The GOSPEL of THOMAS
Elucidation of the secret words
The TAO TE CHING of LAO TZU
 

 
 
 
Letters

There is nothing new under the sun

All doctrines are valid or none, like it is for all religions. The question is why you need a doctrine or a religion. For life they are not necessary, for all creatures and small kids too live without, Wouldn't be rather people need doctrines to affirm their point of view and so their laboriously obtained position in society? And to justify their behaviour and actions? You first have to put stuff you borrow from others in your brain before you can play and puzzle with it, but that has nothing to do with life. Smohalla, a Skokul-chief spoke long ago in his "Discours against the white men":

"With us we call who thinks with his head crazy, with you it is normal" and Rousseau, who never met Indians "I dare to declare the condition of reflecting is against nature and man who reflects is a degenerated animal".

They both didn't devised but experienced that.

"As creator had finished his creation",

so Pico della Mirandola wrote,

"he had a feeling there was somewhat missing. He wished there would be a creature that could contemplate the structure of such a marvelous work, to love the beauty of it and to admire its greatness".

Man became that creature. And for that you don't need doctrines. After all it was enough to excommunicate him,

You forget that the Gospel of Thomas was written in a what we call nowadays a very primitive culture of farmers and nomads, overruled bij the Imperium Romanum. Except the priests, always the priests, nearly everybody was illiterated, like all small children now and always. They didn't know about spiritual, depths, layers, levels and all those complicated terms, ideas and believes we fatigue ourselves with. For those people the Gospel of Thomas was written and they understood the meaning faultless. In the last century BC, a heathen came to Rabbi Hillel the Elder and said to him he would be converted to Judaism, when the master, standing on one leg, could recite the whole Thora. Hillel replied:

"Do not to others what you do not want them to do to you. That is the kernel of the Thora. The rest is comment".

Knowledge is for the "happy" few, but wisdom is for everybody. Only for simple people the Gospel of Thomas is simple, to complicated ones it seems complicated.
Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Epiphanes and Spinoza describe in their writings a picture of the original world as it was before man left his natural state. The quotation of Karl Marx is:

"in the beginning of his history man is bound or chained blind to nature. In the proces of evolution he transforms his relationship to nature and with that himself."

Karl Marx was especially in his early writings prophetically, but he was not radical enough and got caught in the elaboration of his vision and like in christianity his pupils didn't understood what he ment and violated the message for their own purposes.

Every time I read effusions like you wrote I'm amazed and I wonder what people mean by al that complicated, poly-interpretable, conceptions. Who is immature and what do you mean by immature? Can you hear or see if somebody is immature? Doesn't a immature use difficult or exalted words and notions? Can someone be less or more immature? Has the immature to read difficult philosophical books to become mature? At what manner should I recognize a mature? Is he serious-minded and modest? Can he still laugh?
What the hell is a growing mind? Can you see or feel it growing? Its there an end in his growing? How can I experience my mind is growing? Does it hurt? Do I have to be afraid my skull isn't big enough? I really cannot get a image of a developing mind somewhere inside me but it sounds very horrible. Can you tell me how a fully developed mind looks like and have you ever seen such a thing? What is growing if someone grows and who is the supervisor of that process of growing? Can you outgrown yourself and what does that mean? Do I have spiritual eyes and ears too and can you explain where I can find them? What do you mean by spiritual? Is it like esoteric? Never somebody has explained to me what he meant with all that secret words. Do I first have to become complicated to reach simplicity? Isn't it rather people use difficult words if they doesn't know themselves exactly?

"If you can pose a question, you can answer that too"( Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, 6:5)

Long ago I left university and bought a practice in a small rural municipality and soon I experienced I had learned a much, about rare diseases, classification of symptoms, labeling, prescriptions of medicines, but nothing about all those problems my patients came to me, their fears, sorrows, problems in their relationships, in other words nothing about life and dead. Once a visited a simple small farmer with some cows and he told me a marvelous but shocking story for myself. "Yesterday" he told me, "an advisor of the agricultural university paid a visit to me to advise me about the newest insights in cattle-breeding". But, he continued " he has learned all that stuff from his books and if I handle my cows in his way they all will die. And you", looking at me with sparkling eyes, " all you know is from books too, and with you they all die too". He knew his cows, looked, listened, smelled and knew, not hindered by knowledge. Nothing I learned about life in university, I did learn about that from my simple patients and perhaps most from my children. They showed me what I was before I filled my brains with all that complicated theories, notions and constructions. Never I have seen a level in my children, neither in anybody else. Again and again I got more doubts until I met some three years ago some wise people and I understood it wasn't mad I saw things, I did. And all gained momentum and again and again the pieces of the puzzle fell on their right place. I experienced kids nothing can learn from their parents except the way it isn't and the only right way to bring them up it to give a good example, for to be happy they have to unlearn all they have learned, like I had to do.

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know we all want to change your head
You tell me, it's the institution.
Well, you know you better free your mind instead.(The Beatles)

For us that's the message of the Gospel of Thomas, and if we all free our minds the world will change,

Pelagius too has walked into the trap of believe in the misconception and myth of free will. The scattle-brain Paul at least has understood he had no free will as he says:

"For to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not, but the evil which I would not, I do"(Rom.7:15)

Moreover he was very honest to confess he didn't understood a whit of it:

"For we now see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known"(1-Cor.13:12).

Nevertheless it was enough to found the church, but

"Nobody exclusively wanders for his own account, but he is also the cause and accomplisher of wandering of others" (Seneca: De vita beata).

Men are driven by their impulses, passions, desires, vanity, expectations, self-interests, and most of all by their fears. That are their motives and that let them make the choices between two evils and let them do they deep in their heart won't. It is enough to look to yourself to assent to that. Free will is an illusion and that was the mistake of Pelagius.

Logion 37 of the Gospel of Thomas is a crazy logion if you take it litteraly, for "Jesus" is amidst his disciples and speaks to them as they ask when they will see him. At the time you was a small child you didn't know what shame was, for shame is not in your nakedness but in your head. Perhaps your parents and anyway the other children taught you nudity is somewhat dirty and you became uncertain about your body. In this sick and superficial society wherein everybody judges an other by his outer-side and his achievements as his market-value. People cannot love their fellow-men because they have unlearned to love themselves. And if they love themselves it is only for their outer-sides and achievements and they judge themselves by others. So it is not enough to take your clothes of to know you did enter the kingdom, for you have first to regain your Self-confidence and become independent of what others think, or you think others think about you. It is all projection, for you only are influenced by the judgement of others if you judge them yourself and you first have to stop with that. If you are offended by someone, it tells more about yourself than about the other. For you do that because you think he has to change his behaviour, and nobody has the right to determine life of an other. You never can change an other person and if it is so, you only can change the manner you look at it. Like the great stoic Epictetus said:

"It are not the things, but your opinion about the things that disturb you"

. So if you cannot changes things or circumstances you only can change yourself. In all emotions is a part of yourself and only there you can free yourself of. If you do so, you can get rid of all your emotions and then at the end you reach what the stoics call apatheia and that is the same as the Kingdom and then you will experience your shame has gone. It is difficult, you have to be often the least, but the least is always the wisest.

