Analoge 8: The Mystery of Pre-Existence & Human Becoming

 ANALOGUE 8

Before the coming of the Anointed One, no bread from paradise—that place where Adam had first been created—existed in this world. There were all manner of plants for the nourishment of the wild creatures, but there was no wheat for humanity who had only the food provided for all the rest. But when the Anointed came as the Completed Human, he brought bread from heaven so that humanity could be nourished with its own true food. The authorities imagined, of course, that it was through their own force of will they had provided it. Yet all along in secret it was the Sacred Spirit who had been energizing everything in whatever manner she desired. So then truth from its very beginning has been scattered everywhere. Many have watched it being sown, but few who have seen it have reaped it.

Video Introduction by Lynn Bauman

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• This analogue traces the spiritual culinary history of humanity— the nature of the true food of heaven that has the capacity to feed the deep hungers of humankind.

• Food exists on multiple levels—physical food, psychological or soul food from culture and society, and spiritual food; these are not the same.

• The ultimate nourishment and nutrition for humankind is transcendent and eternal.

• The secret/hidden history of the world is introduced, its inner workings and sacred nature. The first Mystery is revealed, as well the unseen and unknown work of Spirit which is being opposed.

• This world is not humankind’s place of origin. Humanity has a hidden history and our first homeland was in paradise, and our second homeland is on earth.

• True food is brought into the world by the Completed Human, the archetype and prototype of the ultimate humanity. Humanity reaching completion depends on receiving food from this original homeland. Only the Messiah knows how to provision this true food.

• The terrestrial authorities are full of hubris.

• The Hidden Spirit has great power, enlivening things and providing energy from the deep well-spring of ultimate Reality.

• The analogue uses an agricultural metaphor: sowing the truth in the ground of humanity, which is often infertile and barren, failing to produce a harvest.

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COMMENTARY

Bread for Humankind

Behind this seemingly simple analogue with its descriptions about bread and the nurturance and feeding of humanity, there are telltale indicators of the author’s complex views of the world, of human beings and their becoming. The author and his contemporaries saw not a simplistic world, but one that in some ways was more complicated than our modern reductionistic view of human history. The fundamental assertion of this analogue is that Yeshua brought manna, the true food of heaven to us (using the historical context of the Hebrew tradition to convey this reality). In order to thrive, human beings need an altogether different kind of diet from what we normally ingest. Typically, the physical body eats to live and we feed our souls with the fast-food of pop culture. Meanwhile, the soul and spirit deeply languish, starving to death, because their original food (their proper nutrition), is nowhere to be found. The truth is that this food’s source is celestial, not terrestrial. Therefore, in anticipation, the human ground has been seeded with divine truth and that seed (harvested and made available as bread) can result in true sustenance. However, that scattered seed and the food produced from it are often in scarce supply.

Understanding the First-Century Messiah

Within the world of first-century Judaism, teachings and activities concerning the coming of a future Messiah were rampant. Yeshua was certainly a focus as speculation about appearance of this Messianic figure grew, and he was not alone in this. The Jews hoped that a Messiah would arise out of the cauldron of chaos and set things straight for their world and society. Israel would be restored to greatness again, becoming a predominant power as it once had had been. Their world was in peril; now was perhaps the time. It was the conclusion of many of Yeshua’s followers that he was the perfect configuration of what they had been looking for all along. But was he? In the end, Yeshua was actually a great disappointment for many. He did not fit their political expectations and would not bend to the will of first century politics. However, seen from a different perspective, he was Messianic and the imperative he carried at his heart was ultimately correct.

During his lifetime few realized that the divine trajectory was not pointed toward a political end but toward a destiny whose aim was the true spiritual flowering of humanity. As with olive and fig trees, there were to be both flower and fruit: a flowering of beauty and the resultant fruit to feed the world. Yeshua became paradigmatic for this imperative, though not for the political one. He began to manifest as a template for the ultimate maturation of all humanity. He was leading the way, and what he brought was not only the design for the future form of humankind, but also the bread that would provide the proper nourishment that would help to change its nature and consciousness. In him our future destiny was being revealed to us while also bringing us the necessary provisions for the journey to that end.

The Return to Paradise

Yeshua opened up the pathway for a return back into paradise, the place from which we originated before our descent into space and time. As we journey through this realm we are in the process of evolving: on this pilgrimage, fed by the proper food, we are maturing and growing both personally and collectively. This theological viewpoint appears to have arisen in Yeshua’s teaching as a direct result of his own visionary seeing. It was a vision that pierced through the current conditions of the world to see its end, and our destiny and telos. Yeshua saw what was needed now, while embracing a clear vision of our future.

