 106. Meditation |
Truly, neither religion, nor spirituality, nor meditation expresses the human relationship to Truth unless each is directly and rightly integrated with the others. Religion, which is founded on personal and moral self-sacrifice, or truly human ecstasy, must maintain direct and conscious association with higher esoteric processes, the secrets of the spiritual adaptation of Man. And the religio-spiritual understanding of human sacrifice in the ultimate Reality must be associated with practical disciplines and transcendental means of higher or more perfect human adaptation through the full technical range of meditative and self-sacrificial processes. And all of this must be integrated with a right understanding and valuation of the Spiritual Master and the radical or perfect Destiny of devotees, or true practitioners.
The religious, spiritual, and meditative Way of Truth or Eternal Life is a process of personal, moral, and higher psycho-physical sacrifice. It is not a superficial and private remedial technique, but a form of culture, a profound and total way of life. The leaders of popular cults tell their fanatic followers: "Meditate on yourself, in yourself, for yourself, and by yourself. Come and get it. What you get-and it will easy-will make you happy, fearless, superior, right, invulnerable, lovable, and immortal." But, truly, what is thus acquired only reinforces the loveless moods of those who are already constantly acquiring and buying for the sake of ultimate results and satisfactions.
The Way of Truth cannot be understood by children or fools. It is of no interest to the vulgar daily personality refined and developed by TV and the mob of peers. It requires the most profound intelligence, commitment, responsibility, and moral force of persistence in practice. It requires the most creative and easeful force of love. It requires great freedom from the destructive force of irrational reactivity, fear, and self-protectiveness.
Therefore, the communication of such a Way truly takes place only in the forums and with the speed of the highest kind of human consideration. To the degree such communication is introduced into the media streams of popular "culture," it must creatively struggle, through constant criticism and depth of information, with the profusion of subhuman propaganda. And the useful or effective communication of the Way of Truth requires a continual mindfulness of the ordinary tendencies, demands, and illusions of the subhuman mood of the usual state of human beings.
The message is this: You, as you know or may experience yourself, are not immortal, nor yet even fully human. What you tend to be, and think, and live is exactly what must be overcome-through insight, change of action, and the fullest working out of the disposition of sacrifice. Your reluctance to resort to the Divine and to the higher Agency of the Spiritual Master, neither of which is within you or even merely outside you, is a sign of the very dilemma from which you must be liberated. Your moral and relational weakness or reactivity is the dominant fault that binds you to the illusion and torment that is yourself. Your tendency toward confinement in inward and mental and physically self-possessed states is not at all reinforced by the truly spiritual Way. The entire Way of Truth is immensely difficult and creative. The entire Way is a Sacrifice. The Way of Truth is the only matter of ultimate significance in the life of Man. Let us yield our very bodies and minds into the Reality and Destiny that is both Spirit and Truth.
-Franklin Jones
The Greek Fragments of Thomas
The Coptic Gospel of Thomas is the only complete version of Thomas we have, but it is not our only direct witness to this text. Long before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, the story of Thomas' re-entry into the modern world began, not at Nag Hammadi, but approximately one hundred fifty miles down the Nile, near El Bahnasa, at an archeological site known as Oxyrhynchus. There, at the end of the last century, a team of British archaeologists sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Fund uncovered a great mass of papyrus fragments from an ancient trash heap. Over the course of eight centuries this dump had served as the inauspicious repository for documents and books of the richest assortment, whose accidental survival has today provided us with one of the most important sources for understanding everyday life in the Greco-Roman world.
