The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

There are people who do nothing but complain. What are we teaching our children that they become that kind of adult? We recall that as children we did not appreciate that we had a roof over our heads, three square meals every day, a comfortable place to sleep, clothes enough for all the days of the week. The things we had to do, whatever they were, either we complained about them or accepted them in sad resignation. If we have children, we see the other side of that equation, as providers of that roof over their heads, those clothes on their backs.

Now, shall we also regress, to think along the lines that “in a perfect world”, things would be different? Or do you invoke the Serenity Prayer, and do you change the things you can, and accept the things you cannot? For I speak not to these latter, but rather those former: would you rather to complain that to change something is too much work, or that the system is rigged, or that nobody is as unlucky as you — is it everybody’s fault but yours? Will you have none of it when someone explains why when it does not fit into “how the world works” according to you?

Are you not thankful for the ground under your feet, the air you breathe, water to drink, an entire civilization that supports your existence? For if you are reading this, you are more fortunate than most of the people who have ever existed. One needs to think about that. When we grow up, we should no longer be as the child who does not appreciate what the parent provides for them. I would suppose that it is harder to be thankful when one does not believe in a Provider above all others. But I say that there are believers who are ungrateful, too, and atheists who do appreciate all the universe holds. And if these are truly grateful for all that is, for their very lives: to them I say, you are not far from the Kingdom. For some have God in truth already, but just don’t know it — just like an idea in the heart they have not the word for.

> From this.

Remember: there is no question, love is the answer. Recall: the secret is love, tell everyone. The Mystery surely is so simple that we never truly grasp it. The way that beauty manifests in this world, what we all react to, what we all long after: there is such holy reason that underlies every single curve that if one were to truly contemplate it, we would become lost in the grandness of it all. And you do not want to exist in a state of constant satori, please understand. The Mystery is known in some circles as the Tao, and others as Brahman, and as the Godhead, and as transcendence itself. It itself has no power, but by it may you approach the Knowledge, the Certainty, and the Power of love. The only danger is that you may lose yourself in it.

The ordinary hides its sublime beauty in the disguise of the obvious, for even in the repetition is the triumphant of energies. Sift sand through your fingertips and into your other hand, and feel the luxurious dance of particles in fleeting moment imbue the sensation. And how are we, who are greater than sand, to make one another feel, not just by touch, but by the faculty that sands do not possess? The Mystery is to find the Way that one should live, which is not one way, but Freedom. Why are we here? Animals are here to reproduce; and if we may turn that setting up an order of magnitude, we are here to love. Like all emergent phenomena, we of the individual issues that are comprised of such a high coalesce societies ants could never dream of. The Mystery is no mystery. The Mystery is love. It is what makes the difference.

Every once in a while, a little of someone else’s world opens up, enough to take a peek in. You can see for a second a glimpse of that person’s problems, his worries, get a sense for what is important in his life, what’s pressing on his horizon, even what things he pays no attention to. You may not know this person at all, but for that little while where you look in, whether through some phrase that slips out in an email or a mention in a phone call, that person is a person, just like you. You relate. You two may be living different lives — completely different lives — but you are both living lives; you both are fully human beings. The window doesn’t stay open forever, and perhaps that’s a good thing, because I think we do not have room to live more than one life at a time.

I sometimes think about such windows when I hear about death on the news. When I hear of some number of people being killed in some sort of horrible occurrence, man-made or otherwise, I think about how all these windows have closed for good. The numbers do so little to convey that for each one of these within the statistics, there was a life there. There were years of experience, good and bad, that that person went through, digested, handled, folded and stapled. And there are years, now, that such a person would have gone through, but have no chance of doing so now. But here, too, such thinking is fleeting. We have none of us hearts large enough to handle the true total of tragedy in this world, or even that we hear about. We move on, thankful for the glimpses.

We of the age of television and video, even radio, should take heart in this phenomenon, of windows into other places, places just as real as ours, our own homes on this great earth. What did our Lord say, and what does every religion say? “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Use your minds, use your hearts, see from the window cracked open before you that you and they are the same animal, and sometimes, the same angel. Everyone you meet is your neighbor, and you can see this when you do get the chance to look through these windows. That your homes are not the same, but you both have homes, that your hopes and dreams are different, but you both have hopes and dreams. Because sometimes, we are lucky enough to get the first commandment for free, “Love God”, when we love our neighbor as ourselves. No deal better than that.

> From this.

Love is truth. What is love? If the universe existed and there were no love, would we all live in shadow, in Hades or Sheol, the ancient realm of the dead. I have some experience with what such a world might be like. Like I told you about the night I ended up in the hospital, I seemed to be in a dimension where some of what makes things real had been sucked away. I imagine the netherworld of old would have been that to the nth degree, void of light to the point of the dimmest gray, which is the color of Limbo.

