or “ism.” But as time would tell, it stood me in good stead.

Being introduced to these books was like putting a puzzle piece into place that had long been missing. It came to me by way of a friend who read something I wrote while I was in the “thrall” of the energy I had been feeling in bursts early on before the full-on “rise” of awakening.

I published the writing on a forum in 2006 just months before kundalini rose. The writing was an innocent appraisal of what I was going through and how it was affecting my inner perception and experience at the time. It was written as prose, but it was poetry at its heart. The discovery that I made was when my friend suggested I read the gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammad. I had no familiarity with these books, but found certain passages in Thomas to be identical in content to what I had just written. My friend had said as much, which piqued my curiosity.

The piece I wrote was about how all of nature was suffused with the energy of life force and that this force existed for plants just as it existed for humans; that sexual energy is the interconnecting principle behind all energy, which is creative and connective. Most people never feel this in their baseline experience because the energy is narrowed down so much that they only get a trickle. By sexual energy, I am not talking about sex or active arousal, but rather a steady continuou experience of sexual/sensual energy as a kind of energetic baseline —or bliss, if you prefer.  What I had unknowingly stumbled onto was this baseline experience instead of mere arousal. How can anyone know the creative power inherent in the emanations of spirit and the universe who does not experience it first hand? 

The energy that I felt was sexual, yes, but it was also different in that I noticed that it was opening my mind in a way that I was familiar with as an artist and seeker, but in a different way. It was like a rarefied form of inspiration, maybe like inspiration on steroids. It brought the awareness that I was opening up to a reality that existed in all things and that this was more than mere imagination. I was at work as this experience first poured through me so powerfully, and was like a narrative that hung in the air, waiting for me as I turned my mind back to it through the course of the day. It was almost exactly like putting a book down and picking it back up at the same place later. The sense that “I” alone was creating this had vanished.

Rather than feeling like I was creating this experience, it had an objective quality to it that was co-creative; as if it waited for me to find my own unique way to give it voice. This was a very different kind of experience, and I have written about it before. On that day it was as though I stepped past mere imagination to find that imagination, if you go deep enough into it, becomes a sensory portal where we form images to describe the reality we are experiencing when we are not using our physical senses. It allows you to see beyond yourself (as long as you aren’t wearing  blinders). 

The sense I had was extremely vivid and a little more than “trippy.” It has now become a fixture of my experience, but back then this was a horse of a different color. It was akin to how you awaken from a dream and are able to go back to sleep to finish the dream….except I was awake.

 It was like a truth living in the light. I came upon the first realization that sexuality was an integral part of spiritual energy in an undivided way. I knew, had known, that our sexuality had the capability to allow us deep communion with ourselves and one another, but I simply had not experienced it in the way I was doing so on that crisp October day in 2006. I was moved by sexual energy to see and to feel into a world that seemed like it was a product of imagination only to find that it was a channel, along with imagination, for apprehending the world and reality in a nonphysical, nonsensory way. I was not experiencing this with a person, it was with a matrix or field of energy that interpenetrated everything. It was through the energy that I first began to relate and see in this new way.

I realized that our shame about sexuality was, at least in part, blocking all of us from knowing the light of this knowing. I knew on that day that what made sexual energy dirty was the shame we brought to it. Sexual energy had been poorly understood as a result. 

When I finally sat down to write out the material that had played through my mind that day, I felt a need to note the time. I put it down on the page and began to type. The material poured through me. It was so fast, a part of me was surprised. I noted the time that I ended and put it at the end of the page. Years later, I went back and tried to type the piece again and found that I couldn’t match the speed that it came through. It was entitled The Yearning. 

After having written the piece, I had the first synchronicity occur that was uncanny right after leaving work. I went into town and wound up buying a science magazine that had a story in it that carried the same message in it as my writing. Out of all the magazine’s I could have bought, this one was the most different of all of them, and I had to work to find it because it was hidden behind a card rack in the store. When I looked at its cover, there was no mention of the story that was in it. These personally relevant coincidences would begin to form the basis of so many events in my life once awakening came in full force. Synchronicity happens when we step into the flow of this energy in consciousness, you see. It is part of this new landscape.

The writings of Thomas, which are a collection of quotes that Jesus said, carries no story-line like the mainstream Gospels do, but instead is a collection of sayings with no apparent personal commentary by Thomas. The book is laden with an understanding of awakening and relays this in the same way Jesus taught the masses, which was through a nonliteral language of parable and analogy. The reason for this is because Jesus was seeking to relay a nonphysical reality to minds who knew nothing but physical reality.  You can’t do this in a literal way and expect anyone to understand you.

