Knowledge of the heart: Pagels excerpt #6

Pagels writes in Why Religion? “The Gospel of Truth, then, is all about relationships—how, when we come to know ourselves, simultaneously we come to know God. Implicit in this relationship is the paradox of gnosis—not intellectual knowledge, but knowledge of the heart. What first we must come to know is that we cannot fully know God, since that Source far transcends our understanding. But what we can know is that we’re intimately connected with that divine Source, since ‘in him we live and move and have our being.’

 

“. . . this is myth as Plato told it: imagination revealing the deeper truths of human experience. So, the speak concludes, ‘If, indeed, these things have happened to each one of us,’ then we can see that this mythical story has real consequences.

 

“On the other hand, when we recognize how connected we are with one another and with ‘all beings,’ this author says, we may ‘say from the heart that you are the perfect day; in you dwells the light that does not fail.’ And recognizing this, in turn, impels us to act in ways that acknowledge those connections:

“Speak the truth with those who search for it . .  support those who have stumbled, and extend your hands to those who are ill. Feed those who are hungry; give rest to the weary . . . strengthen those who wish to rise; and awaken those who are asleep.

 

“Is this really Paul’s secret teaching? We can’t know for sure. As we’ve seen, some scholars agree that the renowned Egyptian teacher Valentinus wrote this gospel, since its language resonates with a famous poem that he wrote, and with the few fragments of his teaching that survive. Did the author receive Paul’s secret teaching orally, handed down in succession from a disciple named Theudas, who received it from Paul? Maybe so, since that’s what Valentinian tradition claims; alternatively, its author may have drawn on Paul’s letters to write it himself.

 

“I’ve come to love this poetic and moving story for the way it reframes the gospel narrative. Instead of seeing suffering as punishment, or somehow as ‘good for you,’ this author sees it rather as Buddhists do, as an essential element of human existence, yet one that may have the potential to break us open out of who we are. My own experience of the ‘nightmare’—the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified—has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores equanimity, even joy.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (pp. 203). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The mystery of Christ in you: Pagels excerpt #5

Pagels writes in Why Religion? “When the author of the Gospel of Truth sets out to reveal Paul’s secret teaching, he begins by asking, What happened before the beginning of time? In answer, he offers a primordial drama of creation, telling how, when ‘all beings’ began to search for the One from whom they came forth, they couldn’t find him. Feeling abandoned, not knowing where they came from, they suffered anguish and terror, like children wandering in the dark, searching in vain for their lost parents. As this gospel tells it, what separates all beings, including ourselves, from God is not sin. Instead, what frustrates our longing to know our source is its transcendence, and our own limited capacity for understanding. Yet when these beings—or when we—realize that we can’t find our way home, don’t know where we came from, or how we got here, we feel utterly lost. Overwhelmed by grief and fear, we may rush into paths that lead nowhere, more lost than ever, imagining that there’s nothing beyond the confusion we see in the world around us.

“At this point, the Gospel of Truth turns toward a drama of cosmic redemption. When the Father sees his children terrified and suffering, ensnared by negative energies, he sends his Son, ‘the hidden mystery, Jesus the Christ,’ to show them a path and bring them back ‘into the Father, into the Mother, Jesus of the infinite sweetness.’ And although, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, ignorant and violent ‘rulers of this world’ tortured and crucified Jesus, the Father overturned their conspiracy, transforming even their hideous crime into a means of grace.

“To show this, the Gospel of Truth reframes the vision of the cross from an instrument of torture into a new tree of knowledge. Here Jesus’s battered body, ‘nailed to a tree,’ is seen as fruit on a tree of ‘knowing the Father,’ which unlike that tree in Paradise, doesn’t bring death, but life, to those who eat from it. Thus, the author suggests that those who participate in the Eucharist, eating the bread and drinking the wine that, symbolically speaking, are Jesus’s flesh and blood, ‘discover him in themselves’ while he ‘discovers themselves in him.’

