The Eyes of Christ (The Gospel of Thomas)

This episode examines the 25th saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus said, "Love others like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.” 

Among other aspects, it explores how love of others guides social and national morality from a nondual perspective.

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Transcript

This episode examines the 25th saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus said, "Love others like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.” This saying has two parts. The first is "Love others like your own soul.” 

Many translations use the word “brother” here: “Love your brother.” One translation uses the word “friend.” It should be obvious that this saying is not limited to males or to biological siblings, or even those we are friendly with. Most familiar is the translation “neighbor.” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan makes it clear who Jesus means by neighbor. It is everyone. 

“Love your neighbor as yourself” is the saying I wrote on a piece of cardboard and held at a street protest a couple of Saturdays ago. Everyone else at the rally was holding signs that had to do with the president or ICE, but I chose to display one of the most important commandments in the Bible, according to Jesus: Love Your neighbor as yourself. Jesus said that the two greatest commandments were to love God with all your soul to love your neighbor as your soul.

Some people do not understand how I can participate in a street protest and teach nonduality. They see that as contradictory.  I explain how in a blog I wrote recently. If you are interested in that, you can find my blog on Substack. That particular post is entitled “Christian Nonduality & Social Conscience.” In short, my participation has nothing to do with partisan politics. It has nothing to do with political parties. I would be proud to display that sign at any rally by any party.  

The saying “Love your neighbor as yourself” has to do with morality, which flows from spirituality. It is about individual morality, social morality, and national morality. It is about how we as a people and a country treat others. It has to do with how we see people, which in turn determines how we treat people. Jesus instructed us to see others as ourselves and treat others the way we would treat ourselves.

Here in the Gospel of Thomas Jesus puts it this way: Love others like your own soul. That wording is slightly different. I prefer the use of the word “other” in this saying, rather than brother, friend or neighbor. It sounds a bit different and opens the saying to new understanding. “Love others like your own soul.” 

The word “soul” can have a lot of different meanings. When Jesus uses the word soul, he is using it in the Hebraic sense and not in the Greek philosophical sense. The word soul is a synonym for self, what we see as our identity. To love another as our soul means that we broaden the sense of who we are to include another.

In the Biblical story of David and Jonathan it says, “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” This is repeated later in the story, “And Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him, for he loved him as he loved his own soul.” There has been a lot of speculation about the nature of this love between David and Jonathan. One thing for sure is that it is an example of loving another as your own soul.

When we meditate upon this saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, we see that Jesus is equating self and other. In Reality there is no distinction between self and other. There really is no such thing as an other. We are all one. We are all one self. 

We are under the illusion that deep inside we are all different. That is the cause of all our problems. It breeds anxiety and fear and hate and violence. In truth we are all the same. We are all One Self, one Soul, with a capital S. That is the Vedanta teaching that atman is Brahman. The individual is the universal. The individual self is the universal Self.  Emerson called it the Over Soul.

We could also come at it another way and say there is no such thing as a self. That is the Buddha’s teaching of No-self. All is One, which means we are all the Other, if you want to call it that. In either case, when you look at another with the eyes of Christ, what we see is ourself. That is why Jesus taught, “As you do it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, so you have done it to me.

Either way you come at it, this is nonduality. The important thing here is not to make this into a philosophical idea or theological doctrine. The important thing is to see this firsthand, to see through the eyes of Christ, to experience this for oneself, to know this as true and not just believe it is true. Then we live life from this one reality. 

When we see the truth of Universal Self or No-Self, then the result is love. Unconditional love. The Buddha called it compassion, but it is the same thing. It is seeing the world from the perspective of Ultimate Reality and living as an expression of Ultimate Reality. That is what Jesus meant when he said “I and the Father are one.” And when he said, “I can do nothing without the Father, and I can do only what I see the Father doing.”

Let’s move onto the second part of the saying. Jesus says, "Love others like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.” This second part has no parallel in the canonical teachings of Jesus. But there are some references to the pupil of the eye or the apple of your eye in the Hebrew Scriptures. 

The psalmist prays to God, “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.” Moses describes God’s care and protection for Israel: “In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye.” The apple of his eye, is a poetic way of talking about the pupil of the eye. Jesus says, “Love others like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.” 

We protect our eyes. We use eye protection. When I am splitting firewood for my woodstove I use protective eye goggles. I had a friend who did not use protective eyewear when he was splitting wood, and a piece of wood flew up and hit him in the eye. It was a serious injury. He almost lost his eye. After a lot of surgeries over many months the physicians were finally able to save his eye. This happened because he did not protect his eye. But he did not learn his lesson. I few years later, at the height of the pandemic he refused to get the COVID vaccine. He tragically died of COVID 19 unnecessarily. 

Jesus says we are to protect others the way we would protect the pupil of our eye. In the next saying in the Gospel of Thomas Jesus picks up on this theme and talks about sawdust and splinters in the eye, a saying we are familiar with from the New Testament. We will deal with that next time. Here Jesus is talking about protecting others the way you would protect our own eyesight. 

The interesting thing about this metaphor is that Jesus may be alluding to spiritual sight as well as physical sight. Jesus makes this connection between physical and spiritual sight a lot. In the Gospel of John he heals a man’s sight, a man who was blind from birth. He did this healing on the Sabbath, so the Pharisees got angry with him. 

Jesus uses the opportunity to talk about spiritual sight and spiritual blindness. Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?” Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”

The proverb says, "There are none so blind as those who will not see.” We heard last time Jesus saying in the Sermon on the Mount, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” He is talking about spiritual sight.

Spiritual blindness is much worse than physical blindness. I have a friend in Melbourne, Australia, who is probably listening to this now. He is physically blind, but spiritually he can see clearly! He is one of those friends who encourages me with regular emails. I hope I encourage him with my words. Jesus came to open the eyes of the spiritually blind. 

When our eyes are spiritually opened, we cannot imagine not seeing Ultimate Reality again. When such darkness does happen to some people, it is terrible for them. It is called the Dark Night of the Soul. The good news is that this Dark Night is a prelude to permanent awakening and seeing. 

When we see others as Jesus see others, when we see them as ourselves, then we love others as our own soul and we protect others as we protect the pupil of our eye. That is to see the world as Jesus sees it. That is to have the eyes of Christ.