The powers that think they control the Earth and would use it (including humankind) to fulfill their own selfish ends, can never see this vision, nor do they understand what is unfolding. Only the saints, seers, and visionaries do, and their seeing is encoded in this text as the mystical vision contained in the prophetic tradition of what was clearly an early Jewish mystical stream (perhaps even an early form of Jewish Kabbalah). Yeshua appears to have shared this viewpoint, for the Gospel of Philip contains these mysteries and his extraordinary vision. Only the prophetic seers understood this Messianic imperative, empowering and moving humanity toward its ultimate destiny. This is the first deep mystery revealed in this text. Likely it is the profound apocalyptic seeing that Yeshua taught in secret to his closest allies and friends as he fed them true food.

This Messianic imperative, as the inner force behind the human world, has been the consistent energy available for its spiritual evolution. It is, of course, hidden from ordinary sight, but becomes the driving force beyond the horizons of human history. Flowing below the surface, it is embedded, not only within the deep design structure of the world, it is also resident in potentia as the divine telos built into every human being. Like a secret nutrient, the divine truth, given as energetic food by the Sacred Spirit, acts upon that human seed, nourishing it until it begins to grow and manifest. It grows, perhaps along with the planet itself, aiming at the divine Light until it reaches eventual and full perfection as the completed being, prefigured in the form of the Anointed One himself.

The Power of the Sacred Spirit

For this completion of humanity to take place, the active Agent is the essential power of Wisdom herself coming to us as Sacred Spirit. We are being introduced here to the energy of its divine feminine form which was evident in earlier Judaism and appears to have been a core image and principle in First Temple Judaism. According to the British scholar, Margret Barker, Wisdom as a feminine presence and principle had been central to Temple worship, known as Ashurah and Hokhmah. During the Deuteronomic ‘reforms’ of King Josiah, however, she was rejected and replaced by dogma and legalism. Wisdom, however, remained in the long memory of the people, and in this text is being given prominence and voice once again. She is the truth-teller, the wisdom mother of the new birth, providing the energy for the transformation of her children and the future form of humankind. She has been doing this work secretly because her truth was denied, supplanted, and replaced by conventional religion with the imposition of its exoteric legal structures. Nevertheless she lives and continues her work behind the scenes and in secret, providing the proper nutrients for human becoming. She has planted, but it has been a difficult harvest due to the force of conventional religion and its patriarchal and authoritarian dominance. Yeshua is understood to be her son and servant. She is his spiritual mother, and together they are serving all of creation in a Messianic way.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

1. This analogue opens out onto many mysteries that the mystics and visionaries through the ages have seen. This vision is part of early Jewish mystical tradition. How do you respond to it?

2. Do you have a sense of your existence prior to coming to Earth in space and time?

3. As Philip does, do you perceive Paradise to be your celestial homeland, and not just an earthly garden? Journal your reflections about this possibility. What questions would you like answered by this or other texts? Make a list of these important questions and keep careful track of any answers you may receive.

4. How do you distinguish between food for the soul, and food for the spirit? Is there a difference for you? Journal what that might be.

5. Would you say you have ever tasted celestial bread or manna? How do you know when you are eating it? Give some examples of what you have experienced as spiritual nutrition.

6. How does spiritual bread strengthen you? What does it do to affect the human spirit?

7. Have you ever been deceived by lesser bread posing as the bread of heaven? What is that experience like? How can you tell the difference?

8. In this analogue a new and perhaps more accurate understanding of Yeshua as the Messiah (the Anointed One) begins to emerge. What does it mean that he becomes a paradigmatic figure? What does he show us about ourselves that we might not see otherwise?

9. How do you relate to Yeshua? How do you want him to relate to you? Is he in any way Messianic for you in the way that is detailed above in this commentary?

10.What is your relationship to the presence of Wisdom as the divine Feminine principle? What has she planted in your life? Has it born fruit? What has opposed her in your life or religious culture?

Notes for Reference and Study

A. As we have seen, Yeshua was said to have taught the mysteries (musterion in Greek)—things that were typically unavailable in common religious understanding. This Analogue contains one of the first real mysteries that is hidden from the view of most people—the mystery of their pre-existence in Paradise before descending into space and time. Understanding this pre-history and our origins in Paradise, that garden from which we have come, appears to be a central teaching of Yeshua both here in this text and in the Gospel of Thomas. The implications are that we have deep ties to this homeland which continue to exert their influence upon us now and from which we carry treasure into this world to be discovered when we need it.

