... See Judas

A new wave of mysticism washes over the spiritual community as the taboo topics of yesterday become best selling novels and hot-topics for TV, Internet, and radio talk shows. People inquire and talk about the discovered texts of the Nag Hammadi Library, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Thomas, the finally– and partially –available Gospel of Judas, the ancient secret societies like the Knights Templar brought out to the light by The Da Vinci Code, etc.

Many of us can barely stand the excitement when witnessing one of these modern-day discoveries of ancient texts and well-kept “secrets,” especially one that departs from the traditional views of standard religious dogma. We almost can hear a muffled I knew it! inside our heart as it leaps for joy.

There seems to be a lovingly gentle, wise, invisible and all-knowing hand leading humanity to a new way, a different way, a better way in all this. This same loving Guide also seems to have brought a monumental new teaching into the 20^th Century, our beloved Course in Miracles, and to It leads one’s way to finding and understanding its teaching in a very methodic and personalized way.

This was my experience. I found and quickly plunged into the Course at the turn of the millennium. Prior to that this Guide had led my hand through a transformative process of changing my mind, a process that was nothing more than preparatory work for the moment when the Course would become an integral part of my everyday life.

As most students know, the Course was born in NY in the early 1970’s, and prior to this time it wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eyes. Interestingly, also during the 1970s, a Coptic papyrus was discovered near Beni Masah, Egypt. The document has been translated and appears to be a text from the 2nd century A.D. describing the story of Jesus’s death from the viewpoint of Judas. The conclusion of the text refers (in Coptic) to the document as “the Gospel of Judas” (Euangelion Ioudas) [1].

Interesting timing don’t you think? That both Jesus and Judas should choose to appear again in the course of History at around the same time? According to a 2006 translation of the manuscript of the text, it is apparently a Gnostic account of an arrangement between Jesus and Judas, who in this telling are Gnostically enlightened beings, with Jesus asking Judas to turn him in to the Romans to help Jesus finish his appointed task from God. Way before this time, around 1945, a close-encounter of the mystical kind also took place, which heralds the return of Judas into the 20^th Century. As WWII unfolded and extended its arms to every continent, including South America a mysterious and hardly documented encounter took place. This encounter resulted in the only publication to make a record of it in 1953. A book titled The Flight of the Feathered Serpent ((ISBN 0-9740560-2-2).

Its author, Armando Cosani, was an average Joe, a war-time correspondent and amateur journalist who felt deeply affected by the state of world affairs, the monstrosity of war, not just for what it was and is, but for how easily we humans accept and sometimes even become so comfortable with its hellish reality as to make it our own and even come enjoy or benefit from its circumstances.

Armando Cosani suggests in his account an untold story of Judas as a Spiritual Master. Here is an excerpt:

“I would like to speak to you about Judas, the man of Kariot, the one you have cursed many times, but who was a beloved brother of that Son of Man whose name was Jesus and who was also the son of the Mayab.

I know well that all I’m going to say to you from now on, in this determination for justice, is in open contradiction to everything you believed to be true of what happened in very remote times.

I, the poorest and most wretched amongst mortals, I will relate to you that which I know about Judas, the man of Kariot.”

This is a book that has been recovered from obscurity and finally made public. It contains deep insight into the lives of Jesus and Judas and clears the dust from a long misunderstood time in history. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which contains the real-life account of the journalist during WWII as he meets and develops a friendship with a mysteriously magnetic and affable man, who turns out to be Judas come Master. The second part contains the inspiring teachings of Judas, which are told in Mayan metaphor. In the third part, Judas relates his experience at the side of Nicodemus and his Master Jesus, 2000 years before. He also relates events which took place at the time, when he was chosen to play a role in the Cosmic Drama of the Holy Land, which brought him immense sorrow many centuries ago.

About his book, Armando Cosani himself wrote: “Certainly, this story doesn’t aim to be an autobiography. This was my friend’s will, and I’m carrying it out, not only because I gave my word, but because I notice something in all this that might have some value which escapes my understanding. It is possible that one of the readers may know what it is all about, and could perhaps explain this man to me.”

