I've had a lot of thoughts about topics that are common to the great Masters but don't really fit into the Common Teachings pages. I was putting off creating the blog page to focus on the interactive images, but when I was reading "Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu The Parallel Sayings" the book I've been getting all these quotes from, I read a quote from the book The Apocryphon of John. If you have a Nag Hammadi, it is in there. If you're not familiar with The Nag Hammadi it is named after a group of caves in Egypt. A bunch of scrolls were discovered in the 1940's that had been hidden away in these caves when governments in the early centuries after Jesus's death were controlling how much of the teachings of Jesus they were going to allow. The 66 books in the Bible is what the Western world has adopted from the Roman Empire. The Catholic Bible has an Apocrypha addition that protestants don't typically use. The Ethiopian Bible has 88 books with more that they encourage we read. The Nag Hammadi is part of those books they recommend. I couldn't put this is on the parallel sayings page because it isn't a quote from Jesus even though it is from the Apocryphon Of John book. The Jesus quote I read that put me on this side road will be on the next (2nd) interactive scroll.
The phrase I read in the Apocryphon Of John is, "The Monad is a power above which no one is. It is the God and Father of completeness, imperishable existing above all in imperishability and as PURE LIGHT. It is beyond sight, invisible, beyond thought, unencompassable by any concept of diety or anything like it, for it is more than a deity with no one above it. It is not subject to anything, for everything exists within it."
When I read this it reminded me of the very first verse in the Tao Te Ching which says, depending on your translation, "The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal name. The nameless is the boundary of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of creation." This would have been a quote from Lao Tzu since it is in the Tao Te Ching.
Hoping I could use these two as parallel sayings with krishna and Buddha I looked asked Duck Duck Go ai and Google Gemini and came up with similar results, both saying there are sayings from Krishna and Buddha, here they are: Hindu texts.. In the Kena Upanishad 1.3 it says "There the eye goes not, speech goes not, nor the mind. We do not know it; we do not understand how to teach It. It is different from the known, and it is beyond the unknown." In the Bhagavad Gita 9.4 it says "By My unmaifested form I pervade this entire universe, all beings exist in Me, but I do not exist in them."
In buddhist scripture: "Ultimate truth (Paramartha) is beyond words, beyond concepts, and beyond all mental distinctions. The moment you try yo name it or try to capture it in thought, you step away from its true nature." Lankavatara Sutra
When I read the passage in The Apocryphon of John it took me back to before the creation story. When every person has the same question, "Where did God come from?" Although it says the Monad power is God and the Father it also says it is more than a deity with no one above it, everything exists within it and it also says it is pure light. A little further on in the book it it says this power marvels at its light, giving eternal life and blessing, bestowing goodness, granting mercy and salvation. Not because it experiencing these but because it gives boundless and unfathonable light.
Then a little further on it says "This is the first power that emerged at the beginning, before the Fullness and in His thought, It is the perfect power," This is the part that made me think it's talking about things before the creation in Genesis.
I plan to do a parallel sayings of the words light and love but having just started The Universal Mind I'm loving where this is already taking us.
Back to the Common teachings pages.
Keep Searching,
Paul