 106. Meditation |
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
-Jesus, Matthew 10:37
If any man come to me, and HATE not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also. He cannot be my disciple. The correct translation is "SET ASIDE," NOT hate.
-Jesus, Luke 14:26
The above statements are incorrectly understood. Jesus always spoke from the condition of enlightenment, and everything he taught was to try to persuade people to meditate and to return to their own spiritual freedom. The above statement describes the temporary setting aside of the psychological and emotional attachments to people and objects during the practice of meditation-cultivation. Jesus never taught people to hate or abandon anything, except their immature psychological attachments, and "seek ye first the kingdom of God." "Lay your treasures in heaven" (during meditation). Kahil Gibran explains it also in his book, The Prophet. It states:
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup
Give one another your gift of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be loving and joyous
But let each one of you be alone (internally centered)
Even as the strings of the lute are alone though they quiver with the same spiritual music
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping
For only the hand of "Life" can contain your hearts
And stand together yet not to near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart
And the oak tree and cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
Marilyn Mellows states:
The Gospel of Thomas is very different from the gospels that have become part of the New testament. It contains no narrative material, nor is there any story of the birth, the life, or the death of Jesus. It consists only of sayings 114 in all, each preceded by the phrase, "And Jesus said." The collected sayings of the Gospel of Thomas are designated by its author as "the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke."
Some of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas are very much like those found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, for example: "Jesus said, 'Come to me, for my yoke is easy and my mastery is gentle, and you will find repose.'" (#90) But others are puzzling: "Jesus said, 'Become passers by.'" (#42).
According to this author, salvation is achieved in the recognition of one's origin (the light) and one's destiny (the repose). And in order to return to his or her origin, the space separate from the world by "stripping off" the garment of flesh and "passing by" corruptible human existence.
For New Testament scholars, one of the most interesting things about this gospel is that its author (who calls himself Didymos Judas Thomas) appears to have used sayings from the same collection used by Matthew and Luke. But for this author and his community, the meaning of these sayings was clearly very different. The Gospel of Thomas, therefore, provided exciting new evidence for the existence of an earlier collection of sayings used by a variety of Christian communities. - End of statement
