gospel of Thomas 2

Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."

Well, this little saying contains much, and will be rather perplexing to many people. The first sentence is simple enough: If you are seeking, carry on seeking until you find. Don't give up halfway. Just because the going gets a bit tough, there's no reason to stop. No. If you start this journey, see it through to the end. Very simple advice. And I agree with Jesus wholeheartedly.

And in fact, this advice is barely needed as advice. For those who start seeking, it becomes impossible to stop anyway. Even if they want to escape and go back to the old, unenlightened life, it's not possible. Once one has started on this path, one gets carried along, whether one likes it or not. So if you start seeking, then be prepared to continue for as long as it takes. And for most people, that is many years. Perhaps twenty years of seeking is the average. For most people, this is not over quickly. So you might as well know from the outset, it's a big undertaking. But in the end, the only undertaking worth undertaking is this seeking. So seek until you find.

But then Jesus says: When you find you'll become troubled. Well, that's rather strange. We set out thinking we're going to find something wonderful, something that brings us great peace and happiness. And here Jesus says, when you find it, you will be troubled.

And this is also my experience. When you become enlightened, you will be rather shocked. You might feel a bit fed up with it. You had all these ideas about enlightenment, and they were all wrong. They were just ideas. And when the ideas have dropped away, when the mind has given up living in that world of fantasy, when we are seeing things directly, living in the world directly, life becomes a simple matter.

But seeing reality, when we still have the memory of the fantasy of enlightenment, letting go of that fantasy – which is the final stage on the journey – letting go of that fantasy leaves us with a troubled mind. We are in shock. We might feel cheated, swindled. There may be all sorts of emotional reactions. And Jesus puts it very simply, we will feel troubled. Yes, it's true. We will feel troubled.

But he goes on to say. When we become troubled, we will then be astonished. And this is also true. These are like the last layers of emotional reaction to the transformation that is happening within us. The old has dropped away, and with it all our ideas of the future, all our ideas about enlightenment. All that has gone. And we are left rather empty, troubled.

And as we sit in that state of mind of feeling troubled, this great astonishment begins to come through. It is another layer of emotional reaction to liberation. We've been in chains, chains of our own making, for decades. Finally, those chains are broken. Of course we're troubled. What to do with this freedom? The cage door is open. But all we know is to live within the cage, pacing up and down, fretting. And now, we're standing at that doorway, looking out, looking out at the world. And it's a big place. A really big place.

So we feel troubled, and then we feel astonished. And as we sit in that astonishment, it's a shock, really. Such a shock to our being, that all this beauty has been here all along, and we have been blind to it. The astonishment is great.

And then something else comes. Beyond these emotional reactions, there is our essence itself. And in that essence, there is a peacefulness. A silence. A stillness. And the infinite unbounded spaciousness. All of that is there. You could say it is God within us. But that is not how it will feel. You will feel yourself to be all. You will feel yourself to be God.

And when Jesus says, we will reign over all, he does not mean we will control everything. He does not mean that I as an individual will become the boss. No. I have disappeared. And all that is left is the all. One is that ocean. There is nothing to be reigned over. And nothing to reign over us.

In that space, we have a power. But it is not a power over things. It is the simple power of living in truth. Of living in our essence, as God.