From the moment I heard the story, my intrigue was overflowing. It happened at Nag Hammadi. An Arab villager, and his two brothers, traveling by camel, left their village and went to a nearby cliff that was riddled with caves. Their purpose was to dig for fertilizer, in the form of bird droppings, that they regularly used to fertilize their crops. In antiquity, these same caves were used as a burial space. On this fateful day, a much more profound event unfolded than the mere gathering of fertilizer. While digging, Mohammed Ali struck something that caught his attention. Continuing to dig, he soon uncovered a six- foot jar that was sealed. Inside, there were 13 volumes of text bound in tooled gazelle leather. Little did he know he had discovered some of the most precious texts of the 20th century; the Gnostic gospels.
One of these texts is known as the Gospel of Thomas. In it, there is a verse that I wish to share as an introduction to this blog post. Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” I interpret this as follows. As we look within ourselves, we all have a choice to make. We can make a connection with our divinity, our source, and become awakened. Or, we can fail to do this, in turn cutting ourselves off from this divinity, and suffer as a result of never coming to understand this connection.
This corresponds nicely with an experience I had at the conclusion my journey across Spain in 2012, the Camino de Santiago. At the conclusion of this sacred pilgrimage, which has been done for over one thousand years, I sat quietly one night in a monastery that had been converted to a hotel. While seated on the edge of a non-descript bed in a tiny non-descript room, I posed a singular question in my mind. What was it I was to have learned from the journey I had just completed? Being in a monastery, I decided to consult a Bible. Randomly opening it, I closed my eyes and simply pointed to a verse on the page and then re-opened my eyes. Trusting this process, here is the verse that was directly beneath my fingertip. “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, the kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within.”
In that moment, as in this one sitting at my desk typing this blog post, I knew on a deep level what this meant. All too often, we look for our answers externally, waiting for someone else to provide us with the solution, answer, or key. What I have learned in my own personal journey is, more often than not, this is a belief and practice that does not provide us with the answers we truly need. I believe those come from within, and this is where the real power resides. You see our soul is connected to divinity, our source, and knows why we came here and what we need to learn. The problem of course being, we get lost somewhere along the road. A detour over here, one over there, and before you know it, its hard to figure out why we are really here. The bread crumbs if you will, that can lead us back to the correct route, lie within.
In my September 12, 2018 blog post entitled, “Where Do Callings Come From?”, I referenced a book from James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, in which he proposes his theory of the acorn. Hillman credits Plato with this theory. At the end of his well-known work, The Republic, Plato in his Myth of Er, proposes the following… in Hillman’s words,
“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live here on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny”
For me, this daimon is the power within. It is the “souls code”. In conclusion, I wish to share another excerpt from Hillman's book. “The daimon’s “reminders” work in many ways. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life—and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.” And so, it is this power within, that we must bring forth as the unknown author of the Book of Thomas suggests. It is in doing so that we save ourselves, and we discover who we really are.
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