Do You Dare to Stand Near to Jesus – Near to the Fire?

We are continuing our exploration of the Gospel of Thomas with logion 82, where Jesus says: “She who is near to Me is near to the fire.”

He knew that what He discovered on behalf of the whole of humanity was a terrible fire, a fire of purifying, excruciating, glorious, tremendous love power. He knew that anybody who joined His path would have to go through enormous struggles and ordeals, because He Himself had been through these struggles and ordeals.

He also knew that anybody who fell in love with Him for His courage, His splendor or His truth-telling, would be burnt by that fire, because if they had the nobility to rise to the divine level of who He was, and that meant they were in for it. They were in for the most difficult and the most beautiful life, the most glorious and the most shattering life.

That’s why He spoke about the fire so nakedly.  He knew the fire that He was, and the fire that He is and the fire that He incarnates, is the evolutionary fire that creates the entire cosmos. It is the fire of divine passion. It is the fire of divine creativity, the fire of divine nobility and the fire of divine prophetic courage.

It is the fire of outrage! It is the fire of profound, wild bravery!

Jesus knew that anyone who was near to Him was near to that fire, and if they could stand it, if they were brave enough, they would be transmuted into gold by that fire, just as He had.  That is the fire that changes the human into the divine human.

You don’t become a divine human just by sitting on a cushion doing a few precious mantras while watching your breath, or doing wonderful yoga practices and breathing in the scent of jasmine from the garden. That’s just one side of it.

The other side is that you have to take your assumptions, your identity, your resources, and throw them into the fire of divine transformation and risk death or humiliation after humiliation, difficulty after difficulty, in order to finally become real and become a servant of that fire.

That is the authentic evolutionary shift that is required at this critical moment on this planet.  I invite you to ask yourself: how are the cherished mundane anchors of your life standing between you and the divine fire?

Jesus didn’t believe that He was the Son of God. Jesus knew that He had found a new evolutionary path and had birthed a new divine human in Himself.  He knew the rigors, horrors, terrors, ordeals, and possibilities of that path, just as He knew His name and the color of His hair, and the bones of His body, because He knew it. He knew it.

He also knew that history was going to give birth to this fire. This wasn’t just His own destiny, but the secret destiny of the human race itself.

Millions of years ago, a group of fish living in a toxic swamp started to understand that the swamp was poisonous. Most of them, of course, had conferences in which they discussed sending vibrations to the poison so that it would disappear, or watched The Secret and imagined that the swamp was a perfect garden – all that crazy horseshit which this culture has drugged itself with – but some of them understood that that swamp was utterly toxic and something had to be done.

So they leapt out of it and they struggled in a wholly new dimension.  Those fishes, over time, developed organs and wings and became birds. They evolved.

Jesus was the first fish to change into a bird. He knew that he was enacting the destiny of humanity. He knew that that fire would be guarded until it had to blaze in order to do its terrible transforming work.

My teacher, Father Bede Griffiths, at the end of his life, said, “I believe that the human race will go through a massive crucifixion on every level. All of its genders, all of its fake fantasies, all will be shredded. There will be madness, chaos and horror on unimaginable levels. But it will not be the end, because this dark night is the necessary crucible for the birth of the divine consciousness in those empty enough and brave enough to receive it.”

His words shifted my understanding of the Gospel of Thomas. We are going through this crucifixion process, this shattering, stripping, searing and burning process, which entails the smashing of all illusions, all the games and every false belief we have clung to, in order to be purified.  Only then can we rise in the golden fire of Christ consciousness, because finally people will be brave enough to go through the authentic transformation and stop playing patty cake with God. They will start realizing that without that fire, we are all doomed to near, if not total, extinction.

You cannot toy with evolution in the way we are playing with it. The Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered in 1945. Do you think their revelation was a coincidence? Do you think the synchronicity of them appearing at the same time as Hiroshima is a coincidence? Do you think it’s just something wonderful that they dropped the atom bomb and they found The Gospel of Thomas? Are you out of your mind? They came together, as a revelation of what evolution would look like if we don’t enter into the real divine evolution. Since then, humanity has been in a desperate race to escape the madness that was unleashed by the Pandora’s Box of nuclear power.

In logion 10, Jesus says “I have cast fire upon the world and here I am guarding it until it blazes.” Well, kids, it’s blazing now.  What is being done about the death of the honey bees?  Look at Fukushima.  Look at how few people are willing to get real about how the Pacific Ocean and every life form in it has become radioactive.  Who is addressing the impact of this crisis upon all sentient beings and every species on the planet?

The Buddha said the world is burning in the fires of ignorance, greed, and craving. 2500 years ago, that was a psychological statement about human consciousness.  Look around now and you’ll see that the planet is literally burning in the fires of greed, ignorance and craving. If you and I do not go through the fire of evolutionary transformation to be made brave enough, wild enough, clear and humble enough to take a strong prophetic stand, then you and I will go down – not that there will be anybody to record us – as the undertakers of this doomed civilization.

The time is now!

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