SEEING: DOUGLAS HARDING AND ST. THOMAS
by contemplativeinquiry
I’ve been working with The Gospel of Thomas (1), for two reasons. First, it is a non-dual text. Second, it comes from my native tradition, by which I here mean the one I was personally born into. The Gospel is a collection of stories and aphorisms attributed to the teacher Yeshua (Jesus), without any accompanying life-story.
Some of these are very unlike the stories and aphorisms we find in the canonical gospels, unlike enough to get the text banned in the later fourth century C.E., a time of hardening Christian Orthodoxy. But others appear within them. I remember hearing these as a small child who knew himself to have been baptised and given a Christian name. They captured my imagination, and I remember liking and indeed loving them.
Thanks to this background, Christianity – even in the form of an early ‘heresy’ – affects me differently from other paths. I need to be on guard against emotionally driven reverence and dismissal alike. Fortunately this is not too difficult with St. Thomas. There’s a way in which this text heals my relationship with the tradition of my birth, though without any call to renew my allegiance to it.
Douglas Harding was a non-dualist teacher who faced the same issue, only more so, having been brought up in the Plymouth Brethren and subsequently become estranged from his family through religious differences. He wrote an essay about the Gospel of Thomas, giving it a warm welcome (2):
“In this early apocryphal Christian text, the living voice of Jesus comes down to us directly, bypassing all that men have been saying about him and doing in his name. It comes across distinctly, high above the confused roar of two millennia of Christianity, so-called. It’s as if he himself had planted this beneficent time-bomb in the cave at Nag Hammadi, carefully setting the fuse to delay its explosion till the world would be ready for the impact. It’s as if, so tragically far ahead of his own time, he knew when significant numbers of quite ordinary men and women (as distinct from highly specialised and disciplined saints and sages and seers) would at last be capable of catching up with his vision of the Light, his experience of what he calls the Kingdom.”
Harding also says that we owe it to such a teacher “not to believe in this teaching of his in Thomas, but to test it, sincerely verifying (and falsifying) the scriptures by our experience instead of our experience by the scriptures”. In the essay, he goes on to accomplish this by identifying parallels between the Gospel of Thomas and his own Headless Way (3).
I will deepen my work with the Gospel of Thomas. I already know the text quite well, but I think that my understanding of it has changed since my last close reading of it several years ago. I hope also to clear up any residual unfinished business with my Christian roots, and allow the text itself a stronger role in my ongoing life and practice.
(1) Jean-Yves Leloup The Gospel of Thomas: The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus Rochester, VA: Inner Traditions, 2005 (English translation and notes by Joseph Rowe. Foreword by Jacob Needleman)
(2) Douglas Harding A Jesus for Our Time. Chapter 14 in Look for Yourself: the Science and Art of Self-Realisation London: The Shollond Trust 2015 (first published the The Head Exchange in 1996)
contemplativeinquiry 
‘There’s a way in which this text heals my relationship with the tradition of my birth, though without any call to renew my allegiance to it.’
The Bible is obviously so full of wisdom… yet I personally find it impossible at the moment to think about healing my relationship with what was also my tradition of birth. When I first went to Sunday school and church parade with brownies I rebelled against the patriarchal presence of the Christian God. I have the utmost respect for Jesus and many of the saints. I just find it very difficult to understand their devotion to Jahweh and moreso to monotheism, which wiped out the polytheist faiths. Whether this will ever change I don’t know. I do find a certain peace and sense of sanctity in some churches and Christian places of worship. My big bug bear, I think, is monotheism. I’d be interested to hear how you deal with these issues.
I can engage with the Thomas Gospel because, in my reading, it points beyond monotheism whilst inheriting that tradition and still somewhat linked to it. The teacher is both a person of his time and at the same time more spacious and visionary.
Thanks for explaining. I think I understand that. Similarly when I read the poetry of William Blake and other Christian poets I find elements that point beyond Christianity/monotheism. I also find some connection in their sense of devotion too although they are devoted to other deities. I guess my block lay in the difference between those-would-become-saints and poets, those who are writing for religious and poetic purposes. But, really, is there that much difference?…
For me, the difference is not always easy to spot. I think there is a difference between writing to support an already pre-supposed doctrine and writing directly from the well spring of experience and inspiration. Of course, the same people can do either of these at different times or both things at the same time – hence the question, is there really that much difference, for those with a strongly lived spiritual culture.