Jesus said, Adam came into being from a great power and a great wealth, but he did not become worthy of you. For had he been worthy, he would not have experienced death. (85)
Just as an oak tree has an organic connection with the very first oak tree of its genealogy, in the same way we all have a living connection with our first human foreparent. Whether the human race has several foreparents or only one, by looking at our present situation we can see that they all ended up the same: undergoing death.
All the lifeforms in the universe are a result of evolution. Either the forms themselves evolved or the Creator Mothers, the Elohim, made those forms exactly for the embodiment of spirits of a vast range of evolutionary progress. However it may be, the first human being in this creation cycle has been given the designation: Adam. So to make things easier I am going to assume that we are all descendants of Adam.
To reach the evolutionary level of humanity is a tremendous accomplishment, the result of millions of births in millions of bodies, each one reflecting a rung of the evolutionary ladder as we slowly moved upward toward humanity. It was no small thing to master each form so we could move on to the next one. Therefore both Adam and we have “come into being from a great power and a great wealth.” We have become what we are because of the divine impulse within each one of us. The power of God has carried us onward in the stream of our many lives. And the accomplishments made in so many births is a great wealth indeed. God has placed at our disposal all the powers of creation.
Glorious as this was, Adam failed in his initial birth in Paradise, the astral realm just one step up from the earth plane. Allowing delusion to grip his mind and heart he “died” to Paradise and fell back to the material world where he began to inhabit the physical human form God had mercifully provided for him and Eve (Genesis 3:21), a form subject to continual birth and death until enough evolution had been attained that he could again rise to Paradise. (See Robe of Light.)
According to a Hebrew book, the Nishmath Chaim, a writing contemporary with Jesus: “The sages of truth remark that [the name] Adam contains the initial letters of Adam, David, and Messiah; for after Adam sinned, his spirit passed into David, and the latter having also sinned, it passed into the Messiah” (Folio 152, column 2). Therefore the first Christians believed that Jesus was the reincarnation of Adam and David returned to earth to make atonement for his failure as Adam which plunged all humanity into the sentence of death through untold ages.
When it is said that Jesus “died for the sins of the world” we have to understand it in this perspective. He was paying a karmic debt, not dying as a blameless sacrifice in place of others so their sins would be freely and effortlessly forgiven as has been taught for centuries. And in doing so he became indeed a savior, a great siddha or master, truly an avatara, an incarnation of divine consciousness. This is his greatness; and to substitute the theological mythologies of exoteric Christianity regarding him is to deny and insult him. For the truth is always greater than fiction–even official religious fiction.
Read the next article in the Gospel of Thomas for Yogis: Blessed Homelessness