Photograph of a page from The Gospel Of Thomas

The key here in ALL of his teachings is his use of the word “like” which is in nearly every parable: he does not say the kingdom is a mustard seed, he says it is like a mustard seed. This type of discourse assumes that you will look inward for the details, for the truth. It is a means of getting us to look inward to find our own inner mustard seed, to understand how something so small and so hidden can grow and unfold into something so large.

(17) “I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind.”

This quote lies at the heart of the deeper esoteric teachings of Jesus, which was that this information could not be properly known through physical means or the senses. It was a reality that Jesus knew and sought to convey. More than just a structure for doing good, it was the essence of spiritual knowledge, of inner discovery. 

“Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in the place of a likeness; then you will enter the kingdom.”

What Jesus is saying is that when the opposites within our nature are brought into unity, awakening comes. For Jesus, the kingdom was the word he used to describe this state of being. 
If this sounds the least bit familiar to those who know and experience kundalini, it is because it is. Some suggest that these teaching borrow from other esoteric traditions. Anyone who has experienced kundalini can likely tell you that when it happens to you, you don’t need a tradition to explain it. You know. So it is natural for anyone who caught on and achieved awakening to describe it in roughly similar ways as another culture or tradition did is because it’s the same experience being described. You will never get awakening through a description, you will get it because you found it inside of you. 

The awakening of kundalini is a merging of the seeming opposite forces in awareness, symbolized in the Hindu tradition as the two serpents that rise up through the body and awareness to merge into one another in an experience of blissful union that awakens, redeems, and saves us from being, as the Gnostic texts convey, “dead.” And life before awakening is like this-we thought we lived until we awoke and then REALLY knew what being alive was all about!

The idea of this fusion of opposites shows up throughout the teachings of Jesus in the Nag Hammadi. It is told in different ways, but it’s the nonliteral language Jesus is using that urges us to look within ourselves for the answer.

(48) “Jesus said, “If two make peace with each other in this one house, they will say to the mountain, “Move away,” and it will move away.”

The clue is in both context and the use of “two” in his teaching. The two are not two physical people. If you take it literally, you lose what he is trying to teach, which is much deeper. He is saying that when you make peace with the two forces in your awareness, the male and female, or in the Hindu tradition, the Shakti and Shiva, in your body (or house), you will attain the powers that come because of it. 
Jesus is not being literal; the two are living in the house that is the body. When they make peace, or move into union with one another, you can think of something and it happens. The mountain does not literally move, he is just saying that the seemingly impossible now becomes possible. For anyone who has experienced awakening, you know just what I mean. Again, synchronicity lies at the heart of this. 

Another key to this is also how Jesus uses the concept of being divided. When you are divided enough within, awakening is not possible. But when you are no longer divided, a process takes hold that is the very essence of what we talk about and experience in awakening. One of these keywords experiences is that of feeling as though we are being taken apart by this force, that it leaves us irretrievably changed. The accounts of this are too numerous to mention in the Nag Hammadi Library (where Thomas is found). So we have Jesus speaking directly to this experience again in Thomas where he states that, “Therefore I say, if he is destroyed he will be filled with light, but if he is divided, he will be filled with darkness.” 

Most every awakening is accompanied by a brilliant flash of light. The encounter of this light is the same light experienced upon bodily death, but those who were on to the esoteric teachings of Jesus could experience this light while still alive, an encounter that always leaves the person forever changed.
If you see what happens to people who have had near death experiences, they are all similarly changed by it; accounts almost always involve the person feeling as though they have to live their lives in a more purposeful and compassionate way than before. Additionally, people who have had a NDE will often have kundalini awakening and if not a rise of the energy, return with similar abilities as those who have awakened without an NDE. This is due to what the encounter with the light does, or initiates in us as real soulful change. It was so important that Jesus taught almost exclusively about it. What these teachings share with other traditions is the concept of a unified self as the means to know God, Cosmic Consciousness. I will remind my readers that the whole purpose of yoga is to bring body and mind into unity in order to prepare for awakening. The word yoga means union.

