Discovery
! !
Finding
the inner meanings
Experience
shows that everyone at first finds the Gospel of Thomas difficult.
No exceptions to this rule have been found. The primary reason
is that Jesus is striving to take his listeners—or for us
his readers—to a higher level of spiritual awareness than
prevails in the materialistic world in which we ordinarily live.
This becomes a step of discovery.
A
secondary reason is that Jesus uses words with symbolic meanings,
which point to concepts beyond those that can be tied down by
rigid words. Symbolic language works not just on the mind but
essentially on the heart and the imagination. It has a power to
reach levels within us that ordinary language fails to touch—it
can convey an awareness in a way that plain words cannot do.
The
great achievement of the scholars of l'Association Metanoia was
to begin to discover the inner meanings hidden in the parables
of the Gospel of Thomas. Their insights give remarkable—and
unique—clues to the meanings. They took the sayings one by
one, and expressed their awareness in the form of a commentary
on each individual saying.
A
further valuable clue was to recognize that the inner meanings
of each individual saying had to be harmonious with all the others—a
consequence of their all coming from one source. This has greatly
helped dismiss mistaken meanings.
In both the Association Metanoia work and in the work described
here much benefit has been derived from insights of other great
spiritual traditions. Very often, when a saying has seemed impenetrable,
such an insight has broken through like a shaft of light to illuminate
Jesus' intended meanings.
On
the other hand, much less often has help been obtained from making
comparisons with the Bible or attempting to draw insights from
the doctrines of the established Christian Churches. Study of
the literature shows that route to be frequently misleading.
This second level of discovery relates to the inner meanings of
each individual saying in the Gospel. It was a work extendi ng
over a period of about eighteen years, and was immensely satisfying.
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to 'Presentation' book 
