A Forgotten Gospel Explains Your Suffering — Gregg Braden

For some people, the way to heal that suffering would be to empower that animal, to heal that animal, to help the animal get back to the best version of itself so that it can go on with its life. Maybe maybe it's a deer that has been struck in the road at night by a car that didn't see the deer. So, there are some people that would say, "Let's heal that deer. Help to mend the broken bones. helped to heal the organs so that deer can go and have a beautiful life because they love the animal. Other people would look at the same deer in the same circumstance and they'd say, "This deer is suffering. The best thing to do is to end the suffering by ending its life by helping it to transition away from this world to the next world." Now, think about that. Both people love animals. Both people want the same thing. They want to end the suffering. But the love has directed them in different ways. different ways to go about doing that. So that's just an example of what I mean when I say that that love can mean different things to different people. Our relationships certainly can result from unresolved hurt. You're going to see why to an even deeper level in this module. But I think you know this if you've been hurt if you've been hurt in a past relationship. I've had friends that tell me about this. The first time they fell in love with another person. That's a very specific kind of love in high school, college. They've never loved deeply before. So without holding anything back, they love completely. They become completely vulnerable. They surrender to that love. When the love doesn't work out, if that's the case, they are hurt so deeply that what they say is never again. Never again will I allow myself to love that deeply. What that means is never again will I allow myself to surrender all aspects of myself in exchange for hoping to experience an even greater aspect with this person. They'll say never again will I I'll always hold something back. I always keep a little bit back for myself so I will never be hurt that way again. The way that I was hurt when my first romance didn't work out. That's an example of how unresolved hurt, not loving deeply to heal those hurts can affect our relationships. Certainly, it can affect our our jobs, our careers through our self-esteem, our self-worth, our willingness to put ourselves out there. It can affect our lives. So, this conversation that we're having, it's about much more than simply romance. It is about our ability to awaken a force that already lives within us from a Sufi perspective about this hurt. And I just want to share with you what Roomie says about love in relationship to where we're going with this wisdom code. What he says is this. He says, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." Now, think about what he's saying here. It's kind of like beauty when we talked about beauty in in the beauty prayer from the Navajo perspective. The Navajo tell us that our job, we don't create the beauty. It's already there. It already exists. Our job is to find it. What what Roomie is telling us here is we don't have to create love. When we seek out and eliminate all of the barriers to our love, all that's left is love. Isn't that a beautiful way to think about this? It's a very very different way. And to me, it makes our job easier in some respects. When we we look at the barriers, what are the emotional blocks that we have? What are the psychological dams? What are the relationship walls that we have put up? When we want to love, our job is to find everything about ourselves that is not love. If you can think in the whiteboard of your mind, just just imagine a whiteboard and you're drawing on this whiteboard, you can say the emotional equation. So the equation looks like this. The first part of the equation is our original capacity to experience love in its completeness. Okay, so that is the first variable in this equation minus our perceptions of love. The perceptions of all of the times that love has hurt us or that we believe love has told us it's not safe to love. Those are perceptions, not necessarily true or false. It's just the way we perceive our experience. So if you take the original capacity for love and you subtract out all of the reasons that we have taught ourselves it's not safe to love equals what's left is the distortion. That distortion is your suffering. Your suffering is the result of the original love minus the perceptions of love telling us that we are incomplete in that way. So as we dissolve those distortions, all that's left is the first part of the equation, the original capacity to love. The more we allow love to heal the hurt in our lives, the more that you and I are going to discover our capacity to love ourselves as well as other people. And that is precisely what this wisdom code is all about. But it comes from a 2500y old text. Now I think this is fascinating because it means that people 2500 years ago the sceneries changed but they were having the same experiences. they had to figure out the same kinds of things. Now, this wisdom code comes from a very unique document. So, I'm just going to share a little background before I go into the document. I think most of you are probably aware that what are called