Luke 9:48: "For he that is least among you all, the same shall be great", so at the base of your totempole, the least in society, is in the vision of "Jesus" the greatest. You have learned you was still nothing when you was a small child, for you had to become somewhat. Why then logion 4 and 22? Why have we to become like the children? Would it be not so in the world "Jesus" speaks about our behaviour is absolute insane and what is insane in our world the life is "Jesus" ment? Is it not our lack of trust, for we don't know who and what we are, we don't understand life, we don't know what we mean when we talk about god, we believe in many others except in ourselves. Life is for people like wandering blindfold in a labyrinth and they don't know why they have to wander, for all people do it. Wouldn't the world outside the labyrinth be a totally different from our world? And is the labyrinth in your own head wherein your soul wanders not as complicated as the outer labyrinth? Compare your brain with a hard disk, with a marvelous and ultimate version of Microsoft, and you have overloaded the harddisk whit all sort of software, that disturbs the system every time. Wouldn't be better to remove all that stuff? In the other world you don't need a computer. That is the meaning of the Gospel of Thomas, to get rid of all the software that disturbs your Reason,

Gender is natural but no divider of mankind. It is difficult to understand mankind in essence is divided by some bodily differences and if you look at little kids you can see it isn't true. For a kid is a kid a kid. They even need no digital speech to communicate and to play. They speak with their body-language and still for adults 80% of the communication is non-verbal, but most of them are not aware of that. It is fascinating to see and hear the discrepancy between what people say and show. And it is poignant to know the body cannot lie and little kids see that faultless. It is the hypertrophy of the left hemisphere of our cortex, due to development of speech and grammar, "I"-awareness, will and activity, that changes kids from double-handed to most right-handed. Ratio resides in the left halve, intuition in the right. Even the weight of the left hemisphere in our rational society is more heavy, like the muscle-hypertrophy of a sportsman. It is difficult for a left-handed to live in a society of right-handed and beware of the double-handed. So only that conditioning in childhood determines preferences and abilities. The parable about the talents in Matthew 18, by most christians is explained as they have to use their talents to serve their own interests and to go far in society, but rather it seems "Jesus" ment you have to use them for the foundation of the Kingdom and a righteous world, and that's quit different.

On your site we read the summary of your book "Jesus the healer" and we think it is perhaps quite different and that Jesus, if the gospels were not merely a construction to hang on a messianistic message, was the real Cynic as described bij Epictetus in his Diatribes, the absolute apocalyptic eschatologist inspired by the book of Henoch, a dangerous political activist and a threat for the establishment, like all prophets, a counter-cultural wisdom sage, like Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and a rabbi inspired by the school of rabbi Hillel the Elder and Philo Alexandrinus.
Further there is a continuous line from Boeddha, saying that all suffering comes from the desire (so: no desire, no suffering), Qohelet,

" he who increases knowledge, increases affliction"

(so: no knowledge, no affliction), Plato, who wrote:

"For that is the biggest mistake in treatment of the illness, that there are doctors for the body and doctors for the mind, whilst both however cannot be separated"

and Aristoboulos,

"the Logos is the medicine"

Callimachus:

"wisdom is for all the all healing medicine",

in the Wisdom of Salomo:

"It is your Logos, o Lord, that cures all"

and Philo Alexandrinus:

"the Logos is the healer of the illnesses"

and he wrote about the Therapeutes:

"they are called therapeutae and therapeutrides, either because they profess an art of medicine more excellent than that in general use in cities (for that only heals bodies, but the other heals souls which are under the mastery of terrible and almost incurable diseases, which pleasures and appetites, fears and griefs, and covetousness, and follies, and injustice, and all the rest of the innumerable multitude of other passions and vices, have inflicted upon them"

Much more later Paracelsus said:

"I warn you, you doctors, do not cure the body, but cure the soul and the body will follow"

and

" Die höchste grund der Artzenei ist die Liebe".

And in Holland the heretic Spinoza wrote:

"Mind and body do not interact, because they are not distinguished".

In the beginning of the twentieth century, doctors still knew about the vis medicatrix naturae and the vitalisme was not yet obscure. The root idea in whole history of all that heretics was that symptoms have a meaning and not a cause and if you look for a cause you find a the meaning nevermore. There are no bodies and minds but only people.
So in our opinion "Jesus" was the ultimate anarchistic, nihilistic, revolutionair, counter-cultural, apocalyptic eschatologist, healer and wisdom sage, whose aim was to turn back this upside-down world, an Umwertung aller Werte like Nietzsche, and to establish a righteous and honest world. He did not cure people from conversion disorders, but he showed them the way to holiness, to the Kingdom of God or the apatheia, to the right and straight path, to selfknowledge and by going that way the symptoms disappear like snow under a hot sun, like we experienced for ourselves.
In this light we wrote the elucidation, and not an interpretation, of the secret sayings of the Gospel of Thomas and brought it back to its revolutionary meaning.
We will end with a passage from your own Henry David Thoreau (Walking):

"So we sounter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn".

Speech is a very treacherous medium. Everyone uses notions and ascribes his own sense to them, dependent of his own opinions. Truth is such a word and before we talk on, it would be sensible to make a clear definition, before we walk in the same trap like Pilate when he spoke: "what is truth". I will explain what is truth in my mind. In the Divina Commedia Dante says:

"By that you will recognize truth, because you listen to it reluctantly"

In Dutch we say: "I tell the truth to him", and people don't realize they only tell their own truth, but anyhow, people hate that. You say "he give him a piece of his mind" or "he tells him some truths" and that is at least less absolute, for you can hear the truth of somebody else is subjective. But anyhow people don't like the truth, because they won't confronted with their vices, their unauthenticity, their prejudices, their short-sightedness, their vanity, their dishonesty and their own part in their misery by holding up the mirror for them. For like Narcissus they won't look to themselves, but they only love their reflection. So in hell there are no mirrors, for if you don't want to look to yourself, life is a hell, but most people are habituated to this hell and they call it the best of the imaginable worlds. In fact truth is horrible, repugnant, shocking, disgusting, offending, and very, very painful. A birth is as painful as a re-birth. Isn't it more easier when Jesus says: "I am the way, the truth and the life, " to read it like "I tell you the way, the truth and about true life"?
So the truth is, your are robed with titles and knowledge, religion, job and possessions. That is the cage you sit in and that makes you are asleep, or "dead", figurative. Your are asleep or awake and there is nothing between, like you are honest or dishonest. If you are even the most little bit dishonest, you are dishonest. Like the thirth Patriarch of Zen said:

"one millimeter and heaven and earth are separated".

Further, it is useless to speak to God, for you only can do that to a anthropomorph, self-created image, that never answers you. It is enough to listen to Him, as he speaks through his Son, the Logos, your inner-voice, your conscious, who knows all, is always right and is self-speaking.

