RSS
Home
Gnostic Sermonette: The Gospel of Thomas #18
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?" Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is. Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."
The Gospel of Thomas, Saying #18
This scripture captures one of the main cores of the Gnostic spirit. Western religions, specifically Christianity and Islam, are concerned primarily with the afterlife or the end-times. Eastern religions, Buddhism for example, are concerned with living in the present moment. The Gnostics decided that the key to finding spiritual liberation lay in returning to the past and finding out what went wrong. The ancient heretics were not satisfied with the stories of the Garden of Eden or God’s six day assembly project.
Through philosophical contemplation and mystical insights, the Gnostics discovered a hidden story before Creation. They discovered the Pleroma, a primordial realm above Heaven. They discovered Aeons, supreme entities that encompassed the Divine Mind. And they discovered a cosmic cataclysm before time and space came into being.
The cosmic cataclysm is usually blamed on an Aeon named Sophia (Greek for wisdom). She committed a mistake and was cast out of the Pleroma. Her mistake was making herself pregnant without the consent of the Divine Mind. In a place called Chaos, she gave birth to an inferior being commonly referred to as Jehovah. Her son rebelled against Sophia and stole her power. He then created the universe with all its laws.
The Gnostics understood that salvation lay in restoring Sophia to the Pleroma by giving back her power stolen by God. How they went about it varied, but it included a process called Gnosis: mystic knowledge that facilitates direct experience with the Divine Mind. The Gnostics regarded Jesus as a manifestation of the Divine Mind and not the son of Jehovah.
On personal level, their revelations teach that when an individual loses wisdom because of egoic behavior, they will find themselves in a flawed reality of their own making. Humans commit great harm to one another because of their reliance on too much reason and not enough wisdom. We live in an age where knowledge is more abundant and available than ever, yet humanity remains on the brink of self-destruction.
As Gnostics and Spiritual Heretics, we must elevate Sophia in all of her aspects. The Gnostic attitude is that the path of ascent is the same as the path of descent. Jesus urges us to return and face our childhood traumas, moments of poor choices and harsh events that crippled our youthful dreams. By dealing with our internal cosmic cataclysms, we can truly begin our journey to a future of spiritual freedom. We will stand at both the end and at the beginning, in a place of wholeness known as the Divine Mind.
Related Articles:
Comments
