Secret taught by living Jesus: If you know yourself then you know the Kingdom

[Guest guest]

shriadishakti , " jagbir singh "

<adishakti_org> wrote:

>

> On December 9, 1996, at 5:45 a.m. Kash was again asked about his

> previously mistaken `out-of-body' belief. He still insisted

> that it is impossible to believe that one is within the body —

> even after being enlightened by the Great Adi Shakti that

> everything is within the Sahasrara!

>

> In other words, despite his misconception being corrected by the

> Great Supreme Spirit, he still could not feel or remember this fact

> whenever he entered his own Thousand-Petal Lotus. He still thought

> he left his body and went out into the Universe to the place humans

> call the Kingdom of God. According to Kash, it is impossible for

> one to know that they are in their own Sahasraras. It is impossible

> to feel the Kingdom of God within the human body.

>

> It is just impossible to comprehend, while being within the

> Sahasrara, that this gross physical world exists outside! In

> other words, on Earth it is impossible to comprehend the subtle

> spiritual Sahasrara within. It is just as difficult within the

> Sahasrara to comprehend that this gross physical Earth exists

> without.

>

> On October 9, 1997, at 19.00 p.m. he was asked if the Spiritual

> World was as real as this Earth, i.e., was it as tangible as

> watching television, talking with his family and all the normal

> activities that makes physical life so conscious and real. He

> replied that not only is the Kingdom of God really real, just as

> this physical world, but also " better, quieter and more peaceful. "

>

 

 

 

" One of these documents [found at Nag Hammadi] begins with the

scribal note in the margin, " The Gospel According to Thomas. " And the

first sentence of that document says, " These are the secret words

which the living Jesus taught and which Judas Thomas Didymos wrote

down. " And then they start a total of over 110 sayings, each

introduced by " Jesus said.... " . . .

 

Now what is typical about these sayings is that in each instance,

these sayings want to say that if you want to understand what Jesus

said, you have to recognize yourself. You have to know yourself, know

who you are. It begins with a saying about the Kingdom of God, " if

you seek the Kingdom of God in the sky then the birds will precede

you. And if you seek it in the sea, then the fish will precede you,

but the Kingdom is in you. And if you know yourself then you know the

Kingdom of God. " (The Kingdom of the Father, in fact, it always says

in the gospel of Thomas. Normally the Kingdom of the Father, not the

Kingdom of God.) " But if you don't know yourself, you live in

poverty. " And poverty is understood as the ignorance of a life in its

physical existence. Knowledge is understood to be the knowledge of

one's divine origin, of the fact that one has come from the Kingdom.

That we are on this earth only in a sojourn....

 

What does it mean really to know oneself? To know oneself is to have

insight into one's own ultimate divine identity. You can go back to

understand this to Greek models, which certainly exist. " Know

yourself " is a very old Greek maxim... that is, you have to know that

your own soul is divine, and then you know that you are immortal,

whereas the body is the mortal part of human existence. Now this is

radicalized in the Gospel of Thomas into saying that everything that

is experienced physically and through sense perception, everything in

this world that you can perceive in this way is nothing. It is, at

best, chaos and, at worst, it doesn't even exist in reality. The only

thing that really exists is your divine spirit or your divine soul,

which is identical in its quality with God himself. And Jesus is the

one who teaches that....

 

When one truly knows oneself, one understands that one is divine, but

also one understands that one is mortal. In such a way, you recognize

that this mortality is really meaningless, as physical existence is

meaningless. And therefore, death is no longer a problem, but death

is a solution, because in death finally all this mortality will fall

away, and the true self will be liberated to an independent existence

that's no longer dependent on physical existence. And on everything

that goes with physical existence, sickness and poverty and so on.

And so physical existence is often described as poverty. But when you

know yourself you are no longer in poverty. "

                              

Helmut Koester, PBS and WGBH/FRONTLINE, 1998

(Helmut Koester: John H. Morison Professor of New Testament Studies

and Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History Harvard Divinity School)