the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered early in 1940s, early to mid 1940s, they are powerful. They're controversial as well because they represent the oldest records of the Old Testament, the oldest records of the Hebrew Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, and the oldest records of other books of the Old Testament. So, this is why when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, it was really a big deal. Well, interestingly, not long after that, the oldest records of the New Testament were also found in a completely different place. In a little village along the Nile River in Egypt, the village is called Nag Hamadi. H A M- A DI. There was a cache of ancient documents that were found. I'll just tell you the story. They were found by uh a young boy whose job it was to go and find something to burn so that his family could have heat and cook on their stove. There aren't a lot of forests along the Nile River in Egypt. This young boy is very creative and he ended up opening up uh old tombs and finding documents in tombs that became the kindling and the firewood for uh for his family's stove. Apparently he had done this in the past. Well, he found one particular tomb and in this tomb was a a cache of of books uh 13 cotices is what they were called containing 52n gnostic and Christian writings and this collection of documents became known that was named after the location it was found became known as the Nag Hamadi library. It is especially controversial because there was an editing that was done in the Christian traditions in the 4th century during the time of the emperor Constantine where a number of biblical books that had been used prior to the 4th century were removed and the ones that were left were condensed and rearranged into what we call the modern Bible. So let me share this with you and then let's take a deeper look at the layers of of meaning in this particular gospel. The master Jesus he said quote if you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you what you do not bring forth will destroy you. And I think we can see now why that would be. If we bring forth the love that is within us, the depth, the capacity of that love to transcend any of the suffering or any of the hurt, it heals us psychologically, it heals us emotionally, it heals us physically, it heals us spiritually. But if we don't, if we bury our hurt, then those chemicals stay in the organs of the body that we associate with our pain. They stay in the heart. They stay in the lungs. They stay in whatever organs they are that that we associate with our suffering. And they remain maybe for a lifetime to become inflamed, to become diseased. We are opening a channel to move beyond judgment and beyond the polarity of the mind. And here's what I mean by that. I think you all know that the brain is a polarity organ. There's a left hemisphere, a right hemisphere. There's a left brain and a right brain. If we try to solve our problems when we try to heal our relationships and when we try to use these wi wisdom codes from the mind only look at what happens in the polarity organ. You're always going to have left brain, right brain. You're always going to have good and bad. You're always going to have right and wrong. You're always going to have success and failure. You're always going to have worthy and not worthy. And this this is the very the very way of thinking that causes the suffering. However, when we begin to engage the heart, the heart is not a polarity organ. Don't have a left heart and a right heart. What you have is a single organ. A single heart. Part of my heritage is Native American. It's southeastern Cherokee. And in the Cherokee traditions, there's actually a word describing what I'm going to say to you right now. It's called shantehta. Shantaeishta means the single eye of the heart. The single eye that doesn't see good bad right wrong success failure, worthy, not worthy. It sees what is true in the moment. It can discern right from wrong without judgment of the right and wrong. That's a deep, deep lesson right there. Discernment, the ability to recognize right and wrong or good and evil without judging because the judgment is what keeps us locked in the ego. It's what keeps us locked in the loops of the ego conversation in the left and the right brain that keep us stuck in the very issues that we're hoping to transcend. So when you want to love without judgment, where do we love from? We love from our heart. Now that's the science describing why intuitively we all know that we say, "Oh man, I love you so much." You know, we don't say, "Oh man, I love you so much." You know, from the brain, it's all coming from the heart. So with this in mind from a place of heartb brain harmony I'm going to invite you to recite recite the wisdom from this code either silently or out loud till you feel the shift in a strength within you as you accept the power of the love your love and the power of that love to transcend the suffering whatever it is that comes into your life. The key is to embrace this with a focus and awareness in the heart, not in the mind. You know how to do that because we've done this in the other modules. So, let's do this. This is my favorite favorite part of each of these modules is actually applying what it is that we're