The Gospel of Thomas the Twin

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save 
you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring
forth will destroy you." 
   
 The Gospel of Thomas (Nag Hammadi)
  

"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas 

The first quote above,  from the Gospel of Thomas (found in 1945 with the Nag Hammadi Gospels, which were very early writings from the advent of  Christianity and apparently hidden because they were considered heretical)......came into my mind yesterday,  very clearly. When that happens, I figure it's worth meditating on. And there are some very personal reasons why this is important to me right now.**

I have not thought of this beautiful quote for many years.  When I began my "vision quest", shortly after graduate school,  to learn about art and spirituality I wrote this quote into the margins of notebooks.  The second quote also, I feel, contributes to these reflections.

According to Wikipedia, the introduction to the Gospel of Thomas states that "These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down." Didymus (Greek) and Thomas (Aramaic) both mean "twin".   Some scholars have pointed out that there was a widespread tradition in early church documents, as well as some surviving Christian traditions, that Jesus had a twin brother, by the name of Didymos Judas Thomas, but most feel this is unlikely.   My sense is that the meaning of "twin" can be understood, from the vantage point of the early Gnostic Christianity, as a metaphor.  All are  "twins" of the great teacher, with the same potentiality and the same  origin - this idea, of course, along with most of the Gnostic sects,  would have been highly heretical as the church became an institution and developed the latter idea of Jesus as divine savior, with it's hierarchy .

"Gnosis (from one of the Greek words for knowledge γνῶσις) is the spiritual knowledge of a saint or  mystically enlightened human being. Within the cultures of the term's provenance (Byzantine and Hellenic) Gnosis was a knowledge or insight into the infinite, divine and uncreated in all rather than knowledge strictly into the finite, natural or material world. Gnosis is a transcendental as well as mature understanding. "  Wikipedia

I've been thinking a great deal about what Jung termed "Shadow" recently.  I believe this  saying from the Gospel of Thomas  is significant to an understanding of this concept.  I carried it about as an encouragement to be an artist, to affirm deeply the life-affirming creative impulse. But one does not have to be a professional artist to "bring forth that which is within".

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you."

We are all creative, in fact, the need to create may be our most profound human drive, right up there with sex and reproduction (which, if you think about it, is all about creation as well).  We come into the world with this energy, this drive, some even say we each come into the world with a creative destiny, a "soul purpose".  We are channels and depositories of creative energy, and through expression of creative energy we are affirmed, healed, we learn, we connect with the world and each other, and we're inspired.  It's the life force.  An individual's unique integrity, personal truth, is also deeply connected to the creative force.

"If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

Creative energy denied becomes toxic, stagnant, destructive. I believe Jesus was truly revolutionary in this profound statement. To live without responding to one's authentic creative impulse and innermost truth is to live with despair that can become carcinogenic, a breeding ground of physical,emotional and psychic disease and destructive social harm. When we deny our authentic expression, when we lie, we do a great disservice to ourselves.

"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven."

This also is a revolutionary statement for the time Jesus lived in, and a revolutionary statement for our time. To "do what you hate" is to live a hateful life, without personal integrity.

"For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered." 

Here the Gospel of the Twin is saying that we live in a Quantum universe.Nothing is really hidden. What is denied (or unconscious) will still manifest, what is seemingly hidden from ourselves or others is nevertheless perceived on unconscious levels.  We're all connected, integral, telepathic.   All things manifest through the creative potential we possess  - we are all creative and collectively co-creative.  But those forces are neutral - they can manifest as positive or negative, consciously or unconsciously.   We need to take responsibility for the font of creative force that each of us is.

**I've been going through MRI's to determine if I may a disease, and I reflect that this quote has particular meaning for me in terms of how I muster my energies for healing.   

The Human Heart

"The Heart Sutra" (2009)

THE HUMAN HEART

We construct it from tin and ambergris and clay,
ochre, graph paper,
a funnel of ghosts, whirlpool
in a downspout full of midsummer rain.

It is, for all its freedom and obstinacy,
an artifact of human agency
in its maverick intricacy,
its chaos reflected 
in earthly circumstance.

Its appetites mirrored by a hungry world
like the lights of the casino
in the coyote's eye. Old
as the odor of almonds in the hills around Solano,

filigreed and chancelled with flavor of blood oranges,
fashioned from moonlight,
yarn, nacre, cordite,
shaped and assembled valve by valve, flange by flange,

and finished with the carnal fire of interstellar dust.
We build the human heart
and lock it in its chest

and hope that what we have made can save us.


Campbell McGrath

The Rainbow Bridge Tarot

I recently was contacted by a woman developing a Divination site about a long, long abandoned project, my "Oracle deck".  I tried for years to get it published, to no avail.  Her encouragement resulted in my putting together  a Rainbow Bridge Blog with the cards, and I find myself having a lot of fun now writing about the images..........who knows, maybe one of these days they'll end up in a deck at last.  Just felt like sharing them here..........**

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE 

 Oracular Cards Inspired by the Tarot

“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because

the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.”