It is a fundamental difference whether I state an opinion or ascertain someone states an opinion. I can state it is raining and that's not my opinion but indeed a fact. I can state someone is angry with me, annoyed with me etc. but that is stating a fact and no opinion. Opinions always are concerned with interests, that a fact too and no opinion. About meta-communication Paul Watzlawick (Mental research Institute Palo Alto) wrote some beautiful books "Pragmatics of Human Communications" and "The language of Change" and in the first he writes:

"we continuous are engaged with communication and yet nearly not able to practise communication about communication".

He shows the traps and the treacherousness and awkwardness of language, the way people always have a double agenda, not really hear but always interpret the words they hear because they filter them through their own paradigm and so the way people are deaf for they won't hear.

"Wass man weiss, das sieht man"

wrote Goethe. You only are detached if you have no more opinion and that's no opinion.
All those big words like God, nature, freedom, man, happiness, health you only can define by what it is NOT. The free West is a cheek, talking about freedom by people who are slaves of their passions, fears and authorities sounds ridiculous to me. You cannot talk about all these things but only about all that hinders to see them clear. Knowledge is ignorance and knowledge is power, so ignorance is the power that made and maintains this unrighteous society.
To know yourself or God you don't need any scripture or book, for like Meister Eckehart spoke:

"Man is the best book of God"

and the Gospel of Thomas is merely a description of all resistance and disbelief you meet when you free yourself from the Matrix,

When you play flute you don't respond to an internal source, but to an internalized program, like a player-piano. Like every trick you first have to acquire some techniques and enough software, like a robot, to reproduce others created for you. The only distinction between a player-piano and a person is the last can make mistakes and can put some of his emotions in the performance. Even when you improvise you use your learned techniques to express your emotions. The question is why you have the need to play flute and I think you are right when you say people fly into activities to escape the chaos in their minds. They are scared of silence and they always are on the run for themselves, scared as they are to meet their Selve, the why-asker. For that they break silence by music, TV, and fly in their work, doing nice things, reading, studying and even on holiday they look for the crowd and when they are alone they run mad with themselves. They seek oblivion in liquor and drugs to escape from themselves or to quit their conscience, what comes to the same thing in essence. You better call it suppression instead of ignorance.

First I was surprised to hear in this group everybody has his own truth and now I understand everybody has his own conscience too. In the whole bible nowhere the idea of conscience is mentioned until the scatterbrain Paul invented it. So there are two possibilities. Either before Paul people didn't have a conscience, or it had an other name. Wouldn't it be possible they called it the Logos or the Son of God, who dwells in all of us? And that people held the Son of God crossed by their own will, so they cannot listen to him? Much more later Freud introduced the Super-Ego, which is a product of the Zeitgeist and is composed by the rules and moral of society, laws of men, we have to internalize to adapt to society and so becomes the inner Big Brother, watching us. Don't you mix up that two? Wouldn't be rather you have to choose to live listening to your big brother or to your conscience or the will of God? I know these all are constructions but I think you have to use words to make them superfluous,

In my introductory post I told you my intention was to explain what is going on in Holland about the Gospel of Thomas and meanwhile I understood it's very different from the complicated and cerebral way you handle it. For us the logia have been beacons on our route and we didn't study it but we used it on our way to self-knowledge. We experienced you have to overcome, paraphrasing Wittgenstein, the logia to see the world clear ( "You have to knock over the ladder, after ascending it" or like the mystic Hans Denck spoke:

"Wer nit in Gottes hausz ist, dem ist der brief kain nütz; wer in Gottes hausz ist, der waiszt on den brieff, wie from der Herr ist".

If you hold up a mirror to someone else you need to be a clear mirror yourself and we did experience you only can understand an other if you do understand yourself. In every contact with our patients and clients for us the only question is: why is it right this person, who comes right now with right this complaint. For us they are fellow-men and they trust us for they feel we accept them like that and together we look for the problem before the complaint. They did translate their problems in symptoms and together we translate it back and we show them in what manner their way of living and handling their emotions are connected with their sickness. We tell parables and use metaphores, we explore together their darkside and tell much about our own struggles and the way we conquered them. We never give advises but we only show connections and let make them choices themselves. If you live at this manner this is the consequence and if you don't like that you have to change your life. People let us take a look behind their scenes, we together empty their garbage-cans, because they feel we accept them like they are and don't condemn them. Always when someone is sitting face to face with us, we realize we could have been ourselves, if we were born in an other nest. For us all men are really equal and for us they differ from each other only by the amount and quality of their luggage and with them we only talk about their luggage and we show what they always have known. It is fascinating to see the way it works. We tell if they cannot changes circumstances they only can look different to them, you never can change an other person, but you can only change the way you look at him, quarrels never give a solution, and sometimes the only thing what is be left is to play the play, like we do for the time being. If they understand what we mean and have started on their way out, we point out them to our sites. Christians are the toughst for they are so fixed on and obsessed by a historical "Jesus", you never can explain to them he was only an example of what we all can and have to be.
We make money but for us its only filthy lucre and we render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. We need nothing for ourselves to be happy. Nobody can find us for we are sly as snakes and harmless like doves. In our group we don't talk and discuss about the Gospel of Thomas, for that we left behind us. We only encourage each other, help each other to not give way to temptations, talk about our experiences and visit other groups. We guard the fire until it is ablaze,

Some three years ago a very unusual version the Gospel of Thomas appeared, written by an unknown writer, with a disturbing elucidation of the secret words, consistent and compromiseless. It seems the writer brought the message of the Gospel of Thomas back to its original revolutionary and anarchistic meaning and a simple course for enlightenment. Meanwhile there are several secret groups and I am a member of one of them and we discus about it and we also try to live according the meaning we find in the explanations and it radical changed our lives. Often we hardly cannot understand people don't see what we see and we have been so blind and deaf before too. We are very cautious for we notice how threatening it is for most of the people and the establishment.

It seems to me very dangerous and strange to hand over responsibility for your own life and health to someone else. In the Isha Upanishad you can read :

"Into blind darkness enter those who follow ignorance; into even greater darkness go those who follow knowledge".

And that is what people do if they surrender themselves to doctors.

"For the ignorant doctors are like devils from purgatory and they maintain purgatory instead of decreasing it and if people would be more mature as they are, they wouldn't fall a victim to their brothers in immaturity, the ignorant doctors. But they are attracted to each other magical: equal attracts equal",

wrote Paracelsus and there is no new thing under the sun. Never a doctor has made somebody a better man. Self doctoring is quit different from leaving doctoring to your Self, for your Self (your Logos) is objective and sees all emotions you maintain your illnesses with and you can ignore them until your last day. No illness is incurable, for it is only incurable if you believe it is incurable and you only cannot change if you believe you cannot change. In "The death of Ivan Ilych" by Lev Tolstoy is a clear passage about what will happen to all of us if we ignore stuff we don't want to see:

"His mental sufferings were due to the fact that that night, as he looked at Gerasim’s sleepy, good-natured face with it prominent cheek-bones, the question suddenly occurred to him: "What if my whole life has been wrong?" It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend. "But if that is so," he said to himself, "and I am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it—what then?" And when he is dying: " He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. He was hindered from getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good one. That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him most torment of all".