learning. You're learning principles, you're learning science, you're learning history, and now you're learning application and technique. Hopefully, you're having >> [music] >> For thousands and thousands of years, our ancestors passed down generation to generation, mother to daughter, father to son, tribe to tribe, civilization to civilization. The things that were really important, the things that they really wanted to be preserved as their legacy, they passed down. They didn't have computers, you know, they didn't have memory sticks, obviously thousands of years ago, but they did have the stories. And the stories reflect the way that we think and how we think. Now, let me just just give you an example so you know exactly what I'm talking about. I think intuitively most of us are on board with the fact that there's a field, a field of energy that underlies all of creation. There's a field that connects all things. Scientists said okay this Higs boson would be created by the disturbance of the quantum field and it will create a particle with a mass of 125 giga electron volts. All right. Our brains typically are not set up to remember very specific kinds of data like that. But that data is what tells a scientist there's a field out there. On the other hand, in the Hopi tradition that we spoke about earlier in this course for thousands of years, they've always known there was a field out there, but they didn't talk about 125 gig electron volt Higs bosons to prove the field. They told the story in the Hopi tradition in the beginning of this cycle of existence. Spider grandmother. Spider grandmother, the ancestral feminine, she emerged from deep within the earth. And spider grandmother began to weave the web of creation upon which her children would live their lives and create their children to live their lives. So it's a very very different feeling. It's not about specific numbers, but it conveys an idea. Spider grandmother wo the web of creation. In recent years, scientists have discovered caves that have been kept hidden from the general public by the Australian people because these caves preserve the wisdom of their origins, where they come from, who they are, uh how they function in the world. And the dates on these caves go back over 28,000 years before present. The Australian Aboriginals have a continuous record of their lineage, of their culture extending at least 28,000 years and possibly older according to some estimates. Uh, another example is in in Africa, the Doon tribe. I'm really fascinated by the Doans. When the scientists began to explore the the history and the culture of the Doon tribe, there were dances that they were performing that were not casual dances. They didn't have a random placement of their feet on the earth when they when they did these dances. Each dance was so precise, so specific. And the children were trained from the time they were very young to mimic the footsteps of their parents as they were performing these dances. And the scientist said, "Okay, why are these dances so specific? What is it about the placement of the feet that makes them so special?" Well, they could not verify what the Doon elders told them early in the 20th century until the astronomers and the satellites late in the 20th century were able to do so. Here's what the Doan said. They said when we step each step of these dances, we are tracing the orbit of the dark star, the hidden star that we come from in the area that we now know as Sirius in the Sirius star system. Well, early in the 20th century, there was only one Sirius star. It's called Sirius A. Very bright star in the sky. You can It's the brightest star. Not the brightest planet, but it's the brightest star. Venus is the brightest planet. Sirius will be the the brightest star. If you look at the belt of Orion, wherever you are, and then if you go from the belt of Orion, take a left and go down, the brightest star you see in the sky, that will be Sirius A. We knew about that in the 20th century. Here's the deal. The Doon said, "No, there's another star, a twin star, a dark star that is our origin. This is where we come from." And the scientist said, "No, there's not. There's there's no dark star there." Late in the 20th century, the telescopes were able to find Sirius B. And Sirius B, the orbit was exactly exactly the orbit that was being traced out by the footsteps in the dance of the Doan people. The parable is called the parable of the woman in the jar. It reminds us of our ability to love another person and how our ability to love another person is directly linked to the capacity that we have to love ourselves and how we lose the ability to love ourselves through the experiences of life over time. It's a big topic. It's deep. Okay. So, here's the parable itself. The parable begins. says, "The kingdom of the father is like a certain woman who was carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking on the road, still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke. The meal emptied out behind her on the road. She did not realize it. She had noticed no incident. When she reached her house, she set the jar down and she found that it was empty." That's the end of that parable. Now bear in mind this is over 2,000 years ago where a learned man not talking about the religion