Jesus said, Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world. (56)
This is extremely clear. The only question is whether the reader will believe it or not and to what degree.
The principle is also clear: Spirit is life, is all; and that which is not spirit is dead, is nothing. The world, being an expression of Spirit must in actuality be alive, but if the individual person is unaware of Spirit as the source and essence of the world, then for him the world is dead–worse, it is deadly. In the motion picture Little Big Man, the old chief says to his adopted grandson played by Dustin Hoffman: “The white man believes that the world is dead, and after a while he believes that he is dead.” A materialistic view of the world breeds a materialistic, soulless view of oneself and of others. This is the horror of Marxist Dialectical Materialism as we saw lived out in the Soviet Union for so long.
But there is a practical aspect to this. We have to “ensoul” the world by awakening our own spirit consciousness. When we do that we will see that it is overflowing with life–divine life–that for the awakened person experience of the world is experience, even a revelation, of the spirit. But for the unawake it remains dead and purposeless.
When we understand that the world of itself is nothing, that it is an expression of divinity, and therefore at the same time everything, then we have risen above corpse consciousness into God consciousness. Infinity is ours.
Read the next article in the Gospel of Thomas for Yogis: Wheat and Weeds