The Mustard Seed: The Gnostic Teachings of Jesus The Mystic

Jesus said: If the flesh has come into existence because of the spirit, it is a marvel; but if the spirit has come into existence because of the body, it is a marvel of marvels. I think Karl Marx missed this! I wonder what he would have thought if he had come to these saying of Jesus. Jesus says:…flesh has come into existence because of the spirit…as all religions say—God created the world. That means flesh has come out of the spirit, matter has come out of the mind; consciousness is the source, the world is just a byproduct. Then, Jesus says:…it is a marvel—it is a mystery. …but if the spirit has come into existence because of the body…as atheists say, materialists say, Karl Marx, Charvak and others say…. Marx says that consciousness is a byproduct of matter. This is what all atheists say, that the world is not created out of the spirit, but the spirit is just a ‘by-phenomenon’, an epiphenomenon of matter; it comes out of matter, it is just a byproduct. Then Jesus says:…if the spirit has come into existence because of the body, it is a marvel of marvels. The first is just a marvel: that God created the world. But the second is a marvel of marvels—if the world created God. To believe the first is difficult; to believe the second is almost impossible.

If you break down a seed you will not find the tree there; you can dissect it but you will not find a tree hidden there. And you can say there is no tree and people were just foolish saying that a great tree is hidden in this seed when there is nothing. This is what analysts have always been doing. You tell them that this flower is beautiful; they will take it to the lab and they will dissect it to find where the beauty is. They will come upon chemicals and other things, they will dissect it and analyze it, and they will label different fragments of the flower in many bottles—but there will not be a single bottle in which they will find beauty. No, they will come out of the lab and they will say, “You must have been under some illusion, you were dreaming—there is no beauty. We have dissected the whole flower, nothing has been left, and there is no beauty.” There are things which are known only in their wholeness; you cannot dissect them. They are greater than their parts, this is the problem—a basic problem for those who are in search of truth. Truth is greater than all the parts joined together. It is not just the sum of the parts, it is greater than the parts. A melody is not just the sum of all the notes, of all the sounds. No, it is something greater.

That is the difference between a botanist and a poet: a botanist knows about the flower, the poet knows the flower.

Where does the value come from? It comes from your desire: if you desire it, it is valuable; if you don’t desire it, the value disappears. The value is not in the thing, it is in your desire.

The same is within you: things change around you and clouds, thoughts change within you—but the sky of the self, the witnessing self, remains the same.

The way you look at it is the case, the way you approach it is the case—your attitude is your world.

It is the very nature of desire that it remains unfulfilled. It will arise again and again, and the more you try to fulfill it, the more it will arise; you are simply feeding the desire when you think you are fulfilling it.

Why does consciousness fortify you?—because the more conscious you become, the more you know you cannot die, there is no death.

The universe was not created in time and finished, it is created each moment; it is being created each moment because it is God’s own being.

Knowing cannot go back; once achieved, it becomes part of you. It is not something you possess—it becomes your being and you cannot unknow it.

You carry something within which does not belong to this world. That is your treasure, and that is your door through which God can be approached.

And all those who have known, they insist: “Know thyself!” Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, they go on insisting, “Know thyself!” The whole insistence of religion is to know thyself.

This is the only poverty: ignorance of oneself—there is no other poverty.

The first thing to be remembered: the creation and the creator are not two, they are one.

Only one thing is real wealth and that is self-knowledge, because it cannot be destroyed.

There is a tradition, a beautiful tradition—I don’t know how much it can be proved, but it is beautiful, needs no proof—there is a tradition that the word Christ is just a form of the word Krishna.

Look for the deathless and remain alert; don’t waste your time with that which is not going to endure, don’t waste your life for that which is going to change, which is part of the changing world.

What is meaning? Meaning means to know the fragment in relation to the whole; meaning is a relationship of the fragment to the whole.

The nature of the self is just like space: empty, infinitely empty, formless.