Logion # 22. Jesus saw children who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These … are like those who enter the Kingdom. They said to him: Shall we then, being children, enter the Kingdom?

It is to the innocence of suckling babes that Jesus points in Logion 22 – an experience we have all had and wondered at. Whatever the Christian gospels may have to say about the new-born cannot detract from the later Christian doctrine that the new-born child is already a sinner: without that, original sin, man’s need for faith, repentance and salvation, through Christ’s sacrifice and the mediation of the Church, would have no cornerstone. Here is a direct contradiction with Jesus’ own teaching in the Thomas Gospel which ascribes not only innocence, but the wisdom of innocence, to the suckling baby who can point out the Place of Life to the man old in days (Logion 4) – not by word but by living example. In Logion 22, when the disciples press him, he goes on: When you make the two One, and the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner… and he goes on to give a series of examples, …then shall you enter the Kingdom’.

This most powerful message of making the two One, and of return to the One, corresponds closely with the advaita tradition. It is fundamental to Thomas. But it is practically non-existent, as Metanoia observes, in the canonical Christian gospels – according to which becoming one with the Father may come about only at the end of the linear process leading from original sin to personal salvation. But that is not the Oneness of which Jesus is speaking here.

We seem constantly bound through our senses to duality, diversity and the manifest world; this is our reality and for most it is hard to conceive or dream of the reversion to Oneness, and to desire it with a nostalgia born of some prior, perhaps innate, experience. It is our ingrained conception of space and time which holds us in this reality, unable to perceive how it could be an illusion. From within the limits of birth and death as we observe them, we are not equipped to see how our Real Self might have an existence outside of space and time. We have trouble to see how union with Supreme Reality, the yoga of atman with brahman, may be accessible to us here and now, without passing through bodily death. We are so conditioned to the power of Death that we cannot accept such a union – the Kingdom, the All, — even if it can be experienced through meditation and inner Knowledge, as constituting the Ultimate Reality. Jesus gives us courage with his majestic assurance in Logion 77.

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