Secrets of God Read online

  Secrets of God

  A Journey to the Mystical Roots of Christianity

  Slawek Wojtowicz

  Don’t you know that you are gods?

  (Psalm 82: 6 & John 10: 34)

  This book is dedicated to Jamie and Daniel

  - I love you more than you can imagine!

  List of Contents

  Introduction............................................................5

  Mystical Worldview...............................................18

  Gospel of Thomas.................................................51

  The Future..............................................................212

  Bibliography...........................................................231

  Movies.....................................................................235

  Introduction

  This story started for me with a powerful mystical experience that turned my worldview upside down. I am a physician, trained as an internist and a medical oncologist in the United States. Like most Western-educated physicians, I was taught that humans are just sophisticated biological machines, a result of billions of years of random evolution. From a practical point of view, this is a workable description of our biological circumstances that was essential for development of modern Western medicine as we know it today. We started by dissecting dead bodies, and used the information gained that way to devise new, effective treatments for a wide variety of diseases. But this approach has some significant limitations, many of which have not been addressed to this day. For example, Western science does not offer satisfactory answers to essential questions such as: What is consciousness? What is life? It simply theorizes that consciousness is a result of various chemical and electrical processes in our brains (or our cells, in the case of life). According to that theory, our consciousness should not survive death, since it is secondary to biological processes in our brains. Yet, there is plenty of evidence that this theory is as out-of-date as the antiquated physics of the 19th century.

  While Western science investigated the outer, physical world, Eastern science focused on the exploration of the mind. The latter came to a very different conclusion: that the consciousness precedes biological processes instead of being a product of these. I would call that a science of hope, as it offers at least a possibility that we are more than complex biological machines.

  My mother died 18 years ago due to complications of multiple sclerosis. Before dying peacefully, she spent three months in the hospital under the compassionate care of one of my former professors. She was fed, washed, and given a clean gown and fresh bedding on a daily basis. I am very thankful to him and the other physicians and nurses who took care of my mother for allowing her to die with dignity. Nevertheless, her death was very painful for both my sister and me. Our mother was the one person in the family who truly loved us, and we weren’t there to hold her hand when she passed away.

  When I came to the funeral, I wanted to spend some time alone with her body. When I looked at her shriveled remains, it became very clear to me that she wasn’t there anymore and that her body was not really her. I cried, wondering, “Where was she now? Was she gone for good?” My Roman Catholic education wasn’t very helpful when confronted by something as final as death. She was a good person—had she earned her place in heaven or was she condemned to burn in hell for eternity for not measuring up to God’s expectations? Or perhaps she was suspended in the limbo of purgatory? I was utterly confused, discouraged, and terrified. I had fantasized that one day she would hold my children in her arms! How could a loving God take her away from me like that, crushing all of my dreams? All of a sudden my life seemed completely pointless. I cried to God to bring her back to me, yet there was no answer—unless silence can be considered one. Was there a God out there? Or was religion just an opiate for the masses, as the Communists taught us? If there was a God, what kind of God was He? How could He permit such horrible suffering for someone who was as loving and caring as my mother? I came to the conclusion that if God existed, He either wasn’t paying attention to our misery and suffering or He didn’t give a damn about us. Why in the world would any sane person worship a God like that?

  I wanted a guarantee that I would get my mother back—blind faith was not good enough for me anymore. In the following weeks I had nightmares in which I died and then searched for my mother in the afterlife—but she wasn’t anywhere to be found. It appeared as if she had simply ceased to exist. These dreams left me even more unsettled and depressed.

  After the funeral I returned back to the United States and threw myself into hospital work. I suppressed my sadness and anger, but after a while I noticed a strange feeling of anxiety that was always there, even when I was resting. I was puzzled: Where did it come from, and what did it signify? Perhaps it was the result of stressful work? At the time I did not associate this anxiety with existential fears brought about by my mother’s death. Instead of scrutinizing my feelings, I chose to ignore them.

  Meanwhile, I continued to attend church on Sundays, driven by Catholic guilt rather than any attraction to the moral doctrines or rituals. I did not openly question the teachings of the Church, but instead chose to ignore the rules that didn’t work for me, like most Catholics do. I was too busy with my medical residency and fellowship to search for anything else. Even though I was not happy with the Catholic Church, it was unthinkable for me at the time to even consider switching to another religion—or even a different Christian denomination—since I was brainwashed to believe that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church. It did not occur to me to ask why I needed salvation in the first place, or what salvation actually entailed. Questions were never encouraged in the Catholic Church. Yet I was always curious about the early years of Christianity. Growing up in Poland, however, I didn’t have an opportunity to investigate that historical period closer, since there were no books written on the subject available in Polish at the time.

  Several years later I became very excited when I accidentally stumbled upon the Gnostic gospels through the Internet. But my excitement was quickly followed by disappointment when I started reading them and discovered that they did not make any sense to me. The books went back onto the shelf, collecting dust for many years.