That's the fight you can put off till your death-bed, perhaps it is wiser to strike a balance of your life now. Finally that's the meaning of the Gospel of Thomas,

People want to be deceived, for they won't hear the truth but only want to get their own right and for that they only hear the arguments that confirm their "own" opinions. When people, they call themselves patients, come to the doctor they always tell the halve of the story and doctors have learned to ignore them if they try to tell the other halve. They can point out precisely all places where it hurts and with our complicated pain-theories we can explain the cause, but doctors did unlearn they suffer for the life they live hurts and so the blind lead the blind and both fall into the ditch. It is fascinating always when you ask people to describe their pains in images: it's like barbed wire is twisted around my chest, like someone stabs a knife in my belly, like my head is jammed in a vice, and many more and always appears in my mind's eye that beautiful painting of the hell by Hieronymus Bosch. And so always people tell unconsciously they really won't to tell.
We are sorry for you if you are convinced your life is merely a stay in your death-bed and I have a slight memory of it. Living in the specious present is quite different, believe us or not.
The article about the consciousness as an electromagnetic field make me think of the Matrix, otherwise a beautiful messianistic metaphore, and of Chuang Tze, to me more clear than Lao Tzu,:

" the simple and honest people is despised and the specious inventions of restless minds are taken in with eagerness. It is the pomp of words , that disturbs the world".

Every culture is based upon dominion of one over an other and the lubricant is lie, deceit and self-deceit. Divide et impera and give people bread and games. We all live in a society where they call war peace, slavery freedom and where ignorance is power.There are always people who determine others how to live and so there are always people who believe an other knows the way he has to live and the result is this society we live in. It is tragic we all have learned it is all normal, like an animal born in a cage will die if you liberate him. Throughout the ages always there have been people who had doubts about what was normal, what is human and what is conditioned by culture, what is nature and what is nurture, what is self and what is ego. And always the lickspittles of the always anti-revolutionairy establishment won. Our history is the history of the winners and power, the history of the leisure class, the history of externals supported by theories of servile thinkers or otherwise that parts of their theories the establishment could use for his own justification. All those others are denounced, exiled, ignored, ridiculed or murdered and most of them finally are abandoned and forgotten and disappointed they fade away fought a losing battle. Like in the Wisdom of Solomon (Apocryphal, for the church couldn't use it for his interests):

"Let us oppress the poor righteous man, let us not spare the widow, nor reverence the ancient gray hairs of the aged. Let our strength be the law of justice: for that which is feeble is found to be nothing worth. Therefore let us lie in wait for the righteous; because he is not for our turn, and he is clean contrary to our doings: he upbraideth us with our offending the law, and objecteth to our infamy the transgressings of our education. He professeth to have the knowledge of God: and he calleth himself the child of the Lord. He was made to reprove our thoughts. He is grievous unto us even to behold: for his life is not like other men's, his ways are of another fashion".

The prophets, Jesus, the martyrs, the Kathars, Spinoza and all other heretics only became famous after their death because they could contradict their so-called followers made of their instructions no more. Perhaps Chuang Tzu was right as he said:

"Nowadays the whole world lives in blinding and though I want to guide the right direction, I fail to it. Knowing this is not possible, trying to force my way would only be an other blinding".

So there is nothing new People are so used to their cage and the idea you cannot leave it, they even not try it. It is like Erich Fromm named it "the fear for freedom" for freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

In the Symposion, in the discourse of Aristophanes, Plato describes the trap of Eros, or Libido, like we call it at present. Ever the nature of man was different, for at that time man was whole and it was of a male/female sex and then he describes a creature with four arms and legs and two backs and they attacked the Gods. And to make an end to their rebellion the Gods decided to cut them in halves. "But now", tells Plato, "we are divided, because of our unrighteousness". So we became male and female, polarized and every half in search of his better half and together they are whole again. Eros or Libido, the reunitor, the Gods planted in and by that man tries to make from two one again. In coition they play a animal with to backs, like Rabelais names it in his Gargantua and Pantagruel, and they call it unification. The big mistake Plato made, the same as in the Fall of Man, is he didn't realize we all are born like small whole little men, and in the course of our acculturation we are halved and brought up to those species with that special behaviour and thinking we call girls and boys, halves who are attracted to each other by Eros.
And that couple of halves need each other, are fit to each other, are complementary to each other, speak about we, are dependent on each other, cling to each other and hold fast each other in a suffocating hold, so no one can change. And they call it love, but it is more like trade. Anyhow it has nothing to do with desinterested love. And it is a wonder these halves get whole baby's. So if one of them changes they don't fit to each other no more, they divorce and go in search again for a new other halve and so l'histoire se repete over and over. The more strong the relation the more grief, if one of the halves falls of, because living as a halve you always miss the other halve. So libido is the big trap to prevent us to become whole again and return from duality and splitness to simplicity and to go in to the bride-room.
The blessed one doesn't know needs no longer and the small dead of orgasm, that losing yourself, from which you awake every time in the same dull world, nothing can add to his blessedness. As to that the Roman Catholic church is right when they state sexual act exclusively has to serve propagation., but that only counts for the community of whole ones and not in this vale of tears, people try to pleasant up and to escape from with their short-living orgasms. Post coitum omne animal triste est. Count for yourself how much you gave in for strange play.
So in paradise, before the Fall or in the Kingdom male and female love each other desinterested, like God loves all his children and there is no savior. Sexual desire is a cultural artefact. You cannot believe that but you only can experience that. You cannot think decreeing what good is and evil leads to disaster, you only can experience that too.
If I speak about the delightful flavour of a fruit, unknown to you, you can believe me or not but you better can taste it too. If I talk about a Shangri-la beyond the horizon, you can believe me or not, but you only can know I'm right if you go and see it yourself,

Are you your body? And who is that "I" that uses your body? Is that "I" the owner of that body? Descartes thought Cogito ergo sum, and he meant because I think there is an "I". So when you was still a little baby, you didn't think and there was no "I'. Either you was born incomplete, or the "I" is something acquired, like clothing or glasses. For a better comprehension it seems easier to identify the "I' with the Ego. The heretical anti-psychiatrist Ronald Laing wrote long ago:

"The "I' is only an instrument for this world".

So the "I" is your luggage to play the game, for the world is a theatre, everybody plays his role and gets his part. In "The book: On the Taboo against Knowing who you are" Alan Watts wrote:

"Instead of giving our children clearly and explicitly explanation of the spelling-rules of society, we throw them in confusion hopeless because we -as adults- once have been thrown in confusion too, and staying in confusion, don't understand ourselves the play we play."