The question at the forefront of your mind might be, “If this is true, why doesn’t it come through more clearly in the canonical Gospels?” It is a fair question, and it’s due in part, I observe, as a result of the early versions of the  Gospels that were making their first rounds during the third century AD. These books have many of the same words in them, but a  different understanding was now in place. For example, when Jesus mentions adultery, people think he is talking against cheating on your spouse. But clearly in the Gospel of Mary our adultery is sinning against out own nature; we turn away from that part in ourselves that could save us. This is but one example of the differences in understanding that took place at the time. The documents, as written, reflect that level of understanding as a result.

These were books selected by a group of people who all thought the same way. That is, they were literalists, and the nuances of Jesus’s spoken word was lost on them. They thus favored books that conveyed a certain literalist depth to them. Everything else sounded like nonsensical gobbledygook to them. So naturally, anything that bid them to dig deep within was quickly rejected, and Thomas, along with a lot of the Nag Hammadi Library, is deep. They labelled it heresy because it did not agree with the collection of books that conveyed what I call Christianity Lite. 

I know this sounds dismissive, but it isn’t. It’s what my journey has shown me is true. If you like this form of Christianity, I think it’s fine, but don’t expect it to be a means to bring you to a full-on transcendent encounter with the cosmic  It simply lacks the important central teachings for sparking the requisite awareness and willingness to approach it differently for that to happen. Too much is missing from the road map! Besides, there are passages in the Bible that exhort followers not to fall prey to conjurer’s and magicians. They effectively sealed the library shut, denying anyone the hope of finding the keys to awaken. If this sounds bad, bear in mind that this was the exact same observation Jesus was making about the Pharisees when he was alive. The key unlocks all of us regardless of religion, but the key has been surrounded by fear of losing ones eternal soul. What a fine state! But the story has stuck along with a particilar understanding of the teachings, and the victor was Rome, so the church in Rome set the pace and the kind of story that would be told.

The history is not ambiguous on this. Rome became the center for Christianity based on the superior resources found there. But Rome was not the defacto center in the beginning. In fact, there was a very real vying for this designation in the beginning. Constantinople was one such early center, and there were also ministries that sprang up in the wake of the work that the disciples did early on in those areas. The gift of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi was a result, most likely, of a church that was nearby.   It is likely that there was ongoing activity long before the structure was even built. 

Rome became the center because of power, influence, money, scribal resources, and the will to become that center. The church also had the support of the Roman empire behind it. The church could decree any teachings it believed stood outside what they believed was the core messages as anathema, which they did, landing any heretic in jail or losing his or her life. The church could simply remand a person to the Roman authorities for punishment in much the same way certain Jews were said to have demanded punishment of Jesus before Pilate.

This is not the only force that served to so change the story of Jesus’s teachings. 
There are scribal errors. Some, most in fact, are so mild that they don’t change the meaning of what is being conveyed. There are tens of thousands of these types of errors that are found in the books, and they are easy to find by simply comparing all of the oldest copies of the same books with others of its kind. But there are more substantive errors that take place, and they are less numerous but they tend to be far more significant. These often take the form of translational errors. 

The Gospels were written mostly in Greek and later translated to Latin. This is how a passage in Luke has Jesus asking Peter three times if he loves him, totally missing the mark meaning-wise from what was said in the Greek version.

Jesus has Peter over to his house for breakfast and he turns to Peter asking him three times if Peter loves him. Peter says that he does love Jesus each time he is asked. 
On the face of it, it doesn’t make sense why Jesus would do this. He just keeps repeating himself. This encounter happened we think after the crucifixion, so Christians have explained this by saying that Jesus was doing this to remind Peter that he had denied knowing Jesus three times when Jesus was arrested and later crucified. And it all makes a kind of sense, except that isn’t what Jesus was asking Peter at all.

Instead, in the Greek, Jesus asks Peter if he loves him agape, which is the form of love one has for, and with, God. Then Jesus uses the word philos, which is the familial form of love one has. Think of it as brotherly love. Jesus then asks him if he feels eros, which is erotic, sexual love. Peter answers in the affirmative each time. 

Do you see how different this story is now? Instead of “going there” and shaming Peter for denouncing him, he is instead asking him if he loves him without reservation, without any boundaries as pertains to social propriety. Jesus wanted to know how full and complete Peter’s love was. Now imagine “eros” being translated into the King James’s Version! That was because the image which those in the early church chose was not the real Jesus. The accounts of Jesus thus followed the narrative the early church fathers wanted, which was a nonsexually, non-erotic Jesus. In this particular case, I think it was quite possible that the error in translation may have been intentional. It is why I view this passage as being intentionally mistranslated; having Jesus speaking of sexual love didn’t fit their narrative, but it fit another story when not translated completely, thus giving the passage a very different spin.

