The Gospel of Thomas (v. 11)

This heaven will pass away and that which is above it will pass away.  The dead are not alive and the living will not die.  In the days when you ate what is dead, you made it alive.  When you come into the light, what will you do?  On the day when you were one, you became two.  But when you have become two, what will you do?

     ~Gospel of Thomas (v.11)

This is a very cryptic line that Jesus spoke to his disciples concerning the purpose and meaning of life, as they knew it, as he knew it, and as God knows it.  There are two levels of heaven that Jesus refers to here, or rather two perceptions of heaven both will pass away.  The first, this heaven, that which we create through Love on Earth, and more personally, Jesus was referring to Himself, will pass away; he died on the Cross and our mortality is limited.  The heaven above refers to that which took place prior to Creation, before their was opportunity to become enlightened and as we Christians refer to it, redeemed. 

Such a place is outside of time.  This often confounds scholars and theologians as they expect everything to progress in linear motion as time does from our perspective but that isn’t necessarily the case.  Just because Jesus died on the Cross at one point in history doesn’t mean that what was prior to that came to an end at his resurrection, it just means that is the event that allowed it to, and presented the patter for it to, change.

Existence itself is undefined and beyond description.  It wasn’t until the birth of the Universe that time and space allowed for their to be anything fathomable for us to define with our limited intellect.  The Universe serves as a connection, or rather a connector like “and”, “but”, “or”, so that there is a before the Universe and a transition to a new way of Existence, not necessarily in the future, but at some point now will become a reality and it will probably take place without us participants even being aware of the change, we will become aware of it afterwards already in motion, limited intellect and all that.  So, the heaven that was above, passes away and a new heaven begins, an eternal realm blessed with still limitless description and form.

To eat what is dead is to take in knowledge that in itself couldn’t lead anyone to such eternal life, but we made it our various belief systems anyway and established rules and dogmas and laws for each to obey and created a weighted unbalanced way of reward and punishment for those that are “in the know” and “those outside of it”. This is not what Jesus describes throughout his gospels, though people insisted it is what he meant and formed the all too popular “Your gonna burn in hell if you don’t get saved,” propaganda. So, Jesus asks them, When you come to the understanding that life isn’t what you thought it was, and the rules aren’t what you insisted they had to be, what will you do?

We have all been born with wounded souls, torn asunder, ripped in half as it were, and live are lives as masculine or feminine.  Jesus speaks of this being healed and the rejoining of the as One becoming reality for us, while still having two separate bodies as before.  If we can not live together as two people when we need each other to be whole, what will we do together when we are each whole and no longer in need?

Jesus answers both of these questions concerning what we should do and how we should live together in his teaching in the canonical gospels.  All of the Laws in any religion come down to two, and we can be true to the first by living the second.  Love with all you heart, mind, and soul.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Yes, I left out the word God on purpose, because people trip over it every time.  For some reason we just can’t see God in our spouse, let alone our neighbor or enemy!  Yet loving each other more than ourselves is exactly how we live out what God has been exampling since creation.  We worship, by doing this ONE tiny little rule, love, at all cost, even to that of our own life.  That has always been the message and it is still the message.  All the cryptic sayings all the hidden secrets are laid to bare when we just start living the message:  LOVE!

Peace to you, Namaste.