Prior to finding the Course, I spent nearly three decades reshaping my mind to free itself from the secondary effects, as I call them, of my Catholic upbringing. Effects from which I was determined to break-free very early on, as early as seven or eight years old. But one does not easily free herself from a religion of guilt without the help of a leading hand to light the way. In 1990, exactly 10 years before finding the Course and after studying Gnosis and other New Age and Eastern philosophies for a prior two decades, I received Armando Cosani’s book as a gift from one of my brothers who was also a Gnostic teacher and who had been my first teacher in esoteric subjects as a child and adolescent.

The Flight of the Feathered Serpent, or TFOTFS for short, became a puzzle to me, and eventually my Bible. If one has never been privy to esoteric writings before, and even if one has, this book can send you in so many directions emotionally, spiritually, intellectually that it is hard to describe.

When I found the Course, it was amazing to see the language similarity as well as the similarity in the teaching. Not only that, but it was freeing to finally have answers to the puzzling questions that had permeated my mind for over 10 years, every time I would pickup TFOTFS to try and solve its riddles. Through its pages I learned to forgive Judas or what he represented: every traitor and every treason in me, every wretched soul and every feeling of wretchedness, every loss, every perceived enemy, and every lonely one.

Judas’s words in this book became my personal guide for many years, I could almost hear him as I read them over and over. Later, with the Course, the lesson became more complete. Forgiving another for what one thinks has been perpetrated against him is not nearly as difficult as forgiving oneself for what one thinks he has accomplished indeed, for the unthinkable betrayal of the Christ that we consistently accuse ourselves of carrying out consciously or unconsciously. Ultimately, the Christ cannot Be betrayed, as the Course so well puts it.

The lesson is complete when one learns that there is a Christ and a Judas in each of us, and of the two only the Christ is true, but the Judas must be there to facilitate the ultimate lesson. The Judas in us is illusory, yet without forgiving him, now that we perceive him as part of our reality, we cannot come to know the Christ.

The Judas in us must carry out his function to perfection, in order to give way to the miracle of the resurrection of the Christ within. There is a saying that goes something like: “There is no greater love than he who would lay down his life for his friend.” I am often tempted to say that there is… there is no greater love than he who would lay down his reputation for his Friend, for millennia on end, so that the lesson could be taught and learned Perfectly over and over until every last one of awakens from the dream of sorrow.

There are two great lessons that one must learn in order to remember and rejoin with the True Self: One is to forgive others, and the other to forgive oneself for what he thinks he did, but did not do.

Just take a look at Armando’s description of this friend, who appeared out of nowhere to lend him a hand in times of trouble, and left him with a mind-blowing teaching to publish in a country and, at a time, when this kind of thinking was still considered sacrilegious.

Armando says that his friend “didn’t smile, he didn’t need to smile, he was that smile all over.” At some point in the story Armando ends up in prison and his friend tells him he is better off in there, as he may finally use this experience to wake-up. Armando responds with a smart-ass reply like “How can you say that I sleep, you can’t sleep in here!” referring to the prison’s circumstances and the terrible company he finds himself in there, of course.

Judas responds with these words, of course too, referring to a different kind of prison circumstance: “That is what you think, because you do not know yet which of the ways of sleeping is more dangerous and harmful in the long term. There is someone who watches over you, even when you sleep, and you are in good company.”

In all this I seem to have grasped that Judas plays a role as important as that of Jesus’s in leading the process of the Atonement. Jesus modeled forgiving others. Judas participated in the Holy Cosmic Drama to teach part two of the lesson, as Jesus had no reason to forgive himself, at that time, appearing as the victim of all sorts of betrayal.

Judas volunteered to betray his beloved Friend, carried out the deed, and then forgave himself for apparently accomplishing the unthinkable, the impossible betrayal of the Christ. If it was a prearranged happening, it was no betrayal. Yet, it had to be done, in order that his Friend too would have all the elements at hand with which to teach His lesson.

The secret of salvation is enclosed in these two; one is not complete without the other. We perceive others, and so we must forgive them for what they did not do. We also perceive a separate self from those others, and we must forgive this self for one did not do. Only this way does one accept the Atonement for himself, only this way can there be true oneness, true joining. As long as I think there is you or me or they it is literally impossible to accept the Atonement since either way one is still seeing things from a fragmentary position.

Forgiving Judas is like forgiving yourself. No wonder Jesus makes it a point to mention Judas so lovingly in the Course. Not only does He do so, but Judas is the only of the disciples mentioned by name in its pages. JESUS AND JUDAS are technically each one side of the same coin of forgiveness, true Brothers in Christ, working together as one.