---Black Elk 

The great Dakota seer and Medicine Man Black Elk  had a vision, when he was a young boy,  he later called "the Hoop of the Nations".  Although he saw the "hoop" of his  own Lakota people broken, he also forsaw a future time, symbolized by a great Circle of interlocking hoops, when many people,  from the world’s four directions,  would come  together  to form a "great hoop".  A world united.   Black Elk's vision has been called by some the "Rainbow Tribe".  The evolution of a global tribe is our greatest challenge and our highest hope.  The Rainbow, to me, represents the emerging global paradigm, which includes a multi-cultural vocabulary for the sacred. 

As mystical traditions of East and West join with the teachings of indigenous shamans, Goddess ways, New Age, contemporary psychology, Quontum Physics and modern science, and the universal language of the arts, a RAINBOW BRIDGE is forming to unite humanity with each other, and with other dimensions of spirit.

 The Rainbow Bridge is really an  Oracle Deck, although it was inspired by my many years of reading the Tarot.  In Tarot, the Higher Arcana is a progression through what mythologist Joseph Campbell called the "Hero’s Journey".  The first card in the traditional deck  is The Fool (Innocence) representing the openness with with we incarnate into this world.

The last card of the Journey is The World, the return Home. 

**(and as I was manuvering these images through the still not understood mysteries of html, the "Contrary" card decided to end up at the top, and I can't seem to get it back in it's column unless I delete it.  Go figure.  Spider Woman's little "web" joke......)

 13 Card Reading

THE CARDS  (some of them)

i
	Prints are available at $20.00 each plus $8.00 shipping.  Some are available as high resolution Giclee prints at $40.00.  They may be ordered from the artist.  Contact:   Lauren Raine (laurenraine@aol.com).

All artwork is copyright Lauren Raine MFA (2011)

Undines

"Moon Pool" (1972) Illustration for Felicia Miller poem

A friend died almost exactly a year ago, and I remembered a poem that she bequeathed me.  We were collaborators during the 70's - I illustrated a collection of poems by her and others.  We  lost contact and reconnected again just 5 years ago when she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Felicia had tried to have a child for many years and could not, and I know that she felt the fertility drugs she took might have caused her disease.

For all those years before then, I carried around Felicia's poems, many of which I had illustrated - they became internalized in me, part of my inner language.  The one I share here is recent.

I've been thinking about the mythic mind, and archetypes we em-body (manifest) in our life stories unconsciously.  At the conference last week, a Jungian psychologist spoke about Jung's notion that the Archetypes have an independent existence;  they are collective intelligences that can manifest both within and through us. I know I often felt that sense when I worked with the Masks of the Goddess collection, particularly when aspected a Goddesses myself.   I don't know if I can explain that. What's "reasonable"?  Are we attracted to certain mythic beings and tales, identifying with them in the course of our lives, or are they already embedded within us, templates of who we already are and are continually becoming?  Is that too fanciful an idea?

 Felicia was a mermaid.   I never thought she was comfortable with this solid world.....she was too mutable a being.   I always seemed to meet her where there was water, and I remember well her sea shell necklaces.    She had an antique book illustrated by Arthur Rackham we used to pore over as young students, and 33 years later I was not surprised to hear passages from a book she was currently writing about a contemporary Ondine, a modern woman trying, unconsciously, to find her way back to the sea.  I am sad she never finished the book......it was beautiful.

There are many romantic stories and urban myths about artists who are discovered, their work living on, and that godawful  cliche I despise because idiotic people have said it to me so many times:  "you'll be famous when your're dead"......etc.   But I know well that there are so very many whose  work dies with them.  I know it only too well.  

One thread of the Ondine (Undine) legend is that in order to gain a human soul,  Ondine (a mermaid  living in the depths of the Danube River) must marry a human and bear a child.  I first heard some of this when I was given the Danish "Little Mermaid" as a child.  (I also couldn't understand why someone who was immortal and at home in the elemental would want a human soul in the first place - being a mermaid seemed so much better.) But according to the legend, mermaids did leave their native element to pursue a human embodiment, usually with a lot of suffering on on their part.  And, like the Selkies*  of Ireland, the sea  always called to them (should a Selkie find her sealskin, the urge to return will become irresistible).

According to Wikipedia, Undines  have beautiful voices, which are sometimes heard within the water.  One of the most famous versions of the German story was Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's novella Undine, which has also been staged as a ballet many times.

Poster for "Undine", the Royal Ballet (2000)

The Channel: Bloomington

Cold water burns my hands,
I dip and turn the paddle shaft.
A few boats pattern the river ahead,
Where green canopy grays the light.

I am in alone in Undine's pool.
Water is a stranger here,
changing blue, gold, clear.
Drifting leaves under glass:
friendless, they swirl by.

Riffles pour their endless lace;
faces glare from flowing beards,
Mock the poor rival lost
in blackened woods.
The changeling cannot read
the bookish rocks,
heaped and left to moss, or
ciphered fern and witchy branch.

" This way  See? Go there."
Foolish, she is frightened
by roots of upturned trees.
She flees too far, strays lost
into blind woods.

I reach and as I draw the blade,
My boat turns, and I look to see
Where glassy current
Shows the way:
a clear channel
and friends who wait below.

Felicia Miller

**  A wonderful movie about the Irish legend of the Selkies is THE SECRET OF ROAN INISH (1994)