As we know from the canonical Gospels, religious authorities questioned the disciples of Jesus concerning their failure to observe basic purity laws. In answer to fairly concrete questions, Jesus offers more examples of the thinking in the first five sayings—all is one. What does this have to do with fasting, praying, charity, and diet?
The radical shift that Jesus purposes—from orthopraxis (right-doing) to orthodoxy (right-thinking) has become such a basic feature of Western individualism that we can miss how radical this reorientation was.
For more on the same subject, see saying #14.
7
Jesus said:
Fortunate is the lion that a human eats,
because that lion becomes human.
Cursed is the human that a lion eats,
because that human becomes a lion.
Meditation
Sufi tradition contains this story:
Once a tiger was pursuing a man. The man ran and ran but could not escape the tiger. Finally, in desperation, the man stopped, turned, and screamed to the tiger, “Why don’t you stop chasing me?”
The tiger replied, “Why don’t you stop being so appetizing?”
8
Jesus said:
A wise fisherman cast his net into the sea.
He pulled it up full of little fish.
Yet among the small, the wise fisherman
found a good, large fish.
He threw the small fish back,
Keeping the large one.
Those with ears, let them hear.
Meditation
What is the net?
Is it the words
We weave to catch
The truth with?
And there
Among the small
We find larger . . .
What?
Meaning?
Or something else?
9
Jesus said:
Listen—a man came out to sow seeds.
He took handfuls and cast the seeds.
Some seeds fell upon the road;
the birds came and ate those.
Other seeds fell onto rocks,
and those did not send roots into the earth
nor did they send shafts rising into the sky.
And some seeds fell into thorns,
which choked the seeds,
and the worms ate them.
And other seeds fell upon good earth,
and those gave fruit up to the sky.
And the sower got sixty times yield from some
and one hundred-twenty times yield from others.
Meditation
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all contain this parable, with the Jesus of Mark later explaining the parable to his disciples: “The sower sows the word.” This is the understanding that has come down to us through Christian tradition.
What if, however, the sower sows fire, as in the following saying . . .
10
Jesus said:
I have cast fire
upon the world;
look, I watch
as it burns.
Meditation
What if fire
Is the seeds
The sower casts?
What if fire
Is the word?
What if
What’s sown
Is thinking anew?
In 1 Samuel 10, Samuel tells the young Saul this,
. . . as you come to the town, you will meet a band of prophets coming down from the shrine with harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre playing in front of them; they will be in a prophetic frenzy. Then the spirit of the Lord will possess you, and you will be in a prophetic frenzy along with them and be turned into a different person.
11
Jesus said:
This sky will pass away,
and the sky above that
will pass away.
Those who are dead do not live,
and those who live will not die.
When you eat what is dead,
you make it alive.
When you come to be in light,
what will you do?
When you were one,
you became two;
but when you become two,
what will you do?
Meditation
Meister Eckert said,
We fight the dark
Not knowing that
The