The other problematic side to this which I haven’t gotten into is the fact that Jesus spoke middle Aramaic, which is a highly contextual language. This means you need to know the context a word is given in order to discern it’s meaning. Since all of the Gospels, we assume, were first written in Greek (“koin” Greek), we are all one step removed from the nuances wording Jesus was giving in his teachings. The elephant in the room though is that if someone did not understand what was being said, a different story might be told. This is a small but important point.

Imagine the scene: Jesus walks into the kitchens of Levi and says, “That is a very cool oven, Levi! How do you cook with it?” Levi later says to his friends, “Jesus cannot understand how I cook with an oven which has no fire…” In truth, Jesus was saying that he thought Levi’s oven was really great and could he show Jesus how he cooks with it? I know that sounds silly, but it’s very likely this has happened about central concepts about Jesus’s divinity, our relationship to that divinity, and the path to salvation. Actually, these small errors make for big missunderstandings!

Most people assume that the Gospels were written by the disciples, but many of the disciples were illiterate and the canonical Gospels have very sophisticated writing structure. They were first told, then copied. There were different versions of the same document in existence (such as two copies of Matthew, one purported to be for the masses while another for the more initiated). Scholars can also see how a Gospel will abruptly have a different writing style, which suggests a different writer. Most readers never even catch the difference though.

 Through translational errors as well as picking the versions of books that spoke more to the people’s own sensibilities who came three hundred years after Jesus, this likely became the force that defined our understanding of Jesus as the man we think we know. 

Then, it was quite easy to fold our arms and say, “For the Bible tells me so!” Except that this isn’t so because there is a problem with that Bible.

We now have books that were hidden away for over 1600 years that had been thought to be extinct. The fabled Gospel of Thomas was decried a myth by the church (even though it was mentioned in the writings of some well known people at the time) until a copy of it emerged having been discovered in the desert of Egypt in 1945. Along with it came a trove of over 40 books all bound in leather folio’s, the contents of which have caused scholars to rethink Christianity in a radicaly new way. 

It would be a different story if the books made no sense at all, but instead the teachings are extremely deep, so deep that gnostic scholars admit that they have trouble understanding them.
They don’t understand them because these books are a treasure of esoteric teachings, the marrow of how to find God, how to know the self, to know about the twin forces within awareness that Jesus says many times in different books as his being “One with the father and mother.” This only sounds strange to someone who has no experience with awakening. Thus, the books in the Nag Hammadi have this as a consistent theme. Yes, there is mention of God the father, some writing in the NHL uses this term exclusively to describe the masculine aspect. But it also focuses on the feminine aspect exclusively too, (Pistis Sophia) so there you go. These “new” themes are difficult for scholars to understand because they themselves do not know or already taste the nature of the experience. 
It’s hard to pull back the veil when you don’t know a veil is even there.
 
To better understand the rift that occurred in the early church and how heresy was the origin of Christianity (as defined by the church in Rome), you have to read the history on all of this. You won’t find the whole history within the church because the church had its mind made up 1600 years ago and it hasn’t changed much since Instead, you have to pick up scholarly analysis to begin to see the additional materials that help to clarify the issue more.

Works by Bart Ehrman, while criticized by the church, are some of the best examples for understanding the Bible as it was instead of how it has been made to look. He does this by examining the facts. He draws on scholarly research instead of faith.
Even in his own work, there seems to be something missing, which is the gap between the esoteric works and the exoteric (canonical Gospels). Somewhere between the death of Jesus and the birth of the church under emperor Constantine, there was a dividing of the way in understanding. Somewhere, books were radically changed. Perhaps this was done piece-meal, changes that took place as the result of people hearing the stories and having only a limited understanding,and then writing them down.  What we know is that the Gospels, most of them, were not written by their authors. We know this because of how they are written. They often use the name of the writer as having said what the book contains instead of the writer using the correct  form of person if they were writing it; “These were the words that Jesus told Luke” instead of, “These were the words that Jesus told to me, Luke.” Even in Thomas the same form is suggested in the first sentence:. “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.” In the case of Thomas, the sayings were without narrative, so it was easier to simply copy them as they were. Scribal errors were reduced with the document  because it had been written and then buried for 1600 years. But this book was copied many times even as the other Gospels were.We do not have another copy of Thomas with which to compare. We do know that some of the sayings found in Thomas were found carved in a building in India, a country, not coincidentally, that Thomas was said to have been encouraged to go to spread the teachings.