  In the meantime, I had been plodding along, trying to live my life as well as I could, hoping for my American Dream to materialize. I worked hard, studied, dated, and in general tried to fit in by subscribing to the values of my new home country. I believed that I had finally managed to escape from the hell of my childhood. I did not realize that I was carrying a big chunk of that hell within me. I gradually discovered that, because of my deep wounds, I was selfish, closed-off, guarded, and afraid to get close to other people. I didn’t know how to be truly happy; I always lived on the verge of desperation—despising my past, unable to enjoy the present, and hoping for a better future.

  That was my life—until IT happened. To be honest, at first I didn’t quite understand what had happened to me—it took me some time to digest this experience and figure out what had really transpired. I wasn’t prepared by my religious education for a mystical experience. I did not expect that an encounter with Christ or God meant that one actually becomes Christ or God, which is exactly what happened to me. I emerged from that experience with the realization that our lives are merely God’s dream—a story—and I saw that everything in the world is perfect just the way it is. God’s plan for us is unfolding like a beautiful flower. There is only one Actor playing all the parts—it is God, and you are Him[1], as is everyone else. Our lives here are simply a way through which God learns about Himself. These insights were a shock to me. Nothing I had learned in the past had suggested anything li
ke this.

  As I continued to digest my mystical experiences I came to believe that each of us is like a small piece of a hologram—the whole universe is contained within each and every one of us. God is in everything we see around us—we are Him, we are surrounded by Him, and we are perfectly safe. We are God’s beloved and perfectly innocent children. We live forever—and it is a curse if one believes that he or she is stuck in hell, but a blessing if one is totally free and full of joy, living in Paradise. Both hell and Paradise are of our own making, and both are right here on Earth, not in some other reality or location. We all live in hell until we discover the God within and awaken to our true identity—since hell is a state of separation from God. Those of us who are not in direct communion with God are therefore in hell. My guess is that this applies to most of the humans currently living on this planet. That’s why we need salvation, which is reclamation of our true, forgotten identity—that of the Children of the Most High.

  What follows in this book is my interpretation of some of the early Christian teachings, primarily originating from the lost gospel of Thomas. It is not “new” in the absolute sense—in fact, it is very much in line with the perennial philosophy taught since the dawn of human history. The “newness” comes from my personal interpretation of mystical experiences, from the idiosyncratic way in which I am translating my glimpses of the divine realm into written or spoken words. These experiences brought me profound healing as my selfish and compulsive patterns began to dissolve. I tasted the freedom that is the birthright of humanity. I dusted off the Gnostic gospels and discovered that they now made sense to me. My eyes and ears were opened and I was ready to take first the steps on the road to full awakening.

  For most of us, awakening is a slow process that eventually culminates in resurrection. Every path leads there, no matter how contorted and complicated it is. We often take a few steps forward and then a step back, or pick a side road leading to nowhere and then we have to retrace our steps to get back on track.

  Confusion rules our existence. The problem is not that The Truth cannot be found, but rather that there is too much noise and too many people proclaiming their truths as “The Truth.” It is up to each of us to fish out the pearls from the net and to discard the junk. Christian churches teach that resurrection occurs only after we die—if we live good enough lives to deserve it. However, in the Eastern tradition, resurrection has to occur before we die.

  Mystics urge us to seek a direct experience of the Divine as our utmost priority. Once that occurs, the real work starts. There are hundreds if not thousands of highly effective spiritual technologies that have been utilized through the ages by all cultures across the globe to induce powerful spiritual experiences. These include meditation, prayer, yoga, chanting, drumming, fasting, ritual use of sacred plants (e.g., peyote, ayahuasca, marijuana or sacred mushrooms), sensory deprivation, hypnosis, various breathing techniques, martial arts, ecstatic dance, and certain sexual practices (such as those utilized in tantric traditions), to name just a few. The perennial wisdom accumulated over thousands of years by various spiritual traditions helps to place mystical experiences in an appropriate context and to integrate them into our lives. That’s why having a spiritual teacher from a particular tradition is very helpful on this path.

  However, even experiencing the Divine directly is not sufficient for salvation. Christian mystics (known also as Gnostics) taught that to be saved one has to actually become a Christ. How can this be done? It turns out that faith in Jesus Christ is not sufficient, in spite of what some devout Christians would like to believe. Much more is needed. Jesus was very clear in his teachings that hard work is required to achieve salvation: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” “Whoever wants to become great amongst you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve” (Matthew 20: 26-28). “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:14).