And we all have learned our tricks and we are proud of them and we want others to admire us for that tricks. Typing is one of that tricks, but who does that typing. If you don't know how you do that, it cannot be you who does it. Is it you who is breathing, or are we all manifestations of the First Unmoving Mover? He who dies before he dies, don't die when he dies, is a quote of Mohammed ( he said some beautiful things too) and that means if you Ego dies, you have no more fear to die, for you are ready.
Typing this, I look out of the window and see the great tits flying to and fro to the nest-box I made for them, feeding their youngs. They don't think, they behave like great tits, they sing like great tits and thy are unable to abandon their nature. But what they cannot is admiring and be surprised about ingeniousity of creation. But man can quit his nature and behave like a humanoid or Yahoo. We are all Eloi, everybody with his own Morlock inside. To find back your own nature, your Self, you first have to know what it isn't and that your "I', your Ego and that is the message of the Gospel of Thomas,

The Gospel of Thomas seems to the people in this world, although it was written in a primitive culture for unlettered and simple men, a difficult and mysterious writing. So you need a golden key to decode the secret sayings. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:

"in the madness the lock is not destroyed, but transformed; the old key can not open it, but a key with an other shape would be able to open it".

At the end of a painful and difficult search, losing all, we found ourselves back in the other world, where we found that key.

Our version of the Gospel of Thomas is not better or worse but only quite different. There are as many interpretations as there are people, for everybody looks through his own colored glasses and does not fight for the truth but for his own right. A message is not good or bad but is works or doesn't and we experience it does. Most of my group are doctors, psychologists and other workers in healthcare and with compassion and love and we try very careful to let people see what we see.

In the twenties of the 20th century W.B. Cannon published a revolutionary book: "The wisdom of the human body", and whit that he became one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine. Descartes divided man in soul (res cogitans) and body (res extensa) and believed they had relations by the epiphysis. De la Mettrie wrote "L'homme machine" and so the concept of man became more mechanistic again and again and emotions became a product of the brain. Cannon proved emotional, vegetative and hormonal reactions are seen by stimuli from outer-world and the way they affect the thalamus. Later others proved chronic emotional stimuli induce first an functional disorder and finally an organic sickness. Later Hans Selye increase the effort by his theory of stress( from distringere= tear apart) and introduced the idea adaptation-mechanisms that overshoot their mark lead to adaptation-diseases and they are organ-specific. So if you master and suppress your emotions, because we live in a civilized society and nobody tells what he thinks, your body talks and shows what you conceal. For instance if you swallow your rage, you get a stomach-ulcer, if you utter your rage the other one gets a stomach-ulcer, like there is always a winner and a loser. But what happened to that knowledge? Scientists who believe measuring is knowing, didn't know what to do with the immeasurable emotions and concluded you cannot measure doesn't exists, like life itself. Further you cannot make money if you point out to people they are responsible for their own sickness. So we are saddled with a medicine only fighting symptoms of a failed adaptation to society, men made themselves.
For that reason you have to quit adaptation, the world, to get rid of your emotions and to reach apatheia or the Kingdom. That is the true healing and when you go in to the bride-room you will be invulnerable and cannot become sick again.

Long ago, by what we then considered as a conjunction of circumstances, we lost all things we loved and we felt like standing with our back against the wall. By that time we understood the question of Job for like he, we wanted to know why all this happened to us and we started our what you call spiritual quest. We experienced how dangerous the question "why" is and like Odysseus we found many troubles, nearly invincible barriers, dangerous temptations, sevenheaded dragons on our way and yet it became all the time easier until the moment we could not go further and had to conclude all our efforts had been in vain. And in a moment of uttermost despair we felt through the mirror and a feeling beyond words toke possession of us and we did not understand what happened to us. It was like the last piece of the puzzle fel on the right place. It was so unbelievable that we did not dare to talk about it to anybody, afraid to be declared for insane. We could not imagine what we saw had seen never before and so we started to read and read and read and wrote and wrote and wrote. For like Odysseus after his coming home, we realized we first had to slaughter the 100 lovers, before we could rest. And everywhere in the whole history from the taoists until now we found it back and at least we had a hundreds pages with annotations like the pack of Sjaalman in the Max Havelaar of Multatuli. The root idea in whole history of all that heretics was that symptoms have a meaning and not a cause and if you look for a cause you find a the meaning nevermore. There are no bodies and minds but only people.
We tried to let people see what we saw, but everybody is so afraid to abandon his seeming securities and to leave the herd. They sooner fight to dead than they give up their opinions and unhappiness. For the biggest problem is if one changes his mind he has to admit to be mistaken his previous life and most people put that of until their death-bed.
The past years we rewrote our annotations many times and every time it became more compact, but we could not find the right form. Two years ago we read the Gospel of Thomas again and in a flash we understood it was our story and within a week we wrote down the elucidation of the secret words or how to become man again and to discover who you are.

I found a nice quote about fat people in Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

"In Kirby and Spence I find an important entomological fact:: that some insects though they are equipped in their last metamorphosis with digestive organs they don't use them. Also they note: it is the general rule that almost all insects in that state eat much more less than larvae. The gluttonous caterpillars changed in a butterfly, the fly that became maggot, content with some drops of sweetness. Somebody who eats much is a man in a larval state. There are whole tribes that live in that state, people without dream or imagination and their fat bellies betray them."

Perhaps it is significant in this split society Western man is laboured under his overweight while everywhere else fellow-men starve and at this moment a new famine threatens Africa.
In a letter to Gabriele Piccolomini Leonardo da Vinci wrote:

"We all are exiles living inside the frames of a strange painting. He who knows this lives grandly. The rest are insects".

Thoreau would say they are larvae, thinking they are unable to leave the painting where the kill the time and so wound eternity. How to become a butterfly and to leave the painting is the meaning of the Gospel of Thomas.

In the eleventh book of Hermes Trismegistos you can read:

"If therefore thou wilt not equal thy self to God, thou canst not understand God. For the like is intelligible by the like. Increase thy self into an immeasurable greatness, leaping beyond every Body; and transcending all Time, become Eternity and thou shalt understand God: If thou believe in thyself that nothing is impossible, but accountest thy self immortal, and that thou canst understand all things, every Art, every Science and the manner and custom of every living thing".

And it seems to me very likely to the meaning of the Gospel of Thomas.
Paracelsus wrote:

"Be able to understand that which brings about fortune, is understanding God; and understanding God is being God, for only the like can understand the like".

And Meister Eckehart spoke:

"The word spoken by Augustinus: 'what man loves, that is man', has to be understand at this manner: Does he love a stone, he is a stone; does he love a man, he is a man; does he love God…. an now I don't dare to speak on, for if I say he is God then, you would stone me to death".

And all this while is written:

" Ye are Gods; and all of you are children of the most High (Psalm 82:6)".

In this time this audacious ones are not stoned to death but are locked in a mental home and it was Ronald Laing (The politics of Experience), in imitation of Socrates, who had understood that the biggest blessings come to us by the way of madness, but in this society we don't allow people to terminate their quest.

In early Judaism deviation from the right and simple Way was regard as the only sin. When you leave that path you have to wander, like Ahasverus, and you become a stranger in the world, but well adapted to the wandering herd in society. So the choice is the Way or society, Life or "dead".