(5)Jesus said, “Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you. For there is nothing hidden which will become manifest.”

The process of awakening is one where you increasingly learn to see things as they are. When you are able to pierce the fog of your belief and inner bias, events will look vastly different to you. You will also attain secret knowledge, which is referred to as “gnosis” and that those who did know were the “gnosticoi.” While writing this piece I had a comment made on another earlier post where a reader, herself awakened, described how she could discern answers to problems, any problem by sitting down, getting quiet, and ‘listening’ inwardly for the answer…. which, she added, always comes. So that is an example of what I mean by “secret” knowledge.

The act of merging the opposites within is what keeps us from being “one-sided” or stuck in one mode (masculine/rational) of thinking. It is when we merge them and find union within that the energy rises and we are saved from death.

The “rising” is mentioned in Philip, and it’s quite remarkable. He explains we must attain this while alive now if we are to live a fuller life. He suggests in his explanation of it that simply waiting to find it when we die wont do it; doing it here is important. He uses the term rising in the flesh. He also explains that the concept of resurrection was wrong. We do not die and come to life, but we are as though dead and come into a larger spiritual life, becoming more alive. I highly suspect that even in his lifetime Philip was seeing a corruption of the teachings by people thinking Jesus would come back to resurrect them, which is a distortion that shows up in the canonical Gospels such as in Revelation where Jesus comes in glory to raise up the dead and judge them too. This is how the fairy tale that is the rapture came to be I think. But Philip explains, no, this is a rebirth, a resurrection of the self in flesh as though it had been dead. This is not a literal physical death. This is a death of soul, of awareness of ones true potential.

This concept of those who are “dead” are found through both Thomas as well as Philip. It is clear that Jesus is playing with words to make an important point. It is also word usage that befuddles scholars. “The dead are not living and the living do not die.”

Those who are not awakened are like someone who is dead; they do not live the fuller life that awakening, or the kingdom affords them. The living do not taste death because the gnosis which they attain upon awakening shows them that they are more than flesh and bone and that the universe is a living breathing subtle presence that supports this new life by way of the Creator who is both masculine and feninine. It is by joining the two in yourself that you live in the same way as the deity does. This is why it brings gnosis of the deity; the twin forces that are in you are present in the deity. This becomes the way to know this larger life.

The difference between canon and the Nag Hammadi is the role Christ plays. In canon, you seek the Christ as Jesus to be saved by him. In the Nag Hammadi, the Christ is found within. You already have the capacity to BE a Christ. The idea that anyone could be a Christ right along with Jesus was an anametha to the church and could land you in jail, and you could lose your life.

The clues to all of this is in knowing that the sayings were meant to stir your own knowing. It’s there for you to know. When you do know, you will begin to see what is being said. While the vocabulary might be different from Vedic teachings about the rising of kundalini, and while they may vary based on aporoach and their details, they both are speaking about the same exact thing. This teaching is the same as found in other non-abrahamic religions or philosophies.

The sad part is that this was weeded out in the beginning as “heresy” when in fact it contains the esoteric teachings that Jesus conveyed to his disciples because, as Jesus explains, the masses are not able to understand his deeper teachings even though they are present in every single parable. He also points out to Peter in the same sentence that even though Jesus speaks plainly to Peter that even he does not understand.

This is a tall order for us, then, to understand these teachings. Perhaps the difference in content may have been due to the differences amongst the disciples themselves, with small differences equalling substantive differences in what they each understood the teachings to mean. Even in the letter of Peter to Philip, Peter describes Philip as standing or keeping himself “separate” from the rest of the disciples. Could it have been that Philip found himself at odds with the rest of the group in his understanding of the teachings? 

I won’t pretend that the Nag Hammadi is without fault, though. While it has those parts that seem to lift off the page, it also contains a lot of what I would expect from a culture of the time as being highly resistant to the feminine principle having equality amongst the masculine. This is no more evident than in the creation story that was written by this group of people. In it, the error in the world came about by the feminine principle seeking to create a world on her own, which results on a demiurge that then sows all kinds of havoc in the world. It seems women just can’t get an even break! But you can see how the bias is there and results in a prejudice against this force, which we all have in ourselves. But luckily, the truth is there inside you, you need only knock and the door will be opened.