“After years of contending with familiar Jewish and Christian sources, I found here a vision that goes beyond what Paul calls ‘the message of the cross.’ Instead of seeing suffering as punishment, this gospel suggests that, seen through the eyes of wisdom, suffering can show how we’re connected with each other, and with God; what Paul’s letter to the Colossians calls ‘the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory. No wonder, then, that Christians called their sacred meal a mystery (mysterion), a Greek term later translated as ‘sacrament’ (from Latin sacramentum).”

“The author of the Gospel of Truth rejects images of God as a harsh, divine judge who sent Jesus into the world ‘to die for our sins.’ Instead, he suggests, the loving and compassionate Rather sent Jesus to find those who were lost, and to bring them back home. So rather than see the writing on the cross as any death sentence—whether Pilate’s or God’s—this author suggests instead that Jesus published there ‘the living book of the living,’ a book ‘written in our heart’ that teaches us who we really are, since it includes the names of everyone who belongs to God’s family.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (pp. 200-201). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Primordial, life-giving energy: Pagels excerpt #4

Pagels writes in Why Religion? “Whoever wrote the poem called Thunder, Complete Mind apparently drew on that opening line of Genesis, as well as on the poem in Proverbs, as did another anonymous writer whose poem was found at Nag Hammadi, who also gave a feminine voice to the primordial, life-giving energy that brings forth all things:

I am the thought that lives in the light.

I live in everyone, and I delve into them all . . .

I move in every creature. . . .

I am the invisible one in all beings . . .

I am a voice speaking softly . . .

I am the real voice . . . the voice from the invisible thought . . .

It is a mystery . . . I cry out in everyone . . .

I hid myself in everyone, and revealed myself within them, and every mind seeking me longs for me . . .

I am she who gradually brought forth everything . . .

I am the image of the invisible spirit . . .

The mother, the light . . . the virgin . . . the womb, and the voice . . .

I put breath within all beings.

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (p. 199). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Secret teachings: Pagels excerpt #3

Pagels notes that Bishop Irenaeus, engaged in missionary work in Gaul in 160-180, “insists  that Jesus and Paul never offered secret teachings.” Yet, she writes, “Mark’s gospel says that Jesus, like other rabbis of his time, spoke a simple message in public, but explained its meaning only to his closest disciples when he was alone with them, saying, ‘the secret of the kingdom of God is given to you—but to those outside, everything is in parables,” so that “they may listen, but not understand’—although Mark tells nearly nothing of what he taught in private.

 

Furthermore, while researching the Gospel of Truth found at Nag Hammadi, Pagels “discovered a different Paul—and a different message. Its anonymous author, most likely Valentinus, the Egyptian poet and visionary, who admires Paul, sees the apostle as teacher of secret wisdom whose vision of grace includes everyone.

And writing to the church in Corinth, Paul adds that while teaching the simple gospel, he also shares with some a secret wisdom: “We do teach wisdom among people who are mature—not the wisdom of this world, nor of the rulers of this age. Rather, we speak the wisdom of God hidden in mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory—which none of the rulers of this age knew—for, had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” Pagels asserts: “I was intrigued to see that here, in his own words, Paul hints at a different version of the gospel—not that God ‘sent his own son to die’ as a human sacrifice, but that ignorant and violent people, or the spiritual powers that energized them, had killed Jesus.”

“Fascinated,” Pagels continues, “I realized that the anonymous author of the Gospel of Truth writes to answer that question, and to reveal that secret wisdom—or, at least, his version of it. He begins with the words ‘The true gospel is joy, to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him!’ Plunging into that mystery, he says that the true gospel, unlike the simple message, doesn’t begin in human history. Instead, it begins before this world was created.

“What happened, then, not just ‘in the beginning,’ but before the beginning, in primordial time—and how would we know? To answer this question, the Gospel of Truth offers a poetic myth. For around the time this author was writing, some devout Jews, and some non-Jews as well, loved to speculate on questions about what God was doing before he created the world. Often they looked for hidden meaning in poetic passages of the Hebrew Bible, like that opening line from Genesis, which tells how ‘a wind (or spirit, ruah) from God moved over chaotic deep waters.’