B. Paradise is said to be an actual place with features like a garden. The Abrahamic traditions say it exists outside of space and time, in another realm or dimension. The mistake is to try to locate the garden in some geographic place in the Middle East, for example between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which seems to be the literalists’ favorite locale. Even in the canonical Gospels, when Yeshua is being tortuously crucified, he speaks briefly to one of the others being crucified at the same time with him, saying that on that very day they will be together in Paradise, obviously a reference that places it beyond this world. To see our homeland as a “celestial Paradise” (where everything loved and gathered here in this realm is also preserved there) is one of Perennial Wisdom’s sacred teachings. Also the ancient Hymn of the Pearl, found in the Thomasine tradition and its scriptures, describes that Realm in some detail, suggesting that we continue to have relationships (and are in dialogue) with it even as we traverse earth.

C. Daily bread as a spiritual metaphor has always been part of Abrahamic traditions. A central feature of Middle Eastern society, the making of bread and offering it generously around the home and to the wider community, has been an essential element of its hospitality. In the ancient stories of the Exodus, when people were in the midst of a grueling journey between Egypt and Palestine, God was said to have fed them daily with a bread called Manna, a piece of which was preserved in the Ark of the Covenant and set within the most holy place of the Temple as a means of remembrance. Eating, giving thanks for and living by means of this daily food was understood to be the necessary response to the gift of heaven and the offering of heaven’s feast for humankind. In the tradition of Yeshua, he asserted that human beings do not live by bread made by human hands alone, but that their true spiritual food was the divine Word (Logos) preceding out of the mouth of God. All of these references concerning spiritual sustenance also point toward the wedding feast to be enjoyed and experienced at the end of time and history.

D. A completed human is not one who is perfect or without flaw but one who is mature. Like a piece of fruit that has become ripe and ready to be enjoyed, humans too ripen, becoming fully themselves—becoming completely human according to the measure of heaven and the Creator of all creatures. Yeshua said that we were to be be complete as the Father and Source is complete. Again, this is not about a perfection understood to be without flaw per se, but about fullness with nothing that is lacking in that fullness. The Gospel of Philip’s image of what that completion is will crescendo toward the end of the text, but in the beginning it sets the standard

toward which it is moving.

E. The term the Sacred Spirit replaces the more traditional Holy Spirit for this text. In Coptic, using Greek terms, (hagia or ‘agia) Spirit can be translated either as Holy as is conventionally done, or just as accurately, sacred. Philip is making a distinction here between one viewpoint about that Spirit and his own. It is important to understand that distinction and so to highlight it, the term Sacred Spirit has been adopted for this text to juxtapose against the more traditional term, the Holy Spirit (or worse, the Holy Ghost). The western use of the phrase the Holy Spirit is often gender specific to the masculine, whereas in this text it is presented as completely opposite that—it is the feminine Spirit, like the one portrayed in Proverbs 8-10. The Sacred Spirit is wisdom herself in her active agency (but perhaps unseen reality) that also flows through Yeshua, anointing him and compelling him toward action in this world. Often this is perceived very differently in Occidental Christianity and its texts which portray the Spirit as co-equal in the Godhead and a member of a very masculine Trinity, but not as the feminine agency who along with the more masculine Logos work together in the world. The next analogue will focus more pointedly on the feminine nature of the Sacred Spirit and her relationship to the doctrines of the virgin birth that were already forming in western Occidental theology and tradition (notice how Mary is portrayed in the canonical Gospels).

F. Margaret Barker’s historical and theological work has been expressed in two important texts: Temple Theology and Temple Mysticism. Please also explore her considerable website available online at margaretbarker.com.

Notes for the Translation

• The issue of food has to do with bread (and its grain sources, primarily wheat). As is metaphorically clear, this is not just about any kind of food, but food or bread from a transcendent source.

• Heaven may indeed be paradise, or a distinction could be made that the heavens (plural) both include paradise but also transcend it.

• The Completed Human is also the perfected or mature human who is a spiritual adult.

• The authorities are the archons mentioned previously, and in this case they may also be religious authorities who assumed that they have provided or accomplished everything according to their own devices and who are perceived to be in league with the archons.