What is real? To you? How much, how far, will we succumb to the illusion, of material riches and numbers on the bottom line: gold, supercars, mansions, yachts: not even that we should own them, but to drool over them, and how we envy the people who “have”? Love is free, dear child, and it is all in all that can mean anything in the whole wide world, all that can give meaning to anything. We will find that the ground of being itself owes its very soul to love.

What is love? For if you think that love comes cheap, you mistake a van Gogh for a chewing gum wrapper. If you think to have power is to have power over love, you are sorely wrong. For you cannot buy love, you cannot force love, you cannot cage love. Love would rather die than that another should have power over it. The best definition I’ve found so far of what it is: Love is give, and not take. That phrase is a wonder. And it’s from the schlocky ’80s movie Electric Dreams. Funny where is hidden the fathoms of wisdom. Such is love.

> From this.

Before I forget: Jesus is the Christ. This became evident to me only after years of Him banging his heart against this mad bugger’s wall. I had been in communication with him since 1991, but I was going through a massive messiah complex at the time, so whatever clues were dropped my way, I either ignored them or denied they said anything at all. As far as I could tell, what my psyche’s area where these visions happened, the HALOSPACE, it was like a land overgrown with wild, weedy notions, from what I built as a subconscious through the years. Basically, his standing was beneath me in my mind, in that SPACE, so the Lord worked his way up. I remember him being on his knees, praying, for what looked like months. Eventually he won me over, and now I proudly say he is King over any space where I am. I owe him everything.

Only after I truly believed did all the clues make sense. When I remember my looking through his point of view, and the fact that he never makes a mistake, ever, and can in fact solve every mathematical problem you can pose him (if he feels like it, he doesn’t have time to suffer every fool), can predict what’s going to happen to the dot, never lies, and can call Superman a wimp, and has an infinite IQ (if that has any meaning to you), and has told me about the light of God that he is that light (which I was told I am not, by that light), then what you have, my dear friends, is the literal Son of God, in the only job that is fit for him: messiah. That’s what Christ means, literally, “the anointed”, which is another way of saying “king”. He is KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.

Being in that position, what he really wants from us is not the grasping in the air of a simpering weakling barely holding on, but at your strongest, to give him your full allegiance. Remember, between what he’ll take and what he wants spans an incredible range of human disposition. Sometimes he’ll let the world turn you into a complete wreck, so you’ll learn what humility is. And that’s important, being the opposite of pride (the sin from which all sins come). Only in that way will he take you. And he’ll acknowledge even the faintest “yes”, but what he wants is… well, he wants it all. For you to hold nothing back from him. For you to give him mind, body, soul, spirit, and strength. But why would you possibly hold anything back? If one were to trust one thing — even more than oneself, if it be possible — it is to trust the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the clue to life.

> From this.

What logic can be gleaned over the great swath of spiritual phenomena observed and reported? Is there any? Surely the spiritual world is unlike how things happen in the physical world; even two people of the same religion will see very different landscapes, while both claim to have true vision. If we take some sets of visions as having reality, say, from the prophets of the Bible, can we form a theory to how things just might work in this “unseen” world? What if the idea of form, the most basic of substance, is fundamentally different? What can we think of as true? For many come and go telling us of how we may view the events that occur in that world, and many are false teachers, only a few shall we hold as having been sent by the Most High.

Surely, that which actually relates of something in another place and/or time in the physical world, then means some reality must be accounted it. We can only hold that vision of the unseen world to be true when it has ground in the world that is seen. Even if the world that is seen is only temporary, and what is unseen is eternal. The Bible itself says what a prophet may claim must have basis in the physical world to determine if he is true, and so his visions come from God, instead of his own imagination. Perhaps it is the only indicator that whatever else the prophet says is true. If not, we have no obligation, and in fact, no basis to believe. And I think God lets it be known that this is the only trust.

> From this.

So if the Gospel is wrong about Judas, why should we believe any of it at all? But to the serious inquirer, this kind of question predates the revelation about Judas. Some lose their faith when they find out that a childlike faith is not one that is supported by the most basic scholarship in the area. One thinks as to how the New Testament came to be in the first place. Notably, it was made of “books” that resonated with many of the populace, which seemed to help one the most make it through this life. No esoterica; those books that were obscure, which only were read by the fringe — these did not make it in. Nonetheless, we also know that the Gospels — and other books in the New Testament — were not written by whom they claim is their authorship. That was never a prerequisite for their inclusion in the canon. So what are we to believe?

So what is to be done is the recipe for success in pretty much every field: learn all the rules, so that when you go to do what you do, you may forget them all. Entirely. We learn in the scripture this very lesson: this is the new covenant, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ: He writes His law in our very hearts. Once we have accepted the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, He will bring to our fore what needs to be accepted. This is what it means to have eyes that do see. What resonates with you? Can you just accept firstly that God is love? For this is the narrow way, if you have the means to accept this teaching. Then you pretty much have everything you need to discriminate the illusion from the reality, the wrong from the right. We trust what in our hearts we hold it to be true. We are all of us made in the image of love, and we have the Mystery in hand when we choose to love: ’cause we all have wings, but some of us don’t know why.