Saturday, June 22, 2019
1:20 p.m. Bored. Maybe forget taking a day off. Thomas, Saying 51.
His disciples asked him: When will the dead rest? When will the new world arrive? He replied: That which you are waiting for has come, but you don’t recognize it.
Seems obvious to me.
Perhaps say a little of what is obvious to you.
Well, if Jesus is talking about the kingdom being an internal state, it isn’t any “future” state of being.
What does it mean, then, “When will the dead rest”?
Perhaps I haven’t looked closely enough. Don’t the dead rest when they remember what they truly are, having dropped the 3D body? Where does the concept of rest come in?
Meaning, where does the concept of lack of rest come in, by contrast? Go back one Saying.
Saying 50 says who we really are, the disciples having presumably learned that much.
Movement. Rest.
Yes, I see. Hmm. I guess you will have to tell us. I can’t.
Try nonetheless.
Movement could be movement from the 3D into the fullness of creation, I suppose. Rest could be knowing where they are. But I doubt this is really the answer.
But what would it mean for the dead to rest? Who are the dead? What is rest?
I guess I was premature in writing “obvious” on the page, whenever I did.
So now give a more considered opinion.
I get that there are the restless dead and the dead at rest. Of course, we don’t know – I don’t, anyway – what the disciples meant by the question, who they thought the dead were. In Monroe terms, we would say the dead who are not at rest require a retrieval – in short, require a reminder of who they are and what condition they are in. Once they come to consciousness of their place and nature in the non-3D world, I suppose they could be considered to be at rest.
The question more precisely is, how would they be not at rest, and what would bring them to rest, that Jesus would say the time for it has already arrived, unrecognized?
I don’t know. It implies that the dead were waiting for something, that the disciples knew they were waiting for something, and that Jesus said, Yes, they were, but it arrived unnoticed. But what was the moment they were waiting for?
Rather, what was the change?
All right, what was the change they were waiting for? Don’t you know? (Am I making this all up?) Did the change come with Jesus? Was he the change? And if so, how?
You are wondering about the tale about Jesus told in the long Urantia Book.
I am. It reads very plausibly and I can’t quite believe it. but it’s a huge work to be a prolonged self-deception, certainly too long and involved to be a deliberate deception. Still, to accept that idea of Jesus would be to cut against what I think I know of Jesus.
And the result is, you don’t know how to clear the slate for a clean answer.
Yes, I suppose that’s what often happens when I get tangled up here.
Another time, then?
Will another time be any better?
You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?
I guess I will.
“The question more precisely is, how would they be not at rest, and what would bring them to rest, that Jesus would say the time for it has already arrived, unrecognized?”
Here’s my take on it: They would be “not at rest” if they were unaware of their essential nature as already free. What would bring them to rest is recognizing this Truth, which can only be recognized here now. When Jesus says, “the time for it has already arrived,” he’s referring to the fact that, the moment you take a step in search of “the new world,” you’ve missed it. It’s already here. You surrender into it rather than move toward it. You release what you’ve placed in the way of it. The moving toward it results in seeking, which implies separation from it. In surrendering into it, you find what’s already here and what has always been here: Freedom. Peace. The Groundless Ground of Being. The Kingdom of Heaven.
IMHO, “dead” doesn’t necessarily refer to having dropped the 3D body. You can be dead to the truth of your essential nature. To “die before you die” is to die to the notion that you are a separate some”thing.”