About Us
The purpose of this publishing venture is to examine our present state of spiritual disquiet and confusion and scout out plausible ways out of the spiritual alienation that disunites us from what is sacred and eternal in each of us. The inner life of human beings today is in greater disorientation and turmoil than at any other time in human history, as the greater availability of material resources and means of pleasures, made accessible by the advent of scientific and technological progress of the past several centuries, has turned the lives of many people into a desire-driven one of obsession and greed. Indeed, it is possible today that people could be so engrossed in their pursuit of material rewards and psychological gratifications that they could live out an entire life without sensing the glaring emptiness that lies at the core of their being if one’s spiritual nature remains unknown. And when a person has no awareness of one’s spiritual inheritance, the likelihood of love, compassion, and benevolence emerging from such a person is very unlikely since they are all derivatives of one’s spiritual nature. We see examples of this all around us today in every sphere of human activities.
Have religions declined then to the point that they fail to enlighten us of our spiritual inheritance now? No, the truth is that they have never succeeded. In the absence of material abundance and easily available means of pleasures, it is easy to direct people’s attention to what is inner and invisible, which is what allowed religions to possess such a prominent position in the lives of the ancient and pre-modern people throughout the world. But with the advance of the modern human civilization whose primary aim being the control of mankind’s material environment, we have unwittingly turned people’s attention to what is outer and visible at the expense of the inner and eternal. The reality is that the organized religions, all of which arose before the advent of scientific and technological progress, were never equipped to withstand the onslaught of materialism and nihilism against the spiritual worth of human existence. Thus the situation will likely continue to deteriorate as traditional religions today have been mostly reduced to fighting a defensive battle in which a favorable outcome is becoming increasingly doubtful.
To make the “decline” of religion worse, religions of the world find themselves today in a divisive and insular state in a world where people have a broader awareness of the world and its diversity. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that all major religions proclaim the unitary nature of the Divine, the historical development of mankind’s religions has resulted in the fracturing of that Oneness into several major religious divisions and numerous minor fragmentations, each claiming its verity in contradistinction to all others. The unfortunate consequence of this is that religion has become yet one more pernicious differentiation, such as race, ethnicity, and nationality, that divides, rather than unites, humanity—a division so severe that it often leads to ungodly hatred and violence among those who claim to honor God.
It is often stated that there is a fundamental underlying unity to all religions, yet it is not the common thread but the different weaves that are the primary focus of all organized religions in promoting their unique truths. The reality then is that their peculiar dogmas and institutional interests will continue to divide humanity while remaining unable to counter the advance of materialism and nihilism that aims to rob humanity of its spiritual inheritance. The common thread indeed exists, but it is not in the form of a religion but something more fundamental: our spiritual kinship with the Divine—a direct connection that each of us has to our divine Progenitor. Religions, on the other hand, are not the direct connection but an intermediated one, and it is in this gap between the direct and indirect experience of the Divine where religions find their existence and usefulness. Undoubtedly, so long as people are satisfied with being intermediated in their search for the Divine, the traditional religions will continue to exist, but they will not bring about the unity of mankind.
In our future publications, we hope to examine in what manner we can reclaim our spiritual nature that does not rely on ancient tales and mythology that hold little relevance to the reality of human existence today, but that which will be capable of leading us to the unity of human existence where the three fundamental natures of the human person, that of the body, mind, and spirit, can exist in harmony, and where our divine nature—compassion, love, and benevolence—guides the lives of individuals as well as the course of society. That is, we must ask afresh the perennial question: How do we bring about our spiritual inheritance into the realm of our day-to-day existence so that each day becomes the experience of love, joy, beauty, and peace of the Sacred?
Coming Next Year
The emergence of the Gospel of Thomas from the desert sand of Egypt in 1945 has given many Christians who know of its existence a troublesome bastard child. Most of them understandably deny its origin as hailing from the first community of Jesus’ followers whose members knew Jesus, since the acceptance of it as such implies that Paul and the four canonical gospel writers owed their inspirations to the Thomasine “gospel” for their differing versions of Jesus, which somehow with the help of a legion of Christian theologians and exegetes managed to coalesce into an organized religion, only to fall centuries later into a swamp of sectarianism. Needless to say, for many Christians, the gospel’s ancestry must be denied at any cost to preserve their religion’s organizational imperatives and the integrity of its doctrinal truths.
Nevertheless, the presence of the Gospel of Thomas reveals that the truths of the Christian religion are quite likely not the only truths that Jesus taught. And those who desire to know Truth should not be hindered by the need of a religion trying to preserve its belief system that may not reflect the entirety of what Jesus wanted to teach. After all, religions live long but human life is short, and we are given a small window in this life to discover what Truth is. As a consequence, we should not fall into the common mistake of conflating a religion’s need with our own spiritual need, as our urge to know the Divine is far more cogent than any doctrine espoused by religions. This perspective applies equally to other religions, not just to Christianity, as the reality of humanity’s spiritual situation today shows that the existing organized religions have become the divider, not the unifier, of humanity’s spiritual quest—and as such, they can hardly claim to represent the living Truth by which we must all live and navigate in today’s world.
The upcoming book and its sister publication will examine many facets of what Jesus taught in view of the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas and attempt to recover the Truth that Jesus tried to instill in his followers by separating his original voice from the voices of many who came after him.