"O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths"(Isaiah 3:11)

If you want to find back the Way, you have to leave the herd, like Nietzsche wrote in his "Also sprach Zarathustra". Therein he describes the process of ripening man has to go. First he is a culture-bearing, willing pack-animal, ready conforming to the requirements and values of his culture, uncritical adapted. Then he leaves the herd and becomes lion, a strong loner, trying to get rid of his cultural luggage, and a threat for the herd. But that phase he has to overcome to become child again, harmless in a holy saying-Yes. All things are said so many times, but people are hearing deaf and seeing blind.
Every culture is a product of losing the Right Way, and then people open Pandora's box and all misery is a stimulation to return to that way and to close that horrible box. So I'm amazed you are amazed about the Twin Towers. All is connected with all and so everybody is jointly responsible, ( not guilty, for that is christian invention) for all catastrophes and misery. All people live in a web of dependence on all other people in the world and every disturbance of that web, spreads over the whole web. Like in chaos-theory the wing-beat of a butterfly in New-Zealand can cause a tornado in the Caribbean. People made and maintain this web themselves and the filaments are the Nasdaq, economy, interests, power, influencing, traditions and many more machinery. Everybody, except the kids, has dirty hands and so everybody is responsible. Before the fall of the wall in Berlin, we had a enemy, on which we could project all evil. The enemy was outside. But now we have no more enemy and we have to conclude the enemy is inside and with the crusade against terrorism we vainly try to create a new enemy to project on. People always reap what they sow.
Karma is a clear image as you consider it like the luggage everybody got from his parents, grand-parents and so on. But reincarnation is a cowardless invention to run away from your responsibilities and so every-time again l'histoire se repete and they call it the "Wheel of eternal Return". Everybody has to stop his own wheel and since you only have one life you have to do it in this life, otherwise you saddle up your children with your Karma.
In our group are only people who left the herd, formerly lions roaring to the establishment, some older then you are, some doctors, academics, psychologists , all playing their role, knowing they do, sly as snakes and harmless as doves. Every day we meet the victims of this rat-race and we carefully try to show them the way out, but it is like mopping while others keep open the tap. That is why we dedicate ourselves to close that tap.

If you meet a problem in your life, wrote Wittgenstein, you can try to solve the problem, but you better can change your life in that way the problem disappears. That's not the way people use to live for they depend to many other people to solve their problems. They need lawyers, soldiers, psychiatrists, priests, academics, and many others to solve the problems they meet on their way so they can go on their way to nowhere. And perhaps the most interesting in connection with the Gospel of Thomas, they need doctors to fight all that symptoms, they call it diseases, they contract by their way of living.

"My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord; neither be weary of his correction( Proverbs 3:11)

and

"Correction is grievous unto him that forsaketh the way: and he that hateth reproof shall die" ( Proverbs15:10)

But with the results of their chastening and their reproofs they go to the doctor and so they never become wise. Suffering has to purify, pain( from poena:=punishment) is a signal, a warning to turn back and to return to the straight and simple Way. The whole bible swarms with such references, the relation between unrighteousness and sickness, but nobody dares to see that. Callimachus, the Cyrenaic, wrote: " Verily, Wisdom is the all of all healing medicine". So the healings of "Jesus" didn't appear out of the blue but are a rediscovery of somewhat people always have known and yet but far away concealed in their hearts. Truth is painful but healing,

Lust is not a major drive in human psychology but in culture. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is the metaphor of culture, power and authority and the terror of Uruk. And the people of Uruk besought the Mother-goddess for help and She created a divine likeness, the mighty Enkidu, the natural man, one with nature. And a trapper started at Enkidu went to Gilgamesh and told him

"There is a certain fellow who has come from the mountains-- he is the mightiest in the land, his strength is as mighty as the meteorite(?) of Anu!".

And Gilgamesh, the voluptuary, advised the trapper to tame the natural man Enkidu by sensual pleasure and spoke:

"Go, trapper, bring the harlot, Shamhat, with you. When the animals are drinking at the watering place have her take off her robe and expose her sex. When he sees her he will draw near to her, and his animals, who grew up in his wilderness, will be alien to him."

And so it happened and so Enkidu lost his strength, the animals became afraid of him, he lost his paradise and became civilized. And in society lust is the big hindrance to regain paradise,

I gave a small anthology of the endless exploits of this best imaginable world and you wrote:
Best of the imaginable worlds? I don't have to imagine it....its real, we're in it and we know it, and its quite wonderful.
I don't understand there is so much misery in your wonderful world. It sounds to me very conflicting, a world with dying, most of them not old and full of years I suppose, and disabled people. And for them they need helpers like you and me.
A small parable: Imagine a wild and whirly river and at the lower reaches the helpers are collected. And every day the river supplies a never ceasing influx of drowning persons. Victims with a big variety of injuries. The helpers devote their attention to the victims, some already dying, classify the symptoms, calling them diseases, and are of the opinion their work is very sensible. They don't ask themselves where all victims come from, for that's life they learned. There is no why, for that question is forbidden. Nobody is allowed to swim against the stream in search to the upper reaches of the river, for imagine he would discover the Why, for helpers need victims for from that they derive the sense of their lives. Dedicated and full of mercy the helpers patch up the victims and when thy are recovered enough, they can leave again. Some are irreparable, they call them disabled, and they may stay. Some time later the victim, dismissed a moment ago, washes ashore again, and they call it a recidivism. And again the helper does his best and the victim is very grateful to him. And everybody thinks the helper is so clever, doing a fantastic job, that he is indispensable, until a day the helper washes ashore himself. For in the world this river flows there are only victims.

Here a small anthology of the endless exploits and dark-side of your best imaginable world: everywhere quarrels, hate, discord, solitude, depression, terror, misery and pain, uncertainty, despair, aggression, trouble and problems, blood, sweat and tears. Filled hospitals and jails, alcoholics and drugs-addicts, civil wars, tortures, billions of dollars for armament, in 2000 years 5000 wars. 600 million hungry, millions of refugees, road-victims, epidemics of cancer, Aids, heart-diseases and many others. Murder and homicide, terrorism, abortions and suicide, divorces, unemployment, poverty, physically and mentally handicapped. People destroy nature, fell the rain-woods, fish the oceans empty, destroy the ozone -layer, while they search for the lost paradise. And you sit in your ivory tower with clad windows, sitting on the lid of your own garbage-box and warble you live in such a nice world. That is what they call hearing deaf and seeing blind. Doubtless in logion 56 you don't find a corpse but a beautiful creation. That requires much self-deceit and the annoying thing is
you always bear the deceiver within you. There a so many good things, people say, but in this dualistic society that's only the one side of the medal. Opposite to all achievements is degeneration and indissoluble they are joined together. Behind the fine facade of welfare state is hidden a world of misery. That is toll mankind pays for his shortsightedness. In this split world there is no good without evil, no pros without cons, no above without under, no wealth without poverty, no God without Satan, no future without past. So if you want to go beyond duality and get rid of evil, cons, under, poverty, Satan and past, you have to get rid of the so-called good, pros, above, wealth and future. Perhaps is would be nice to read Candide, by Voltaire,a razorsharp satire about the best imaginable world, of present interest.