“What was there, then? Others claimed to find hints of what happened in a famous poem in the biblical Book of Proverbs, in which divine wisdom (hohkmah), identified with God’s spirit (ruah), tells how she worked with God to create the world. Since both ‘spirit’ and ‘wisdom’ are feminine terms in Hebrew, she speaks as the Lord’s feminine companion, or perhaps as his beloved daughter, who participated with him in creating the world, when first she swept over the deep ocean waters:

“When he marked out the foundations of the earth, I was there beside him, like a little child, delighting him daily, always rejoicing before him, and rejoicing in his world full of people, delighting in the human race.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (p. 197-198). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Children of God: Pagels excerpt #2

Pagels writes in Why Religion? unlike the Gospel of Mark, which pictures Jesus announcing that ‘the kingdom of God is coming soon,’ as a catastrophic event, the end of the world, the Gospel of Thomas suggests that he was speaking in metaphor:

“Jesus says: If those who lead you say to you, ‘The kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds will get there first. If they say, ‘It is in the sea, then the fish will get there first. Rather, the kingdom of God is within you, and outside of you. When you come to know yourselves then . . . you will know that you are the children of God.

“Here, with some irony, Jesus reveals that the kingdom of God is not an actual place in the sky—or anywhere else—or an event expected in human time. Instead, it’s a state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are and come to know God as the source of our being. In Thomas, then, the “good news” is not only about Jesus; it’s also about every one of us. For while we ordinarily identify ourselves by specifying how we differ, in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, background, family name, this saying suggests that recognizing that we are ‘children of God’ requires us to recognize how we are the same—members, so to speak, of the same family.

“These sayings suggest what later becomes a primary theme of Jewish mystical tradition: that the ‘image of God,’ divine light given in creation, is hidden deep within each one of us, linking our fragile, limited selves to their divine source. Although we’re often unaware of that spiritual potential, the Thomas sayings urge us to keep on seeking until we find it: ‘Within a person of light, there is light. If illuminated, it lights up the whole world; if not, everything is dark.’

“Emerging from a time of unbearable grief, I felt that such sayings offered a glimpse of what I’d sensed in my vision of a net. They helped dispel isolation and turn me from despair, suggesting that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God.”

What we’re looking for may not be anything supernatural, as we usually understand what we call ‘spiritual.’ Instead, as one saying in Thomas suggests, we may find what we’re seeking right where we are: ‘Jesus says: “Recognize what is before your eyes, and the mysteries will be revealed to you.”

Like Emily Dickinson’s poems, such sayings remain opaque as stone to anyone who has not experienced anything like what they describe; but those who have find that they open secret doors within us. And because they do, what each person finds there may be—must be—different. Each time we read them, the words may weave like music into a particular situation, evoking new insight. Some secret texts calm and still us, as when listening in meditation; others abound in metaphor, flights of imagination, soaring and diving.”

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (p. 176-178). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Sensing a presence after death: Pagels excerpt #1

Elaine Pagels, History of Religion professor at Princeton since 1982, is best known for her research and books about what are generally identified as the Gnostic Gospels. Her book with this title published in 1989 received both the National Book and National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Her 2018 book, Why Religion? A Personal Story, reveals her struggle for a religious faith, after the deaths of her son Mark, who died in 1987 from pulmonary hypertension at age six, and her husband Heinz, who a year later fell from a cliff while hiking.

Her son’s death devastated both Elaine and Heinz. “We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. I was moved by what another bereaved mother, Maria of Paris, a Russian Christian whom Orthodox Christians revere as a saint, wrote after her six-year-old daughter died; she felt her ‘whole natural life . . . shaken . . . disintegrated; desires have gone . . . meaning has lost its meaning.’

“But instead of sinking into passivity, she risked her life to save the lives of other people’s children during the Nazi occupation. When German soldiers forced Jews into a central square of Paris before shoving them into trains hurtling toward the death camps, Maria slipped into the square to join them. There, whispering hastily, she persuaded several parents to allow her to hide their children in garbage bins, and so to save their lives, which she did, finding families to care for each one of them. Later, when she and her own son were arrested by Nazi soldiers and sent to the death camps, she exchanged places with someone targeted for the gas chambers, serene in the conviction that she’d done what her faith required, choosing to enable others to live. Many other parents whose children have been killed by gun violence, war, drunk drivers, or disease also choose to create meaning by working to spare other people unfathomable losses like their own.”

