Are You Prepared for the Shattering Risk of Finding the Divine – in Yourself?

Over the next seven posts, I will introduce selected logions from the Gospel of Thomas, so we can begin to understand their meanings on a deep soul level. You will realize that what’s being given to you in this astonishing Gospel, this amazing divine revelation of the inmost processes of transfiguration, is something that speaks to you in your own deepest journey, from the depths of yourself. This information is given by someone who lives in that depth, because that person has become one with the divine human and thereby one with our evolutionary destiny.

Starting with Logion 2: “Let him who seeks, not cease seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be troubled, and when he has been troubled, he will marvel and he will reign over the All.”That is the entire path of divinization, condensed into four lines. As you live this path, every single word will reveal amazing truths and secrets, because Jesus is grabbing the entire human race by the scruff of the neck and saying, “I’m not interested in you just seeking comfortably in order to have a few divine experiences. That’s just bourgeois stupor. What I want is that you seek so intensely, so passionately, that you actually risk finding. That you actually risk discovering what all the mystics of all the traditions know and are begging us to understand: that the Divine lives in you as your essential nature and consciousness.

“The reason why you don’t really want to discover that, and you want to go on seeking, going on this pilgrimage, reading this book and coming to that conference, is because when you start to discover that the Divine is living in you, as you, you are going to be freaked out.”

That’s what Jesus says, because He is the supreme realist. Anybody who is doing this work has to be completely realistic. Jesus says: “When he finds, he will be troubled.” He will be deeply, deeply troubled.

There are three reasons why we are all deeply troubled when we find. The first reason is because when you discover the beauty and splendor of what lives in you as the Divine, your own nature, your own character suddenly seems so poor, so threadbare and so cowardly beside the splendor that you’re just beginning to understand. You face increasingly the dereliction and the self-betrayal of your false ego.

That is a ghastly experience and it’s meant to be, because if you don’t face it, you’re going to be trapped in it and trapped in this imprisoned splendor for the rest of your life.

The second reason why it’s troubling is that the more you come into contact with the divine splendor,  fearlessness, beauty and power that is your innate divine nature, you fall that much more helplessly in love with the divine Love that is streaming into you. The more you submit to whatever you have to go through to become more like that Love, which might be humiliation after humiliation, denunciation after denunciation, or ordeal after ordeal, at the end of a certain moment comes the stripping away of everything that lives as your false ego, so that you can eventually abide in the greatness of the Divine.

So that is troubling, because when you fall in love with that fire, you fall in love with The Fire. You realize that there will come a day when you will be burnt to ashes by that Fire, if you love enough. That will turn you into a crazy person who, despite the respectable suit, is walking around begging people to  understand the glory of Jesus’ teachings.  So – watch out!

The third reason why you will be troubled is the real reason why so many people keep safe with that little rule, that little prayer, that little meditation, their occasional check to the Sierra Club, their tidy little mysticism. The third reason why it will trouble you is because you will know that by connecting with this divine nature, you are also connecting with divine responsibilities. Jesus suffered and burned and gave everything to try to wake people up, in order to prepare us for the age in which we are now living, where everything is at stake. In an age like this, when you wake up to your divine nature, you wake up to the divine nature of everyone and everything and you wake up to the nightmare of what is going on.

You wake up to your absolutely inescapable responsibility to do something about it. You have nowhere to hide.

You think this path is a sweet path? This path is a glorious path, but it is a path that will burn down all your hiding places. So stick to the New Age if you want a comfortable life, and stick to meditating on more McMansions and Mercedes Benzes and being thin and appearing on Oprah. That’s the corporatized spirituality that belongs to this decadent time, but it has nothing to do with the transfiguration process of the great evolutionary revolutionary that is Jesus.

“When he has been troubled” – when you have been deeply, deeply troubled, when you have begun to dive into the beauty and splendor of yourself, your true self, and really, really risked your life to take up the responsibilities of enacting the truth of that self, then the great revelations will come to you of the holiness and beauty and power of that true self.

You will be amazed, because at that moment you will be astonished by the vastness of your true identity, and the splendor, the fearlessness and the courage that belong to it. You will find your own Jesus rising like a fire in you, with many of the same sacred powers, because Jesus never claimed to be the unique one. What He claimed to find was this path and He wanted to give it to everybody.

This is what He is doing in the Gospel of Thomas.

You will be amazed “and you will reign over the All.” You will come to a state of such nakedness and vulnerability,  authenticity, power and clear groundedness in your divine nature that you will be able to reign over the All. The waves will obey you. Sickness will obey you. The dead will rise to you, because you are Life and a part of God incarnate and that power will radiate from you.

Why is this important, do you think, at a time like this?  You and I haven’t got a hope of achieving anything real in this crisis. Look how little we’re actually doing. Look how halfhearted and comatose our actions actually are. Look how afraid we are, look how in denial we are. Look how petty we are, look how slavish we are to our system of corruption and comfort.  Look at us!

But if we go on a true divinization process and risk the burning, the shattering and the remaking, who knows what we could be capable of?

We’ve got to go through this process! Because if we don’t, we’re going to be stuffing popcorn into our mouths and debating the pros and cons of global warming when the last tree burns down!

That’s why it’s important, my friends. That’s why fools like myself spend their lives on this. Because we’ve known the human race has come to a place where, if it doesn’t go through a massive divinization process, and get to a wholly new level of empowerment and fearlessness, it hasn’t got a hope in hell of getting through this! Not a hope in hell.

Let me just ask you one question. It’s 2013. What have we done about the environment? Nothing!

Because we’re so scared, so weak and so paralyzed.  We’re so polluted by false mysticism and so few of us have any authentic divine experience, because if we did, we would be burning with sacred outrage and pouring our lives out in sacred action.

And we’re not. But we can be. I hope.

Until my next post, I invite you to ask yourself: what are you truly seeking in your quest for the Divine and what are you prepared to risk finding?

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