When I awoke, I became aware by meditating and focusing on the energy that this thing felt like the embrace of a man and woman. I called it that. I also found that the i focused on their embrace that I could begin to feel a third presence emerge from them. I called this “the child.” I didn’t know that this was kundalini, I simply knew what I felt. What I did not know was that this was the same result as the early Christians had and were describing. In fact, they used the image of the bridal chamber to explain the sexual bliss that existed in the experience of this union. The Christ was the one who emerged from this bridal chamber called the “nymphion.” Boom.

It was in reading these words that it all came  together for me; the union of the inner man and woman producing the child, which for me was a transcendent awareness that unleashed my mind and brought “secret knowledge” was the same thing Jesus and his followers had described. It was also an idea the later Christians who devolved away from and could not stand the idea of their god-man as being sexual in any way. This also meant that the teachings of Christianity did not offer the teachings which, despite their prudishness, would have actually saved them and redirected them into a new life.

It was a big “WOW” moment for me to say the least. This was the origin of the Trinity, and the takeaway here was that the Holy Ghost was the missing link, the feminine aspect that if understood, could have jump-started a revolution in being here on earth. 

In recent posts on how to release trauma, you can perhaps understand why I stress why it’s so important to release trauma or emotional material from the past. It is because it serves to divide you and keeps your insides turning away from the trigger that brings awakening.

This is not just achieved by dealing with emotional material in a more or less direct fashion, it can also be achieved by way of somatic release exercises which recognizes that emotion is stored in the body and can be released through body movement without having to reexperience trauma, but simply to face and acknowledge the emotion. This is at the core of pranayama yoga as well as chi gong, just to name a few. This has, though, the result of releasing what divides you and as such, will lead to awakening when enough of the right material is healed or released. It isn’t for the elect, it is who each of us are regardless of class or religion. It goes way deeper than that.

The teachings found in Thomas might speak to you as they spoke to me and others. For me, it was through Thomas that I knew someone besides me had experienced this before. Philip explained that Jesus was trying to get his disciples to be Christ’s. This happens when the two merge deeply into each other and remain so from then on. This is the consumation of Augustine, the divine marriage of the alchemists, and the Bridal Chamber. It is cosmic consciousness of the Hindu, exemplified in the merging of the yoni and lingam, the Tor of the Druids in England, and cosmic mind of the Zen Buddhists.
Critics of these writings seem to say that the writings in the NHL are of eastern lineage and are not aligned to Christian thinking. I rather think that the truths espoused in all of these traditions or strands of thought arise from direct experience of a spiritual reality that is common to us all. I was able to describe my own experience without the aid of a tradition. Further, I was led to writings that had passages nearly identical to what I had written. 
What I did was no different than what anyone else has done who could witness their own awakening. It isn’t that the early Christians were  a “Gnostic” group, it was that they had insight that led them to describe what all other esoteric traditions have done for ages, with the descriptions illuminating a condition, or state, or structure to consciousness that is common to all of us. What the critics do not get is that this experience is often so clear and vivid that those describing it as the union of opposites are describing it as it is. No tradition needs to tell you what’s happening because you feel the energy rise, you feel the physiological and neurological reaction to the energy as serpentine, and you experience the rush as it pierces the chakras and opens you even further for the universal awareness to move through you.  I described it on my own in exactly the same way that the early Christians had-which was the truth of the Trinity.

All of this amazing stuff is in you, and is the source of all that I write about. I hope that you might find this so that you can walk in this new life which is the real “resurrection and the life.”

The Work – A New Timeline

I am working on the most difficult chapter in my book, which is going back into the historical record to show how Christian orthodoxy was an outgrowth of a much deeper mystical current that existed with the first Christian (Jesus), and that through the intervening years between his Ascension and the institutionalizing of the church, this deeper connection to soulful truth was lost.

It is a difficult chapter  for a number of reasons. One is bias.I am up against an entrenched tradition that is used to believing what it believes.  The other is a tradition that was built off of and drew from an earlier “doxos” (or thought) but lost critical aspects or concepts necessary for it to more deeply guide it’s followers to the depths of who they were. The other difficulty has been time. The sheer accretion of it as a belief system has made it a stumbling block, most notably for those with the most need for clearing a path within that leads both into themselves and into the vast realm that is the Kingdom. Lastly, it is challenging because so much has to be packed in to what must be a short and to the point chapter.

To untangle this has meant that I need to bring not just scholarly resources to the table, but the reality and experience of awakening as well. It means that I have to show how this first tradition was lost long before ink was set to papyrus, and how it most likely happened. 