talking about the historical context. A very learned man was attempting to share a deep knowledge with the people of his time that had not attained the same level of knowledge that he had. So he was making it very simple and this is why he used the parable because [snorts] it it's easy for him to explain it this way. So, so what is the parable saying? Let's look at this. The first line, the kingdom of the father is like a certain woman who is carrying a jar full of meal. If you trust someone enough to give them your car keys to your automobile, do you also trust them enough to give them your checkbook to your life savings? Is it the same kind of trust? And you might say, "Well, I'll trust them in my car, but not my life savings because I had a bad experience from someone in the past that took money from me when I trusted them." And you know, you hear stories like this all the time. So, in our relationships, this is where it gets so interesting. The Gnostic Gospels are based upon traditions of the ancient Essenes. E S. The Essenes, mysterious sect. They showed up about 500 years before the time of Jesus. Jesus was an Essene and Jesus shared a scene tradition. This means I many of you know personally I'm the product of a very dysfunctional family. Uh come from an alcoholic family, an abusive alcoholic family. My father was the abuser to my mother, my younger brother and I. He left uh thankfully he left when I was 10 years of age. And what I can tell you and I know many of you can relate to this. When you come from an alcoholic family, there is a lot of chaos, a lot of tension. And often the children will try to make the peace. We are called the peacemakers. So to to have peace, we will compromise and we will give away pieces of ourselves where we say, "Okay, our opinion no longer matters because the opinion of the abuser is is the dominant opinion." So we learn not to voice our opinions. We we lose a part of ourselves in this way. And women know this even perhaps better than men. Typically, if a woman comes from a an allmale family, all brothers, um, or dominated by brothers. Often the brothers, what are we going to have for dinner? The woman says, I want a salad. The brothers say, I want pizza. The pizza wins. What are we going to watch for a movie? We want to watch Terminator. And Arnold Schwarzenegger blow things up. and the woman wants to watch um you know a love story and they end up watching the movie the Terminator. The message is that the woman's opinion is not valuable and she feels that she's not heard and you hear this all the time. Women talk about this and men to some degree. When those things happen that's us giving pieces of ourselves away. So I'm saying this to you so you have some idea. I want to make sure in the brief time we have I want you to know what this is saying to us. When you give those pieces away, you want to be whole and you will spend your life seeking out other people that energetically have the compliment of what you've lost. And you'll feel powerfully, magnetically drawn to them. This parable tells you why. Because you have lost those pieces of yourselves. Line number three, she did not realize it. She didn't realize she lost the meal. She had noticed no incident. So little by little as we go through life, as we mature, we give away pieces of ourselves. We lose pieces of ourselves, sometimes willingly, sometimes not. And we may not even notice it. And here's the point of the parable. The woman made it home. She set the the jar down to use the meal to feed her family, and there was nothing there. How many of us have gone through life compromising ourselves, giving pieces of ourselves away to create peace in relationships or maybe a job or career and then one day you find someone that you love and you want to love, you want to give them from deep within and you reach within your vessel for your love and you find it's empty. How many times does that happen where you you want to love but you're held back by something? That's what the parable is all about. We don't notice it until one day we reach into our vessel and our love is gone. So this is this is line number four. When she reached her house, she sat the jar down and she found it empty. So when we reach into our vessel and we discover it's empty, it's not the end. It is the beginning of a new path. The good news is because what we think is lost, it's never really lost. It's never gone because our love, our love can never be destroyed. Here's what we do. We're so good at this. We're so good at preserving our own safety. When we feel unsafe in life, when we feel it's not safe to love, we will hide our vulnerable parts to keep them safe. We'll hide them from one another. We'll hide them from other people. Often we hide them from ourselves. We will tell ourselves that we no longer know how to love. So [music] two scientists Michaelelsson and Mley the very famous Michaelelsson Mley experiment to determine if this field even exists and if it is what is our relationship to the field. Let me give you just a little sense of the experiment. If if I invited you to join me outdoors right now, wherever we are, and [clears throat] we moistened our finger, we put it above our head. And in the moment that we did that, if we felt no wind against our finger and concluded because we feel