I could track down the specific quote - but it's from the Book of Thomas. It's succinct. It's a call to action. It's practical and empirical. Do you see the light or not?
The next Spring Forest Qigong community meeting is focusing on how visualizing light is not just about light but more a totality of feeling, or as qigong master Chunyi Lin recently said, to feel the vibrations.
So when I rediscovered Pagel's book at Goodwill - this time with a book cover - the book cover really drew me in. I had not realized the focus of the book was the Book of Thomas (and it's relation to the Book of John based on the Logos).
Essentially Irenaeus who created the 4 gospels, was against the required "2nd baptism" ritual done by the Gnostics for further spiritual purification training. He argued that Jesus was the "only" - Logos Incarnate - and no one else could embody the Logos. So the Gnostic emphasis on seeing the light was, to Irenaeus, really about spiritual ego, and instead we needed to just trust the rules of the church, and that God, through Jesus, remained an ineffable mystery.
OK but to this day - this debate remains a live one and very viable - within the church. I have not finished the book yet so I can't give all the details. But when we look at the Orthodox Church - we find a view very different than Irenaeus:
The name Christ is not properly predicated of the Logos, but is the narne of the person of union born of Mary and in whom the Logos dwells and who was assumed by the Logos. Nestorius fanatically insisted that the Logos was not born of the Virgin according to His Humanity and did not, therefore, become by nature man. On the basis of this he divided the natures and predicates of Christ attributing the human to the assumed man and the divine to the Logos.
In the light of his denial of the two births of the Logos and the double consubstantiality of the One and the Same Logos, Son of God and the Self-Same also Son of Mary, and thus of the true meaning of the title Theotokos, Nestorius insistence that he does not divide Christ into two persons, but only the natures and names, was judged a mockery of the faith and on this basis he was condemned by the Third and Fourth Ecumenical Councils and rejected by john of Antioch and Leo of Rome.So it is D.M. Murdock in her epic, very detailed scholarly tome, Christ in Egypt that argues this Logos emphasis of the book of John was from Egyptian spiritual training. And so the Gnostic emphasis on the Logos was actually closer also to the Egyptian training. So as Slavoj Zizek likes to call it, the Gnostics were a "Vanishing Mediator" between the Book of John as promoted by Irenaeus and the Gnostics, more aligned to the actual Egyptian and Pythagorean spiritual training.
So then in this 2015 analysis (pdf) - the Logos is translated as "The Word" but rather as a harmonious order of the Word, not as chaos:
So the analysis considers some of the PreSocratic use of the term Logos and acknowledges the Book of John is relying on this pre-Christian meaning. But if this is true then we need to take that Pre-Christian meaning very seriously. Even the dictionary defines Logos not just as "reason" but as "ratio" and then as "proportion" and it is harmonic proportion. So the real meaning of Logos is not "the Word" as the typical Christian rendition would have us believe, but actually the real meaning of the Logos is the PreSocratic and Egyptian harmonic alchemy meditation training.
So of course there will be eternal squabbling about whether Christ is human or whether humans can be like the Logos, as Christ, as both are made in the "image" of God - because the West has defined time as an image - since Plato stated "time is the image of eternity." By studying the true meaning of the Logos as nonwestern harmonics - then this whole "false framework" of debate can be bypassed.
Why does no one do this? Because no one really studies the music harmonics seriously - to discover it's secret yet very simple meaning of complementary opposites of 2 and 3 with the 1 and infinity - as the real meaning of the Logos from the Tetraktys or Tetrad.
I had studied the Book of John in detail in my Christian high school and so I knew that the Logos was actually from Pythagorean philosophy based on music theory. I kept this secret to myself, of course, since I knew it would not be accepted.
But I had never encountered the term "Logos Incarnate" to describe Jesus. In fact this is also what the qigong masters are - only they call it "Embodying the Emptiness."
In reality Christian theology is subservient to Western science (that arose from the Monasteries) based on Platonic philosophy that has the power of mathematics from the Pythagorean Logos (misinterpreted and misapplied).
So what does this Ph.D. thesis have to say on the Logos - from an ecological interpretation of Christianity?
So Irenaeus argued that humans were in a "fallen state" controlled by the Devil due to Original Sin - and so only Jesus as the Logos Incarnate could save humanity. But in fact this argument is really just a patriarchal lie. And as we now know the Church has been controlled by this patriarchal lie of ejaculation addiction as the true evil.
So this Ph.D. points out for Christianity the Logos was essentially a "sword" or war against ecology and matter and "the flesh" - but a losing war indeed.
The idea was to "blind the senses" through the Logos - we can see then that this is the equivalent of left-brain dominant mind yoga - a prayer so strong that it concentrates the mind and shuts out the 5 normal perceptions. This is one approach but the mind on its own is too weak and ineffective - the left brain dominance is cut off since the left side vagus nerve does not connect to the right side of the brain.
So then for the "standard" Christianity, the Logos is an extreme left brain rationalism as a fanatical theology, to hopefully "repress" the lower emotions. It does not work, and so then the repressed emotions are projected externally as patriarchal oppression. This is not at all the real meaning of the Logos as music harmonics as alchemical wisdom. So for Christianity - Jesus as a human is not the Logos. Whereas the original nonwestern meaning of the Logos (or preSocratic) is a harmonic body-mind healing transformation.
For Christianity in its standard form then the Logos does not operate through the "human mind" and therefore is inaccessible to Christians (except only through worshiping Jesus as the Christ).
The author of the Ph.D. thesis argues it is precisely this dualist meaning of the Logos that then justifies the Ecocide of Earth that has been carried out through Western Christian civilization. In other words because Jesus as God could be sacrificed in the flesh to save humanity, so too can Earth's ecology be sacrificed.
So then the author argues this Logos needs to be turned around - to accept that the body of Jesus was fragile despite being embraced by the Logos and therefore so too is the body of Earth also fragile. Unfortunately this attempt to turn around Christianity is still dependent on the wrong Platonic math that was the "power" of Christianity - through the Benedictine monks creating modern science as professor David F. Noble so well detailed in his book "The Religion of Technology" and "World Without Women" and others.
Let's see if this pdf gives any more secrets
So there is a secret Matrifocal meaning of the Logos:
This is the truth - psychophysiologically - females are yang internally - are the original healers.
https://www.uib.no/en/persons/Per.Olav.Folger%C3%B8
Oh he studies Animism - so yes he understands the secret more or less! Cool.
Now we go to Elaine Pagels - her book Beyond Belief just released in Paperback - NPR interview
This 2018 ph.d. thesis is a fascinating expose on the origins of the gospels
So essentially Antioch was the site of the creation of Christianity - and the gospels as sayings were not attributed to authors with names, not until the gospels were politically Massaged - as the Christians of Antioch were mainly Gentiles but the Jewish influence had to be interpreted.
Ignatius was the first "bishop" known in written language and the first to impose a hierarchical structure of the church and the first to write of Christians, and "the Gospel." But Ignatius also claimed the holy spirit spoke through him and that his martyrdom in Rome put him in line with Peter and Paul, followers of Jesus.
At his time, some "Jewish Christians" still met on the Sabbath, versus the "Lord's Day." So the Christian church was still being "created" at 100 AD.
So some of the Christians not following Ignatius did not consider the Apostle teachings more important than the Old Testament:
And the main opposition to Ignatius was from Essene Judaism.
fascinating 2018 book on Jewish-Christians before "Christianity" was formalized
another Gospel of Thomas lecture by Prof Gilles Quispel
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