The death of her son and husband led Pagels to seriously consider if she could believe in a life after death. She writes: “Questions kept recurring: Where do they go? How can someone so intensely alive suddenly be gone? What happens? Where are they? Somewhere, or nowhere? Flashes of insight would vanish, like water falling through my fingers, leaving only hints, guesses—and hopes. On the day Mark died, I’d been astonished to have the clear impression that after he initially departed from his failing body, he’d been invisibly present with us in a room down the hall, then had returned to his body when his heart started beating again, only to stop when his heart and lungs failed to circulate oxygen. Moments later, back in the room where his lifeless body lay, I felt that somehow I’d seen precisely where he had ascended to the ceiling in a swirl of silver energy and departed. And what had happened three days after Heinz died, when he’d seemed to answer my unspoken question? Both experiences were completely contrary to what I expected, yet both felt vividly real—neither, as I’d been taught to believe, simply illusions, or instinctive denial of death’s finality.

“More than six months after Heinz died, another surprise. I opened the top drawer of my bureau, looking for the comic picture of Superman emblazoned on a cover of Time magazine, titled ‘Superman at Fifty!,’ which I’d hidden there a year earlier to use on the invitations for the party I’d secretly planned for his fiftieth birthday. He never made it to fifty, though; that would have happened this February. Next to that picture, I’d placed the watch and belt that mountain rescue volunteers recovered from his body in July. Turning over his watch, I was astonished—not that it had stopped, but that it hadn’t stopped soon after he died. Instead, the watch’s timer showed that it had stopped one day before I was looking at it, on February 19—on the day that would have been his fiftieth birthday.

“Could this be coincidence? Of course, it could; I cannot draw any clear inferences from such incidents, although they’d shaken what once I’d taken for granted: the rationalism of those who insist that death is nothing but disintegration. As one anthropologist observes, when we confront the unknown, any interpretation is provisional, necessarily incomplete. Still, those experiences left with me the sense that when I come near death, I’ll likely be hoping to see the two of them, as the song says, welcoming me to join them ‘across the shining river.’ At other times, though, I expect nothing more than a blank sky.”

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion?  (p. 104, 137-138). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Living light/love stories matters: Cook excerpt #26

Nick Cook writes: To conclude, I need to return to where we began: to ‘A Matter Of Life and Death’.

In my consulting work, I use the power of story to help deliver strategy and reach target markets and, one way or another, usually end up citing the work of Joseph Campbell, an American professor of comparative religion and mythology who came up with the concept of ‘monomyth’: his theory that the great stories of the world are descended from a single ‘origin story’ conceived at humanity’s awakening. In his seminal book, ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’⁷⁴, published in 1949, he broke the monomyth down into its constituent parts via a model he called ‘The Hero’s Journey’.

Almost all the stories we love – particularly of the epic kind – follow the journey’s twelve waypoints, which starts with an ordinary person getting a ‘call to adventure’; his or her reluctance being assuaged by a wiser, older mentor; a series of trials that culminate in our hero acquiring a prize, or ‘boon’; the boon’s return to the ‘ordinary world’ and it then acting in such a way that the ordinary world is forever changed.

The Lord Of The Rings, The Matrix and Star Wars are all testaments to the power of monomyth – George Lucas, indeed, consulted Campbell on the original Star Wars script.

We resonate with these stories, because the characters in them – from the hero and the heroine to the fool and the arch-villain – are all archetypes: facets of our own psyches.

Expressed another way, the challenges faced by these heroes are mythic representations of the trials each of us faces and undergoes in life.

On a recent assignment with a ‘top ten’ consulting organization to deliver themes that its senior partners believed would be critical to business success in the coming decade, one of the biggest themes to emerge during our discussions was ‘purpose’. Unless companies developed a culture that engendered purpose, we were informed, 60 per cent of Millennials would walk out the door to seek alternative employment with an employer that more genuinely shared their values. Sixty-eight per cent of employees, we were also told, believed businesses didn’t do enough to instil a sense of ‘meaningful purpose’ in their culture. To develop this culture, they needed to be vulnerable, confessional, own up to past mistakes and show the next generation of talent that they were serious about recruiting and retaining them. Businesses that succeeded going forward, these consulting gurus all agreed, would need to ‘do good’ in addition to ‘doing well’. And if they didn’t – i.e. they merely paid lip-service to that ambition - heaven help them: there were any number of ‘hashtag movements’ out there to ensure that they got their name in lights - and for all the wrong reasons.