no wind, there is no air. Is that valid? Well, of course it's not. We know that the air exists whether there is a wind or not. Well, this is the equivalent of the Michaelelsson Molay experiment. They said if there's a field that connects all things, that field should be in motion. The Earth is rotating and it would create a motion in the field. So, we should be able to detect the field. They built equipment to detect the field and they detected no movement in 1897. And because they detected no movement, the conclusion published in mainstream scientific journals for a hundred years said that there is no field and everything is separate from everything else. Uh Albert Einstein had some very strong opinions and his opinions surprise most people. So the question are we passive observers in the universe? Are we sitting and watching things happen around us with no influence over what those are? Are we victims of the universe, our own circumstances? Or are we somehow actively participating? Maybe we don't know it, but are we somehow actively participating in the universe? Well, I want to share with you Albert Einstein, and again, a lot of people were surprised. I'm going to give you a a direct quote from him. He said quote we live in a world which exists independently of us human beings. So he believed that we are separate from everything out there. He said the world stands before us like this great eternal riddle partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. So what he's he's saying is we're separate and we're lucky if we get to understand a little bit of it. Okay. So that was Albert Einstein's perspective and it was a problem for him. on his deathbed. He was still trying to work the equations to unify all of the fields of physics into one eloquent equation that would describe our relationship to the universe. And he couldn't do it because he did not acknowledge the existence of the field that connects all things and us being part of that. And listen to what Wheeler said about our relationship to the field that we are building the universe as we go. I'm going to give you a a direct statement that he made that is so powerful. He said, "We live in what he called a participatory universe." End of quote. Quote, "We live in a participatory universe." End of quote. I love this because it it means that we are not imposing our will. We are not controlling the world, but we are part of what it is that's happening. What Wheeler was saying is he couldn't imagine universe that doesn't exist without us because the act of us observing the universe is what's building the universe. Now I'm going to expand on this just a little bit because it's going to be very important for this this particular wisdom code. What Weer said, let me just going to take you a little bit deeper into these implications. It's so powerful. If we are in a participatory universe and the act of us looking at the universe is is as important as what he is saying. Here's what it means. You know, we're we're building telescopes to look to the edge of the universe. We keep looking for the edge of the universe. How how far does it go? Where where does it end? And we keep building more powerful microscopes and building the uh the the superconducting super colliders to find the smallest particles of matter. How small how small can we go? What John Wheeler is telling us is that we'll never find the edge of the universe. This is where science is right now. And it goes back to another experiment that was done early in the 20th century. Many of you know this called the very famous double slit experiment. Double slit experiment is where scientists discovered that electrons behave one way when they're not being observed. They are waves of information. However, when they're being observed, it could be a human watching. It can be a camera watching. The act of them being observed, the waves collapse into particles. So the act of observation influences matter and how it behaves in our in our universe in our world. So this is this is very important. It's important for where we're going to go with this because there is a field. There's a field. Now scientists acknowledge this field. But here's what they do when they talk about the field at conferences. They say, "Oh yeah, there's a field out there." And their hands go like this. There's a field out there that connects all things. Here's what they're missing. You and I are the field. We are the field. This ancient code of I will, it affirms to our body and declares to the field that we are part of the field that we are empowered to choose. When we accept our place in the field, that's very different from feeling separate from the field. When you accept that you are the field and you begin to say, "How do I change the field?" You don't have to make the change happen. You become the change that you want to see. If you want to see that healing in your body, you have to become that healing. And this code helps us to know. So, there are a number of biblical passages that give us insight into our relationship with the field, but they do it through story. They're not using science. They're not using math. They're not talking about gig electron volts. They're talking about how we apply this relationship in our lives. And let me give you a very specific one. It's