  Then he tells us how to walk on the path to salvation: “Love your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30). “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). These instructions appear to ask for things beyond human capacity. How can we possibly be as perfect as God Himself? It seems that we are so weak and imperfect and so far away from God. That’s what many orthodox religions tell us—“You came from the dust and you will turn into the dust.” In other words, we are totally insignificant and there is no hope for us in this life. We are doomed to suffer and die, and we are helpless to change our fate. We can’t do anything ourselves to reach salvation—we can only hope that God will have mercy on us sinners. Yet when we look at what’s happening around us, we will notice that the God worshipped by most mainstream religions doesn’t seem to be very loving or merciful—indeed, He appears to be very absent from our world. How depressing!

  Fortunately, Gnostic gospels (gnosis can be defined as “experiential knowledge”) bring a message that is much more hopeful: Yes, we have fallen very low, but God loves us more than we can imagine and He is reaching down to us so that we can climb up to Him out of the hell we have created for ourselves. We are co-responsible for our salvation—it will not happen without our effort. This message gives a new meaning and purpose to our lives, especially when we realize that Jesus did not intend to start a new religion. He wanted to teach each of us how to become a Christ, just like him. Jesus was not “more special” than everyone else—he was simply one of us, just like you and me. And thus we can also do what he did, if we follow his example and take his message seriously. Yet it is clear that many of his teachings were distorted, lost, or destroyed. How can we recover the key elements of his original message?

  With a little help from God, nothing is impossible. What was lost, seemingly without any chance for recovery, miraculously re-appeared in the world again. The mystical teachings of Jesus were rediscovered in Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. The most important text in this archeological find was The Gospel of Thomas. This particular gospel has been known to historians only by its name and from refutations by early orthodox heresy hunters. Even though a few small papyrus fragments of The Gospel of Thomas in the Greek language had been discovered by archeologists, it appeared that no complete copies survived mass book burnings instituted by the Church in the third and fourth centuries AD. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the first almost complete copy of a Coptic translation of The Gospel of Thomas were truly amazing. In 1945, Arab peasants searching for natural fertilizer in Upper Egypt near the town of Nag Hammadi (known in antiquity as Chenoboskion) accidentally discovered a human skeleton and a large earthenware jar buried next to each other. They smashed the jar, hoping to find gold inside, but to their disappointment it contained only 13 papyrus books bound in leather. One of the discoverers, Muhammad Ali Al-Samman, brought the books home and left them on the ground next to the stove. Subsequently, his mother used some of the papyrus pages for kindling the fire.

  The books changed hands several times, but after a long and tortuous journey most of the codices ended up in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. It took about 30 years before the Nag Hammadi texts were translated into modern languages and became widely available. Even though some of the texts were destroyed, some 52 survived—all of them Coptic translations of early Christian writings, including four gospels known to historians until then only by name: The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Truth, and The Gospel to Egyptians. Other texts included poems, letters, and treatises attributed to Jesus’ followers, and various mystical documents dealing with cosmology and theology. How did these ancient texts end up in a jar buried near Nag Hammadi? After Emperor Constantine’s conversion, when Christianity became an official religion of the Roman Empire, and following the First Council of Nicaea, which was convoked by Constantine in 325 AD, possession of he
retical books was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were promptly destroyed when discovered. Historians speculate that an anonymous monk from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius smuggled the banned books from the library and buried them to save them from destruction. He must have been old and frail when he accomplished this task, and likely did not make it back to the monastery (if the skeleton that was found guarding the treasure was his). The books remained buried for over 1600 years until their discovery six decades ago.

  The Gospel of Thomas is perhaps the best-known and most important find from Nag Hammadi library. It is not clear who actually wrote this gospel, even though it is attributed to one of the closest disciples of Jesus, Judas Thomas. It was a common practice in early Christianity to attribute gospels and other significant writings to people from the immediate circle of Jesus’ disciples—perhaps to give these documents more credibility. Many modern historians believe that none of the gospels—including those that are canonical—were actually written by the people they were named after.

  Very little is known about the presumed author of this gospel, Judas Thomas. His name implies that he had a twin brother, but the identity of his sibling is unknown. Some speculate that “Thomas” (the Aramaic word Tau’ma is related to the word for twin, T’oma) was a nickname, reflecting his spiritual closeness to Jesus. Early Christian tradition presents him as an apostle who, after the resurrection of Jesus, traveled East, spreading Christianity in India and eventually dying there as a martyr. Thomas is barely mentioned in the synoptic gospels, except for the gospel of John, which portrays him in a negative light as a doubter who did not believe testimonies of other disciples meeting the resurrected Jesus until he saw him with his own eyes (John 20: 19-29). It is obvious, however, that this story was created by the author of the gospel of John as a polemical tool directed against those in the early Christian movement who preferred more solid proof of the resurrection than the second-hand testimonies of other people. Close reading of other synoptic gospels reveals a significant discrepancy between their and John’s accounts of the first appearance of Jesus to the disciples. According to the other gospels, all 11 disciples—including Thomas—were present to witness that event (Matthew 28: 16-20, Luke 24: 36-49, Mark 16: 14-18).