The Tao of Christ
The Tao of Christ is a podcast which explores the mystical roots of Christianity, which Jesus called the Kingdom of God, which church historian Evelyn Underhill called the Unitive Life, which Richard Rohr calls the Universal Christ, and which I refer to as Christian nonduality, unitive awareness, or union with God. This is the Tao of Christ.
The Tao of Christ
Jesus on Spacetime (The Gospel of Thomas)
This episode is on the 27th saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. It is actually two sayings. One is about finding the Kingdom of God. The other is about seeing the Father. These are both ways of talking about spiritual awakening. He talks about this in the context of the spiritual disciplines of fasting and Sabbath. The first is about true fasting. The second is about true Sabbath-keeping.
It reads: "If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the Kingdom. If you do not observe the sabbath as a sabbath you will not see the Father." I understand these sayings as talking about space and time – spacetime - from a nondual perspective. In other words the world is not what you think it is.
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This episode is on the 27th saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. It is actually two sayings. One is about finding the Kingdom of God. The other is about seeing the Father. Thee are both ways of talking about spiritual awakening. He talks about this in the context of the spiritual disciplines of fasting and Sabbath. The first is about true fasting. The second is about true Sabbath-keeping.
It reads: "If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the Kingdom. If you do not observe the sabbath as a sabbath you will not see the Father." I understand these sayings as talking about space and time – spacetime - from a nondual perspective. In other words the world is not what you think it is.
I just finished reading a novel entitled The Game. It is the first in a series entitled The Game is Life by Terry Schott. It reminds me of the Matrix. In the book Earth is a virtual reality game managed by a supercomputer guided by an Artificial Intelligence. The game takes the place of traditional education. It is meant to teach about life.
When people are plugged into the game, they are born on earth, having no knowledge of their prior life outside the game. Time flows differently in the game than in the real world. They live a whole lifetime of seventy or eighty years inside the game in a matter of weeks or months in the “real world.” When they die in the game, they wake up in the real world. After a while, depending on how well they played, they can reenter the game as a different avatar.
There is a lot more to it than that, but this is the gist of it. In this first book the main characters are a young man and woman who in the game come to realize that this world is an illusion. They start a spiritual movement to teach this truth to others. They have spiritual practices as part of this movement. So you can see why I would like this book.
In the saying of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus mentions two spiritual practices: fasting and Sabbath. First Jesus says, "If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the Kingdom.” Normally we think of fasting as doing without food for a period of time. That is a common practice in many spiritual traditions.
Here he is not talking about fasting from food, but fasting from the world. In regular fasting you stop eating for a period of time for a spiritual purpose. The spiritual purpose according to Jesus in this saying is to find the Kingdom of God. "If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the Kingdom.”
People have tried to find the Kingdom of God by withdrawing from the world and becoming a hermit or entering a monastery or going off into the wilderness. Those are long-stranding spiritual practices in different spiritual traditions. One could see this as unplugging from the world.
People today talk about going off the grid. There is a movement of young people who fast from social media. They will not use the internet or cell phones. That is countercultural these days. I respect these folks. They see how technology can distort human vision. These people are fasting from the world. It is like when I was young in the 1960’s and early 70’s when hippies used to live in communes. "Turn on, tune in, drop out" as Timothy Leary used to say.
Throughout history – including the history of Christianity – people have dropped out of society, retreated from the world for spiritual purposes, to find the Kingdom. The purpose is to withdraw from the world to see the world more clearly. To gain some spiritual perspective. It refines our vision so we can see the universe as it really is. The problem is that even in these intentional communities the vision is often lost in time. They become their own little human culture that obscures their vision.
One can fast from the world while being in regular society. That is what Jesus called his followers to do. In his great nondual prayer of the Gospel of John, Jesus says of his followers: “they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.”
That is often summed up in the phrase: “being in the world but not of the world.” That is what it means to fast from the world. It sometimes is called detachment. When we fast from the world, then we find that the world is not what we think it is. Hinduism calls this world maya, sometimes translated illusion. It is not real in the way we think it is. It is relatively real, not ultimately real.
It is real insofar as it communicates Reality, which Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. It is not real when it obscures the Kingdom of God. So it is all about how you see the world, whether you take it at face value or look deeper. I look at the world, and I see God. I see the Kingdom of Heaven. The heavens declare the glory of God, the psalmist says.
The natural world communicates the presence and power of the Divine. The apostle Paul says: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
When you fast from the manmade interpretation of the world that has been superimposed over the world and obscures our sight, then the truth shines through. The truth of the Kingdom is always shining; it is just that people don’t see it. “They suppress the truth in unrighteousness” as the apostle Paul says in that same passage. So we fast from the manmade world in order to find the divine Kingdom.
The same is true of time. We fast from time in order to see eternity. That is the meaning of keeping the sabbath. Jesus says, “If you do not observe the sabbath as a sabbath you will not see the Father." Jesus did not keep the rules surrounding the man-made Sabbath. He broke those all the time and was criticized by the Pharisees for it.
He saw a deeper meaning of the Sabbath. Keeping the Sabbath as the Sabbath is fasting from time in order to see eternity. Time is as illusion. I often quote Einstein in these episodes, where he says time is a stubbornly persistent illusion. It has been scientifically proven that time slows down and speeds up and even stops. Time-space or space-time is relative. The Kingdom of God is eternal. We fast from spacetime to see Eternity.
This human world is under the bondage of time. We are constantly measuring ourselves and everything else in terms of time. My seventy-fifth birthday is coming up in a couple of months. My wife asked me the other day how I want to celebrate it, and I told her I do not want to do anything special. I will do something for the grandkids’ sake – cake and ice cream – but no big celebration.
Humans are obsessed with time. I have an appointment in a couple of days to have a small skin cancer surgery. Based on others I have had, it will probably be a dozen stitches. I got a warning by email and cellphone from the doctor’s office to be there on time. In fact ten minutes early .. or else! As a culture we are obsessed with time. The Sabbath is a day to fast from time. To see through the illusion of time. To take a step out of time and into eternity.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not unending time. It is beyond time. Outside of time. Transcending time, yet including time. We fast from the manmade model of time just as we fast from the manmade model of the world. We fast from mortality and realize immortality; we fast from humanity and we see divinity. We keep the true meaning of Sabbath, and we see the Father according to Jesus. We see the Kingdom of the Father, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God.