Being ‘authentic’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘purposeful’ – and, most importantly, ‘human’ - in the era of artificial intelligence and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are terms that are increasingly becoming hardwired into the playbooks of organisations and multinationals seeking to survive and thrive in the 2020s.

Alongside this, however, the world has never been more anxious.

According to the World Health Organization, one in four of us will experience a mental health problem at some point in our lives. Around 450 million people currently suffer from a mental health condition, placing mental disorders amongst the leading causes of ill-health and disability worldwide. In the US, according to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 43.6 million Americans – more than 18 per cent of the population over 18 years of age – suffer from mental illness in any given year; almost ten million – 4.2 per cent of the adult population – will suffer from a seriously debilitating mental illness. Elsewhere, the stats are no better. Phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as general anxiety and depression are the order of the day for large swaths of the population⁷⁵.

And this was before Coronavirus. Emerging from the pandemic, we still have any number of potentially cataclysmic events to look forward to, most of them of our own making.

Thanks to exponential advances in technology and medicine, every day brings news of what we’re able to do to change our physical bodies – either so we can adapt to an increasingly hostile world, or so we can live longer and/or smarter; or merely to make us look better. This is the transhumanist route many see as humanity’s future. What it ignores, however, is the part of us we have discussed in these pages; the part that plugs us into the sea of connection and information that is our real world - integrating the part we’ve ignored for too long; the part we don’t see in the mirror.

As ‘stories in physical form’, to quote Suzanne Giesemann, we have the power at any given moment to decide what our stories are going to be – and, if we want to, in this moment or any other, to change them. We can also look back and see that what we’ve achieved to get to where we are – no matter what those achievements are - harbours all the elements of the mythic stories Joseph Campbell tells us are the interplay of our archetypes as we struggle to understand who we are and why we’re here.

The testimony of our witnesses, along with a growing body of scientific evidence that consciousness is primary, ought to tell us that every life on the planet is part of an interconnected story that matters – and that these stories – our stories – imprint forever in the fabric of existence. This, I believe, is a far better narrative than the transhumanist one and, at a subliminal level, is one that it is hardwired into us all; the proof of it being held in the stories we resonate with that tell us this is so - including those that come to us from the great religions.

At the end of A Matter Of Life And Death, Peter, of course, triumphs before the court, because, whilst the law of the universe is ‘immutable’, nothing, the court is told, is stronger than love.

In amongst all the pieces of remarkable testimony given by our expert witnesses here, we have been confronted with actual, physical evidence that this may indeed be so.

For, in the ‘giving and receiving of light’ – a light that is shared in the moment of physical death via a connection that appears to be based on an unbreakable bond between the essence of two or more people – we are offered clues to a form of entanglement, a foundational pillar of quantum mechanics, that may prove to be the true substrate of existence.

That this light appears only to people who have this bond is not at odds with the view that it is also a symbolic message from the universe – a message that ‘life goes on’.

The screen that we experience as reality is ‘one mind’, Suzanne Giesemann tells us, but it also arises as individual minds. For these two statements to square with one another we and the screen - the ‘one mind’ - have to be that same limitless intelligence.

Why would an intelligent, sentient, self-aware, loving universe put itself through all the trials and tribulations of life as we experience it, with its suffering and its beauty and everything in between?

The answer, perhaps, is that it is the only way it has of experiencing itself.

And, thus, maybe, when you strip away all the science, this is why existence ‘is’: so that it can know itself, learn and evolve.

As well as being a measurable communication from the universe, the light, I believe, is a sign of the hope that is given to us all.

74 The Hero With A thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, Princeton University Press, 1949.
75 https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/mental-health-and-mental-disorders#4

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.