TGU and Thomas: Saying 7

 Saying 7

Jesus said: Blessed is a lion that a man eats, because that lion will become human. Cursed is a man that a lion eats, because that lion will become human.

[TGU] Remember to connect a given saying with one or more previous sayings.

Yes. And I don’t know if it is because I am browsing yesterday’s entry, or merely while I am doing so, it occurs to me that the saying is about process (Maybe.)

No, you are on the right track. Express your insight.

If the man eats the lion or the lion eats the man, either way the lion becomes human. But the consequences for the man are very different. I am supposing that the lion is meant to indicate our animal nature – and the man, the higher possibilities, but as I try to phrase that, it breaks down.

So let us look at it. You could guess that the lion is the 3D self, but in that case, is the man the non-3D self? How could that be? How could the non-3D self be absorbed by the 3D self? Does that make sense?

As so often, I can feel things clarifying even as I write out your response, or sometimes mine. But it isn’t quite there yet.

What would your life be if

Oh! Of course. Okay, I get it. it’s a matter of remembering (as you have told us) to keep in mind what Jesus was about. He was providing insight into the nature of life and the way things are. He was not giving abstract disquisitions; it was meant to be practical.

That’s correct. So it isn’t a matter of the non-3D being overcome by the 3D, but of the non-3D being effectively choked out of 3D life from the point of view of the 3D life you are leading.

Obvious once said.

So, from the point of view of a 3D consciousness attempting to come to greater clarity, greater self-possession, greater consciousness, it is all-important which way the lion becomes human. If a 3D-centered consciousness identifies with its animal nature, any advance in identification with larger aspects of itself may result only in aggrandizement of the disconnected, animal, 3D-centered being.

Nietzsche in his madness, rather than, say, Jung in his wholeness.

That is a very good pair of comparisons, and of course not the first time we have paired them in your mind.

It is very interesting in this new context. I have looked at Nietzsche as an example of psychic inflation followed by inevitable collapse.

Let us provide suggestive additional examples. Hitler. The sorcerer’s apprentice. Many a televangelist.

I see. What they have in common is insufficiently prepared contact with larger powers, which swallowed them up.

We know it is difficult to do, yet it is important that you all concentrate on remembering wider lessons.

I couldn’t phrase it, but I know that you meant, don’t forget to integrate things we have learned at other time, in learning new things or new ways of seeing.

Specifically, you were instructed at some length to remember or realize for the first time that your lives are not only your own affair, but are the conduits for vast impersonal forces. Those forces will provide you with great power and authority if you are in proper relation to them – and they will take over and destroy you as an individual if you are not.

Either way, the division between 3D and non-3D has been broken down, or at least greatly thinned, but one way is destructive to us.

This is why Jesus was so insistent on proper internal conduct. No, that isn’t a mis-phrasing; we wish to introduce a new way of comparison, similar to saying 3D and non-3D instead of, say, physical and spiritual. We are knitting together what is easily sundered.

Internal conduct, external conduct will in some ways, for some purposes, lead to greater clarity than trying to say “being v. doing,” for example.

Yes, I see it.

Well, Jesus was continually emphasizing how intent was critical. The same action, the same thought, even the same priorities, in a way, could be very different, and lead to very different results, depending upon context. Depending, in other words, upon how, more so than upon what.

We could pray correctly and have a positive result in terms of increasing our access for positive reasons, or could pray incorrectly and obtain a negative result.

You have the right idea, but have not yet expressed the right idea. Expand your exposition.

Hitler, say, may very well have had an altruistic intent, channeled through personal (inadequate) intentions. He wanted to right political and social wrongs; wanted to overcome forces that he thought were destructive to society; wanted to fight both communism and rule by money (which he identified with Judaism, having absorbed the anti-Semitism of his native Austria). These were altruistic goals in that they were transpersonal. They were personal in that he intended to rule, and in a sense was using the forces he knew how to raise [in others]. But, as Jung said, it was closer to say that Hitler was Germany than to say he ruled it. He did not have that separation. Like Nietzsche but in a different direction, he had evoked forces he did not know how to control, although he thought he did. Vast impersonal forces of hatred, rejection, revenge, self-aggrandizement, a will to power—all of it that we have become so familiar with – it took him over and left him mad. Mad and vastly influential, because his madness evoked and met response in a German people that had been traumatized by a combination of guilt, misfortune and injustice, all of these forces channeled by unscrupulous men for their own petty uses, which channeling was itself being used to express forces they had little idea of and no control over.

Only, don’t let yourself assume that Jesus was concerned with collective or political ends. These are and were abstractions. They affect lives, but they have no ability to assist anybody to come into proper relation with his own (or her own, of course; it is the same thing) truer relation to the world, that is, to reality.

Do not let the lion eat the man, regardless of your outrage or sympathy or concern. Learn to somewhat distrust even your altruism. Perhaps we should say, especially your altruism, for it is often a fleeing from the proper real and necessary, in order to march off to a pretended siege of Babylon, as Emerson put it.

But if the man eat the lion –

Then with luck you get a Carl Jung, able to help the world. But more commonly you get individuals unknown to the world, but holding it together as a side-effect of their own greater integration. While you are working on yourselves, it is as well to remember to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but to God the things that are God’s.