fascinating to me. We're going to go through this completely. We'll take it apart line by line and then we'll apply it in our lives. All right. So, we're going to go with this. So, this particular code comes from the biblical gospel, the book of Matthew that appears in in many different forms through the Gnostic and the uh and the Christian traditions. This is from the King James version if you'd like to find it and follow along for yourself. Chapter 8:es 2 and 3. Listen what the man says. He walks up and he says,"Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." All right, this is a powerful request. It sets into motion two events. First of all, by asking, he had to ask. The man declares that he is open to receive. He's open to change. You have to be open to receive. You have to be willing to change. Some people are not. All right? So, his statement opens that door number one. And then number two, his request makes a statement to the universe that he is willing to accept the change in the field that will also change his body. All right? He's he's communicating that he is malleable, that he is not static, that he is a dynamic system. All right? Now the next part of the account describes what Jesus did and he did two things. He had a physical action and he had the words that accommodate uh or that that follow this action. The declaration I will he's declaring what will happen. The work be thou clean. That is a statement to the field. And the emotion that underlies that statement sets into motion a shift in the waves of possibility collapsing into physical reality the energy that reflects what is being willed. Be thou clean. Be thou clean. And by doing that, in making that declaration, he speaks I will. His declaration becomes real. It becomes true. It becomes manifest. And the man is healed. All right? So this is one example. And you see many examples of this. You see it in uh in other traditions as well. You see it in shamanic traditions. You see this uh in some of the the Tibetan traditions. You see it in uh some of the Hindu traditions. this underlying principle of being present with the outcome. So the effectiveness of this particular power code, it comes from once again repeating it in the affirmative to imprint this code on the subconscious mind. And that's what I'm going to invite you to do with me now. So we're going to go back to the steps that we did earlier in the course. We're going to create that heartbrain harmony that you are now an expert at at doing. We've done this a number of times now. And that was intentional. It was intentional so that you become comfortable with the steps by repeating those steps and it becomes second nature to you. You don't have to have my voice leading you through it. You don't have to have music in the background. Uh or you can have your own music in the background. All right? So, we'll we'll create the coherence when the heart and the brain come together. And then by doing that we're going to open this deep clear channel to communicate directly with the subconscious. This is where you want to plant the code. I will will. All right. And from this place of heartb brain harmony I'm going to invite you to make a statement to the affirmative of something that you will in your world in your life. And for simplicity let's just choose one together. I think everyone everyone wants to be uh the highest effect the highest essence of their own healing. So we can use our own personal healing because when we're at our best we're at our best for others as well. All right. So we'll say the words I will followed by a concise single declaration of your desired outcome. So, for example, I will wholeness and healing in my body. That could be our code right there. I will wholeness and healing in my body. All right? And when it's finished, to the best of your ability, would invite you to feel the feeling. Feel as if the outcome is already present. As if that wholeness is already there. See the outcome in your mind's eye. Feel it with as many senses as are possible. As many of your senses as possible. What does it feel like to have this? So that you're creating the chemistry in your body. Now I want you to know that specialized neurons in your neoortex, they're called cubelly neurons, respond to this kind of code. The cubelli neurons will create the chemistry in your brain and send the signal to the body to create the chemistry in your body to match what the neurons see in your mind's eye. This is why it's so important to focus on the positive, focus on the outcome. We're taught often to focus on the things that are wrong. You know, if uh if we have a blemish on our skin that nobody else sees, you look in the mirror and you will zero right in on that blemish because that's that's our conditioning. So this is the invitation in your mind's eye to hold the image of the positive outcome so that you can feed that information to your pubelli neurons. Those neurons can feed the chemistry in your body to mirror that. But it also influences the field where you are constantly emerging and collapsing from. We're bringing all this together. And the beauty is you don't have to know any of it to implement this code. But now you understand the mechanism. Your left brain understands the mechanism. So it makes it much easier to do this. Okay.