The challenge that comes along with all of this is how the early church sought to scour from history those books and sects that actually served to birth Christianity before it was a state institutionalized religion. A lot of supporting material that I could have used has been lost. However, despite all of this, something amazing has been given to us in our current era. It came in the form of a time capsule, an honest to goodness time capsule buried in the perfect spot in order that it could survive the heresy hunters that have come and gone over the centuries as Christendom has grown.

In an interesting twist of fate, a man named none other than Muhammad Ali (no, not that Ali) uncovered one of the greatest finds to date of early Christian thought in the desert in Egypt just outside the town called Nag Hammadi. Without knowing it, Ali played a role in helping rewrite history by helping to bring forward the very documents the early church came to revile, and which it spent so much effort in burning, anathematizing, and demonizing.

While the Nag Hammad find took place in 1945, translations of the more than forty books were not completed and brought into the broader publishing world until about 1972. As a result, we are only now beginning to assess more deeply the impact that these books have had not only on how we conceived Christianity, but also ourselves at our deepest of levels. 
The reason why I am approaching this subject is two-fold. First, as Westerners, we have been touched most by Christianity than any other religion. Even people who are not members of a church or who buy into the faith at all are still affected by the reach of a religion whose values have threaded themselves into so many facets of our lives. Many people today might not be involved in the church, but very often their parents took them to church as children, or they have grandparents who did. Secondly, there is the issue of the truths and the path that could have happened, but didn’t, and how important the teachings were to anyone, regardless of any religious affiliation. Before there was a religion, there were brilliant messages that were plucked from the Light, which transcends all religions or institutions.
The story here, at its core, is about an infection. It is the infection of ignorance and how it can turn it’s own deliverance into a 1600 year odyssey of illusion. I know how bad that sounds, and honestly, I am grappling hard with how to strike the right balance in this one important chapter in WTI. Sometimes you have to know how to break the news gently. But this isn’t just about overturning a beloved institution. It is  not about that at all. It is in fact about a way to recognize that we have been swimming in the shallows all this time, and that a deep ocean beckons to be explored.
The problem that we face in the wake of the discovery and subsequent dissemination of the Nag Hammad Library into the mainstream is that the conversation about it has lacked a thread of continuity of knowing (or gnosis) when studying the texts that make up the collection. As a result, those who did the translating and the commentaries that accompany the books admit to being mystified by their central precepts. These books cannot just be read with the intellect, or with orthodoxy weighing heavy in the mind, but must, I feel, be read with the heart and the soul. These books ask of us something more than what orthodoxy ever did. It isn’t surprising to find that Christian scholars are so dumbfounded. They are inheritors of a tradition that never demanded that they utilize the hidden depths. It is now time that we did. What’s more is that people are  ready.
These books from the Nag Hammad Library, the best of them, ask us to take that leap into the unknown in order to retrieve or discover that which most of us have lost or have buried. This isn’t about facts and concepts, but a quality that IS us. Curiously, in some of the books, they provide the simplest and clearest means to reach awakening, which Jesus called the Kingdom.
To do all of this in one small chapter has led to the realization that this first book won’t be “the” book most widely read, but will be the foundation for a number of them. What gets laid down in this one small but potent chapter on Christianity will lead to a book that side steps the Orthodox journey and helps to bring a turn of mind and willingness to go deeper. More than a dry analysis of these “new books” from Egypt, it will show how they communicate the ineffable and help bring us closer to it, less by rational discourse and more by tapping our innate powers of feeling in order to conceive what is in fact entirely revolutionary in each of us. In an effort to set themselves apart from other religions, Christianity denied the very aspects that are universal to reaching enlightenment by hiding something terribly important to all of us.
The chapter on Christianity in the book I am writing now will be to wet our whistle for a deeper dive into what the origins of Christianity could have become. The book will examine all of the historical evidence and will ask readers to be audacious enough to step into the gap, their own unknown, to reach out, and in, to retrieve what is still missing in so many of us.
My dear friend and spiritual cohort who is one of the most gifted psychic intuitives I have ever met, said to me many years ago that there would be a book that I would write that would be the book, and it wasn’t the one I was working on then. This ruffled my feathers back then partly because I had so much time, so much experience, tied up in the effort of that manuscript that I had in front of me. But here it is, six years later, and as I begin working on this one chapter, I can feel the presence of an entirely new book muscling it’s way into my awareness. When Ali told me about this as we sat in the car at the gas station that rainy day, she said, “That book is already written, Parker….it’s just waiting for you to put it to paper.” Sometimes a wise man needs a wise woman to help him see the bigger picture.

