“Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.”

They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”

Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.””

An infant relies solely on its caretakers for sustenance, and I was always taught that we have to be like children – solely reliant on God – our caretaker – in order to be able to enter God’s kingdom. But children have another important quality about them:

They are who they are before the world tells them who to be.

What if Jesus isn’t talking about reliance on an external power, but about return to our God-given internal power?

Jesus’s disciples seem to be asking if they literally need to become children to enter the kingdom. And Jesus answers with allegory and metaphor that hide spiritual aspirations behind impossible physical feats.

How do you make the two one? Or make the inside like the outside or the above like the below? How do you make a foot and replace a foot with the foot you made? On the surface, these seem like ridiculously high expectations without any concrete guidance.

I think Jesus is calling us to remember that everything is everything. We get so caught up in the physical world that we forget that at our core, we are spirits.

I interpret this saying to mean that Jesus is telling us to stop compartmentalizing spirituality and physicality – treat them as one and the same.

I think this is what The Gospel of Thomas is about. 114 secret sayings of Jesus, all meant to encourage us to look within, to understand how heavily our spiritual world affects our physical world, and to remember who we were in spirit before we were told who to be in the physical world.

I am trying to lean into the idea of exploring Gnosticism less from an intellectual or literal mindset and more from a mystical or experiential mindset.

My brain always wants to dissect texts to get to the root of their meaning. But the more I read about Gnosticism, the more I feel that mystical and experiential knowledge is what lies at the heart of this faith.

Have you ever had an experience that led you back to your core, spiritual self?