And remember the beautiful song by the Eagles about the white man's burden:

THE LAST RESORT

She came from Providence, wasn't in Rhode Island
Where the Old World shadows hang heavy in the air
She packed her hopes and dreams like a refugee
Just as her father came across the sea

She heard about a place; people were smilin'
Spoke about the Red man's way and how they loved the land
They came from everywhere to the Great Divide
Seeking a place to stand or a place to hide

Down in the crowded bars, out for a good time
Can't wait to tell you all what it's like up there
They called it paradise; I don't know why
Somebody laid the mountains low while the town got high

And then the chilly winds blew down across the desert
Through the canyons of the coast to the Malibu
Where the pretty people play; hungry for power
To light their neon ways and give 'em things to do

Some rich man came and raped the land; nobody caught him
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes, and Jesus, people bought 'em
They called it paradise; the place to be
They watched the hazy sun sinkin' in the sea

You can leave it all behind, and sail to Lahaina
Just like the missionaries did so many years ago
They even brought a neon sign: Jesus is comin'
Brought the white man's burden down; brought the white man's reign

Who will provide the grand design, what is yours and what is mine
"Cause there is no more new frontier; we have got to make it here
We satisfy our endless needs, and justify our bloody deeds
In the name of destiny, and in the name of God

And you can see them there on Sunday morning
They stand up and sing about what it's like up there
They called it paradise; I don't know why
You call someplace paradise; kiss it goodbye

Man is responsible for his own life, his own actions and all misery that results from them. What man distinguishes from animals is his freedom, not bound to a territory, no natural enemies and not bound to special food, for

"I have given you every herb baring seed, which is upon the face of all earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat" (Gen 1:29)

But that only is valid if you walk on the right and simple way (of righteousness, Prov. 8:20) Imagine a beautiful straight and smooth way, whereon it is lovely to walk. Beside that way it is rough, nearly impassable, with bramble-bushes and pitfalls. If you step beside the way it doesn't feel good and that's only a warning to turn back. So all emotions and all pain and all suffering only is an incitement to go back for your own good. Every action is a question, the result is the answer and it is your own responsibility to listen to it. But men blame the bramble-bushes, the pitfalls, their fellow-travellers and their leaders.
Life can be unbelievable easy and the route to the simple way is the meaning of the Gospel of Thomas,

Little kids don't understand the strange world of the grown-ups. So you have to make them strange to fit them in that world. With crooked bricks you built a crooked wall. With sick people a sick society. Straight brick don't fit In a crooked wall and healthy men don't fit in a sick society. So the less adapted the healthier and the healthier the less adapted. But parents adapt their children, we call it education, in their own image and likeness and behave so like god. That's why people attribute their qualities to their own projected god, the punishing and revenging father they stand in frightened awe of. Naturally little kids are not selfish or bullying, for they are born as tabula rasa in a system with unnatural rules, laws, requirements and values, they have to adapt to. And only that makes them selfish and bullying and the biggest taboo is to tell parents they are responsible for the behaviour, health and sickness of their kids. But they have learned to blame the genes, character, the weather, and many more poor excuses to run away from their responsibility. Still in the thirties of the past century in the medical world it was common knowledge the asthma of a child was the neurosis of the parents. Nowadays it is almost a mortal sin if you even think about it. The genetics is the new predestination doctrine, the new original sin and the patients the new credulous. They exchanged religion for science, the new saviour. Emanuel Kant wrote in 1783 about Enlightenment:

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!"- that is the motto of enlightenment".

But people refer to others and think if they stand on the shoulders for their predecessors they can reach higher, but so you built a Tower of Babel, or a Colossus with feet of clay.

Heard again yesterday that marvelous Logical Song by Supertramp and wrote it down for you for I think there is more wisdom in it then in most present philosophers

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily
joyfully, playfully, watching me.
But they send me away, to teach me how be sensible
logical, responsible, practical
And they showed me a world, where I could be so
dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical

There are times, when all the world is asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know, it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am

Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a
radical, liberal, fanatical, criminal
Won't you sign us your name, we'd like to feel you're
acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable

We are all born princes(ces) but our parents turned us into frogs, like their parents did to them and so on and on and we wait for the Prince or the Saviour, like Snow-white, to wake us. In whole creation there is no living creature that educates his young ones, they only let them grow up by only protecting and giving the good example.

"It is like the dismay of the skilled gardener, capable in lopping, shaving and all demand of the profession, if at once a stranger pulls out of his hands pruning-knife and lopping-shears and says: let grow that mess, freely, like it wants to do. For I assure you, you cannot make clear to any gardener in the world, a wilderness is more beautiful than a maintained garden. And so not to many others, even if they are no gardeners"(Frederik van Eeden, Dutch Utopist and follower of your own undervalued prophet Henry David Thoreau)

And the Oglala-chief Luther Standing bear spoke that beautiful words somewhere in 19e century:

"We considered the great areas, the magnificent waving hills and the twisting streams with their tangle of vegetation not like "wild". For the white man only, nature was a wasteland, and for them the land was poisoned with "wild "animals and "wild" men. For us they were tame. Earth was beneficent and we were surrounded by the blessings of the Great Mystery. First when the hairy man came from the Eats and treated with brute rage us and the people beloved by us unrighteous, it became "wild" for us. And at the moment the animals from the wood took flight by his arrival, for us the "Wild West" began"

It was Nietzsche who wrote: "christianity is the biggest business-accident of the last 2000 years" and "the last christian died at the cross". And I am afraid he is right.

There are two ways to render myths harmless. First you can sell them like fairy-tales, like we did with the myths of Andersen and Grimm or you can rebuild them to a religion. Such is the fate of satirical books like Gullivers Travels and the worst you can do is to allow Disney to violate them to merely entertainment. Then carry them over to the scholars, the literals and word-fuckers and everybody is at sea. There is no expedition sent out in search for the glass slipper of Cinderella but they do for the ark of Noah and the foreskin of jesus. And the result to take the Promised Land literally seems clear. Bruce Springsteen didn't mean Israel when he sang:

"Blow away the dreams that tear you apart.
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but brokenhearted
I believe in the promised land".

There is another beautiful satire by Bernard Mandeville, I can't help he is Dutch too, "The grumbling Hive". It is still very of current interest. In his time like always the establishment knew itself in danger, branded him as a heretic and named him Man Devil.
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/hive.html

Always the problem is to know what is the wheat and what the chaff. The Maker didn't create people but creates them continuously. He is the always creating creator. In Job 34: 14-15 you can read:

"If he set his heart upon man, [if] he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust."