Part of the soul of this new book is how we can change our world by being able to acknowledge one element, one simple aspect of our inner spiritual reality  that the Orthodox tradition swept under the rug right from the beginning. I sense, at this time, that it has to do with something that will only work if we begin to embody and practice it in our day to day. The way we are going about it now will only lead to a growing divide between all of us and our fundamental nature’s. We need to become aware and begin working now if we are to stave off what could become an ever-widening gap in our society and all of its institutions. 

How A Book Not Yet Written Catalyzed A New Paradigm For Men

What is so interesting about this is that in the months prior to beginning work on this chapter, I felt a clear need to begin doing a type of inner work with men.This was an unexpected realization, and it happened during a conversation I was having about retreats for women who were doing spiritual healing of their own. When asked if I would want to be a contributing partner in this visionary idea, I found quite suddenly that I really needed to work with men, at least at first. At the time I really had no idea about what that work would entail.  
The idea was firmly planted though, and it hasn’t budged a single bit since then. The earliest ideas began in my mind as a group who would first gather locally to begin revisioning the masculine, to, as a group, share and work together to come up with solutions that will aid in recreating the masculine experience and identity. This would be done without destroying what is the essence of what it is to be men in an essential way, apart from cultural expectations and programming. This local group would then be translated into a larger arena where workshops and retreats would be formed in order to reach a wider audience. That assumed that men would ready for this, and I personally see many who are.

Since then, without fully knowing what the content would be exactly, the concept has evolved very quickly into a means to effect a much needed paradigm shift. This shift will have the result of creating a space and knowing about how to heal our innermost spiritual, and emotional fractures related to masculine identity. The outcome of this, I sense, will be men who live very different lives and whose own healing will also help heal a new generation of women who have been yearning quietly for this sort of outcome, for this kind of man in their lives, be they father, brother, son, or lover.
I know that you might be wondering how this type of work is connected to a book on Christianity. It ties into fundamental beliefs about our identities which were supported and informed by the church. It has played it’s part in keeping a great secret from itself and us. This secret has the power to transform all of us. It is the missing ingredient that when added, is tranformative at the most basic and essential levels. Since paternalism had a hand in the early church, and because of the extraordinary scope of the reach the church has had on most Westerners, being able to see the church as how it could have been actually can show men how they can be today by correcting this one simple aspect that got hidden away by men. Men did this, and now we can each undo it. The results should be interesting to say the least.
Having said this, this work won’t be limited to heterosexuals since it will not be built on the old paradigm which has an often unrecognized or acknowledged codependency at its core. It will instead seek to bring healing and fresh thinking to the individual first, with the balance then achieved in the self naturally rippling outward with new effects, new eventualities, coming into the lives of those who participate. This will be driven naturally and organically as an outcome of this re-visioning process that will call upon, not coincidentally, the one aspect that the early Orthodox Church sought to hide, whether by ignorance or design.
There is a lot that I haven’t written about in specific terms because to do so would mean a number of posts. The main core of the work will in fact be incredibly simple because instead of this being a process of reshaping the selves of men, it actually serves to bring men to the one place within them that society has taught them to ignore. Instead of methods, finding this lost part of themselves will BE the method, the compass, the guide, the teacher. We have been envisioning this the wrong way, you see. 

What I sense that this awareness can liberate in men is an amazing relatedness to their deepest selves…this in turn will bring greater and greater layers of fulfillment which will be a healing balm for the rough edges we have had for so long. I am merely it’s facilitator. You are the healer!
It only takes a single pebble dropped in the calm waters of a self ready for change to effect this change.

Who knew what writing this one chapter might birth or clear the way for all of this to begin coming through?
For now, I have a chapter to write. Besides my own work that sustains me in my day to day, I have an outline to write along with how to include all elements necessary to make this book what it needs to be. Concurrent with this will no doubt be setting up the framework for my first group of men who are ready to take that first step into a new world.

The One

The One has no limits.  It is neither form, nor not-form. It is indivisible.  Everything that exists, exists in it.  It seeks only Itself.  It is eternal and the giver of eternity.  It is pure Light.  It is the Blessed One that never changes.

The Apocryphon of John

 

All things manifest are filled with God.  All things that are invisible are filled with God.  All things flow from God, yet [S]He does not change.

The Isha Upanishad