The Pearl of Great Price
I’ve
been putting it off long enough, and this morning I decided to bite the bullet
and write my spiritual musing on the pearl of great price. Not that I
want to, because it will put me out there, alone and singular in my
perspective; but the seed has broken through from the depths of my unconscious,
and I have an obligation to give it light…
In
the Gospel of Mathew, 13: 45-46. Jesus said: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking
goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold
all that he had, and bought it.”
Who
is the merchant man, and why did Jesus liken him unto the kingdom
of heaven? Why is he seeking goodly pearls? What does Jesus mean
by kingdom
of heaven? And what is the pearl of great price?
Jesus
spoke to the public in parables. As he said to his disciples, it was not given
to the public to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it
was; and in private he revealed the mysteries of his parables because his
disciples were ready to receive them. “For
whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but
whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath,” said
Jesus (Math. 14: 12).
It
took years of “work” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching until I was ready to
be initiated into the mysteries of the secret way of life that Jesus spoke to
in his encoded teaching, and I finally broke the code of Christ’s sayings which
I expound upon in my novel Jesus Wears
Dockers; but I’ve been called by my Muse in today’s musing to take the
logic of Christ’s teaching to its conclusion and reveal the secret of the pearl
of great price.
But I
cannot reveal this secret without explaining what Jesus meant when he said that
his disciples were ready for the secret knowledge of his teaching while the
public at large was not; so what made the disciples ready? That’s the first
question.
It
took most of my life to answer this question, which I’ve written about in Do We Have an Immortal Soul?, so I need
not expound upon it here; suffice to say that my self-initiation into the
mysteries of life allowed me to see that we are all sparks of divine
consciousness whose purpose in life is to grow in our own individuality until
we are mature enough to bear the fruit of our own divine nature, and then we
are called back home to God; which is what Jesus meant by his saying, “Many are called, but few are chosen” and which I expound upon in my
little book Why Bother? The Riddle of the
Good Samaritan. And it is here that I have a parting of the ways with the
world and put myself out there in my understanding of the most secret of all of
Christ’s parables—the parable of the pearl of great price.
There
is such great irony in this parable that I don’t know if I can do it justice,
but I must try; because in this irony can be seen the infinity mercy of the
Creator’s love and the incredible depths of man’s vanity, an irony that I would
have remained oblivious to had I not bottomed out of my own vanity which I
wrote about in my novel Healing with
Padre Pio; and just what is the great irony in the parable of the pearl of great
price?
In a
word, the great irony is that when all is said and done the secret of Christ’s
teaching—that part of his teaching that he could not give to the public because
the public was not ready to receive it—is not a secret at all; it is there for
everyone to see, if they have “eyes” to see it. And that’s the mystery that
took the best part of my life to resolve and which now sets me apart from the rest
of the world.
I
went through many teachings and more suffering than I care to remember to
arrive at the simple truth that the great secret is that there is no secret
teaching because life itself is the way, and it took me a long time to get over
my anger at the world for playing me for a fool (hence my inspiration for
writing Old Whore Life, Exploring the
Shadow Side of Karma), but now I am free to look at life unobfuscated by
the vanity of humanity.
Every
teaching claims its own truth—Christianity’s belief that only through Jesus Christ
can we be saved; Gurdjieff’s belief that we are not born with an immortal soul;
Buddhism’s belief that our individual self is an illusion; and the claim made
by a new age teaching (which I lived for thirty years) that it is the most
direct path to God; and, of course, science’s stubborn non-belief in God and the
afterlife, and on and on—but when all is said and done, all ways are true
because LIFE IS THE WAY. And the pearl of great price is our own life,
which is the key to the kingdom of heaven. In short, all
ways lead to the individual self; and the more true we are to ourselves, the
more we realize our divine nature. And that’s the great irony of the
parable of the pearl of great price!
