An excerpt from “The Gospel of Thomas for Awakening” (now available at Amazon in print and Kindle formats)
Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day (I Thessalonians 5:5).
Jesus said, If they say to you, “Where did you come from?” say to them, “We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.” If they say to you, “Is it you?,” say, “We are its children, we are the elect of the living father.” If they ask you, “What is the sign of your father in you?,” say to them, “It is movement and repose.” (Gospel of Thomas 50)
If they say to you, “Where did you come from?” say to them, “We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.” First let us note what Jesus does not tell us to say. He does not tell us to say that we are creations of God or servants or God–and certainly not sinners.
Our origin reveals our nature. Since we came from the Light, we are ourselves that Light. Quite some years ago a healing group met each week in our monastery. At the beginning of each session we would say some prayers, always ending with: “Christ is the Light; the Light is Christ. I am that Christ; I am that Light.” This is the truth of our real, essential nature. It is not the truth of our temporal, ever-changing nature that is involved in evolution. But it is necessary for us to stop in our evolution dance occasionally and remember who and what we really are.
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower–but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
So said Tennyson and so say all the wise. Those who do not say so should be ignored and even avoided. For they tell us lies about ourselves and would have us lie to ourselves in time. “Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). Saint Paul described them as “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away” (II Timothy 3:5).
We entered this relative field of evolution from “the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.” That is the point at which the Invisible Light became Visible Light so creation could be projected for our habitation and evolution. That Light manifested as the creation in which we too became manifest. Being images of God, we became revelations of God just as the sun is reflected in many vessels of water. The reflections are many, but the Reflected is One.
If they say to you, “Is it you?,” say, “We are its children, we are the elect of the living father.” We are not God, but we positively are the children of God, “for in him we live, and move, and have our being; for we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28). The word translated “offspring” is genos, which means “kind” and from which we get the word genus–species. So we are what God is–as Tennyson says above–the difference being in degree. God is infinite and we are finite, he is the ocean and we are the waves. The ocean is the wave, but the wave is not the ocean.
We have been chosen by God, the Living Father, to evolve throughout our incarnations within relative creation, within physical, astral and causal worlds, until we attain to his perfect likeness, participating in his infinity which he shares with us, yet which is always his exclusively. We become godlike but never become God. We will be gods within God.
If they ask you, “What is the sign of your father in you?,” say to them, “It is movement and repose.” Our life is the shared life of God. It is a dynamic, evolutionary life which consists of “movement and repose, ” of “motion and rest” (Patterson and Maeyer’s translation). This means that within us there is both intense evolutionary movement in the form of development and at the same time there is an increasing establishment and expansion in the motionless consciousness that is the essence of our being, that is the Father within us. These two simultaneous poles of our existence are the “sign” of our Father within us.
Here, too, the words of Rumi cited earlier apply. This is the heart-song and the experience of the yogi.
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