TGU and Thomas, Sayings 51 and 52

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,[i] 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.[ii]

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.

 

Saying 52

They said to him: Twenty-four prophets spoke to Israel, and they all spoke of you. He responded to them: You have deserted the living one who is with you, and you spoke about the dead.

Again seems obvious, but Saying 51 turned out to be not so obvious. To me it compares reality with hearsay, or in-person with tradition or reputation. In short, two ways of approaching life. But saying 51 seemed to say something similar, reality v. expectations.

And wasn’t that the problem Jesus had to deal with? He was trying to give people the key to living more fully, more abundantly, which means living in the moment, wide awake, seeing what is, rather than seeing through a veil of illusions and filters.

Yes, I see that.

Knowing that, you really know all there is in this saying and the previous one, even if you do not understand every reference or nuance. There is always more to be learned, but there is no need to learn everything about anything in particular; it’s a question of what you want. Let’s proceed.

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[i] Participants in residential courses at The Monroe Institute move into altered states to do certain things. Among these are “retrievals,” tuning in to the consciousness of departed souls who may be lost or confused after death, helping escort them through their own fears to whatever comes next for them.

[ii] The Urantia Book, anonymously channeled material purporting to reveal the inner meaning of life on Earth, particularly the life of Jesus, was published in 1955 by the Urantia Book Fellowship, and the text placed in the public domain.

 

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