So you can consider the whole earth and all life as a hologram maintained by all energy in the cosmos and so the centre of the cosmos. The Maker is the holographer who made the eternal and immutable laws of nature and even He cannot change them but He is not in need of that for He saw it was good, a perfect world in perfect balance with perfect men to enjoy his creation. All living creatures always living according their nature except the human race that thinks in its pride it knows better. People don't live according their nature but they are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one. They all behaved like androids and forgot who they are and that the meaning of their Maker is they only live to enjoy his creation.
A writing, thinking human is an android like you wrote a down-graded representation of the perfect human puppet.
Some 2000 years ago there was a movement of former androids who became men again and experienced the blessedness of that condition . They saw little children, little real humans, transformed into androids by their android parents and wanted to stop that madness and so they wrote the Gospel of Thomas. The androids won and made christianity.

"In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, That he may withdraw man [from] [his] purpose, and hide pride from man. He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword"(Job 33:15).

That is the meaning of dreaming. Everybody has a drawer somewhere in his head filled with uncomprehended events of the past. Sometimes they just escape and gnaw at the conscience and people hurry to lock them back in the drawer. All are offences (and consequences of them, sickness, emotions, accidents and so on) against the maxim: "do not to others what you do not want they do to you" and wherein you ran away from your own responsibility by blaming the other or the circumstances. All that situations stay haunting you until you admit for yourself your own share in it. You never can change the past, you only can nullify the results of the past. It is as easy as that. And if you are not willing to face that situations and to admit to your self you had been wrong, they will pursue you until your death-bed.
"Oh death, where art thou sting?" reminds me to a autobiografic book, of a Switser Fritz Zorn, "The sting of dying", with the unforgettable intro:

"I am young, rich and educated; I am unhappy, neurotic and alone.I am educated bourgois and my whole life I was honest.My family is rather degenerated and I guess I have a hereditary taint myself and I am affected by my family.Of course I have cancer what results from the foregoing as a matter of course."

He describes in a striking way his desperate effort, from the moment he heard he had cancer, to get rid of his past and in sight with the goal he failed.

There are two types of relationship. A biological like I have with my biological brothers and sisters and a congeniality of mind. Saying 99:

"The disciples said to him: Thy brethren and thy mother are standing outside. He said to them: Those here who do the will of my Father, these are my brethren and my mother; these are they who shall enter into the kingdom of my Father".

We all are sons and daughters of God but if we have to behave like that and do His will. If you follow your "own" will, your "own" passions and serve your "own" interests you don't experience you are a Son of God. So when Paul speaks about James, the brother of the Lord, he means it metaphorical. If you are the brother of the Lord, you are like the Lord. So if you are a congenial of the Lord, you behave like the Lord. In 1-Cor.-46 you can read:

"After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of oneborn out of due time"

You can take it literally like a phantom but it seems obvious to understand it metaphorical like they reached enlightenment. Unlike you want to compare it with the newborn christians who found Jesus in their hearts. In Marc-41 and Matth-40 James not yet bore that epitheton ornans for at that moment he was still a disciple.
Another nice example is the miraculous feeding of the four-thousand. It is a crazy story contrary to the laws of nature like all miracles. In the Tractatus Theologico-politicus ( Ch.6 About Miracles) the arch-heretic Spinoza writes:

"For the mass thinks the force and providence of God just then appears most distinct when they see something unusual happening in nature, somewhat that is contrary to the idea it has by virtue of custom about nature, especially when this turns out to its own profit or benefit".

And he demonstrates every "miracle" needs a breaking of the eternal laws of nature. So no speaking snake or donkey of Bileam, no resuscitation of Lazare or Risen Lord. All are only metaphores.
Philo, who stayed for sometime with the Essenes, talks about 4000 of them. Wouldn't it be likely the miraculous feeding means their joining to the messianic movement?

Long ago you were a little kid and your mind only created images and they all had a meaning. Your fears came through like monsters and crocodiles under your bed. You had to eat and drink what your parents decided for you and you had to believe their explanations you didn't understood. And your mother said she loved you so much she could eat you up. That's the reason you did understand the fairy-tale about Hänsel and Grethel. You didn't yet think in language and reality was still reality. Life still was so wonderful, a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical. And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily joyfully, playfully, watching you. Reality was not yet fragmentated, a wood was a wood, your fellow-children weren't black or catholic or kids of the lawyer, men not yet dangerous, but then for you all children were equal. You even didn't need language to play the whole day. I hope you didn't forget that. Images and metaphores are not abstract but thinking in notions is abstract, an abstraction and a reduction of reality. Kids are simple minded and unlettered and they don't understand the complicated waffle of the grown-ups, for that's not of their world. The parables of "Jesus" are very simple unless you try to understand them litteraly

"Impure and deformed is the look from the willing. First when we desire nothing, first when our looking becomes pure contemplation, the soul of things opens: beauty. If I look at a forest I want to sell, rent, cut down, wherein I want to hunt, that I want to impose with a mortgage, then I don't see the wood, but only what has to do with my willing, with my plans and anxieties and with my purse. Then it consists of wood, it's young or old, sane or sick. Yet if I want nothing from it and straight away "thoughtless" deeply stare into the green, first then it is wood, is it nature, is it lovely, it gives wonder" ( Herman Hesse, Between East and West).

So indeed reality exists independent of what people think about it, but by their thinking they don't see what they see. They see purposes and self-interest and unfortunately they look to their fellow-men with the same look. In what way can I use the other for my own interests like pawns in a game of chess,

Indeed everyone thinks in imagery but because grown-ups have created an ratinal world they live in two different worlds and they are always conflicting. It is not possible for a man to ride two horses or draw two bows, and it is not possible for a servant to serve two masters; or he will honour the one and insult the other. You cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I think it's fascinating the way you describe the problem, that you are what you was as a child before language, but you have a lot more baggage. That is exactly the problem, for you have to choose for the child or the baggage. Music, art and poetry only act as makeshifts to funny-up the life in the cage. Happy people don't need that. Whole nature every moment ifs full of music but people prefer their own creations. In the fairy-tale of The Nightingale one day the emperor got an artificial nightingale and "the music-master praised the bird in the highest degree, and even asserted that it was better than a real nightingale, not only in its dress and the beautiful diamonds, but also in its musical power. "For you must perceive, my chief lord and emperor, that with a real nightingale we can never tell what is going to be sung, but with this bird everything is settled. It can be opened and explained, so that people may understand how the waltzes are formed, and why one note follows upon another."They all said "Oh!" and held up their forefingers and nodded, but a poor fisherman, who had heard the real nightingale, said, "it sounds prettily enough, and the melodies are all alike; yet there seems something wanting, I cannot exactly tell what." The music-master wrote a work, in twenty-five volumes, about the artificial bird, which was very learned and very long, and full of the most difficult Chinese words; yet all the people said they had read it, and understood it, for fear of being thought stupid and having their bodies trampled upon". Man-made music is so poor compared with all music nature makes us a present.
There only one miracle and that is creation and life. God, how the universe came about, what happens after death are no miracles but questions people go into for they don't know who they are. To enjoy a theatre-play I don't need to know about the stage-management nor the side-scenes. To enjoy life I don't need to know about my liver and excretion nor about photosynthesis or the orbit of Mars. Only when people feel lost in the world and wandering consume their mind, they feel the need to catalogue their threatening world.