Transcending stories about spirit and matter to act from our wonder about both

“If the flesh came into being because of the spirit, it is a wonder. If the spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. But I, I am amazed at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.” Saying 29 of Jesus, in The Gospel of Thomas. 

Have we modern humans poisoned and degraded our living home and brought society to collapse due to our delusion that we are separate from nature and that nature is separate from the divine? That is a view I’ve had a lot of time for. It was part of my motivation for exploring different religious ideas, as well as taking a revisionist perspective on the religion of my upbringing — Christianity. That led me to look at some of the Gnostic Gospels, over the past year. What I learned has shifted my perspective on the deeper causes of our overly destructive habits as modern humans. In this essay I’ll share my realisations through a focus on one specific saying of Jesus, according to a text called the Gospel of Thomas, which was unknown in the modern world before the 1970s. 

The traditional view of ancient Christian Gnostic belief is that they thought the material world was ungodly, or even bad, and that we humans each have a divine spark in us which we need to identify with in order to escape this world into the divine realm. However, this view came from the condemnations of ancient ‘heresiologists’ like Irenaeus, who painted Gnostics and their texts as dangerous distortions of the ‘true’ Christianity. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 has changed how we can engage with Gnostic ideas. When the 13 codices, including the Gospel of Thomas, were finally translated and published in the 1970s, they revealed a far more complex picture. I previously wrote about the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which was discovered some decades earlier. It revealed a Gnosticism that invites a direct mystical experience of personal union with the divine. That is not seen as an escape from the material realm but as awakening to the true reality of our interbeing with everything as sacred. The beauty of it inspired me to compose a mantra last year. Reflecting on one Nag Hammadi text, the Gospel of Thomas, over recent months I see something similar, but with an invitation to accept we don’t need to be certain about our stories of this aspect of existence. The implication from that Gospel is that the stories we tell about the matter-spirit relationship are less important than how those stories make us feel and move us to act. 

In my experience, many people are responding to their awareness of metacrisis and collapse by becoming more curious about spirituality and religion. That is why I feel it might be useful to share with you some reflections on my own philosophical and spiritual journey, which includes Christian Mysticism.

Saying 29 on spirit and matter

Thomas reports Jesus as saying, “If the flesh came into being because of the spirit, it is a wonder. If the spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. But I, I am amazed at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.” At first glance, this Saying 29 could appear to be a classic statement of spiritual dualism. The “great wealth” of the spirit and the “poverty” of the flesh seem to be set in stark contrast, evoking a worldview where the divine is trapped in the material. That is how many scholars have interpreted the gnostic view of matter and spirit. But that applies a perspective on Gnosticism that is inherited from views of their persecutors in ancient times. I think that legacy has coloured the way they read the texts translated in the 1970s. This is illustrated by a closer reading of Saying 29. If we foreground the saying’s unique structure, it reveals something more open-ended and, ultimately, far more powerful. 

Saying 29 does not declare a doctrine; it invites reflection on the nature of the relationship between spirit and matter, spirit and body. It presents possibilities, marvels at a central mystery, and implicitly asks the most profound question of all: why would spirit enter a world without it? The subtle genius of this Saying lies in its two opening hypotheticals. By stating that both a spirit-caused body and a body-caused spirit would be wonders, it acknowledges any explanation for the human condition is astonishing. Is the material world a product of metaphysical divine spirit? A wonder. Did that divine spirit emerge from the complex beauty of the physical? An even greater wonder. This structure invites us to feel humbled and honoured to experiencing life as we are. It also helps us from settling into a single dogma. It primes us not to search for the correct ontological view, but to contemplate possibilities and how each view could inspire us. 

The third point in the saying does not negate the first two but adds something new: “But I, I am amazed at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.” This conjunction of spirit and flesh is stated as a currently observable fact, but also with an invitation to consider process and purpose. The source of wonder includes the question implied by the juxtaposition of “wealthy” spirit and “poor” flesh. So why would spirit do that?

This is where we can move beyond existing orthodoxies on what the Gnostics might have believed. As I mentioned in starting this essay, the classic interpretation, which heavily influences how many scholars read Thomas, sees this cohabitation or indwelling as a kind of cosmic accident or entrapment. The spirit, a divine spark, is imprisoned in the matter of the body. The goal, then, is to realize this inner divine energy and seek for it to guide us until we can escape from this material world with it.

But if we sit with the question of “why” then another answer emerges, one that is more aligned with a theology of incarnation and love. Why would a great wealth go to join a great poverty? The only motivation that makes sense of such a radical move, is to share. Wealth that hoards itself is not truly wealth; its purpose is realized only in its distribution. Therefore this saying is expressing wonder at how the spirit enters into the relative ‘poverty’ of the flesh not because it is trapped, but because it is on a mission of enrichment. It comes to infuse the material with its own quality, to lift up the physical into something greater than it could be on its own.

In this text Jesus is reported as saying that the wonder is not that the spirit is here, but that it chose to be here. The ‘poverty’ of the flesh is not a prison to be escaped, but a medium to be transformed. The body is not the spirit’s cage, but its project and partner. This shifts the spiritual task from one of escape and separation to one of integration and embodiment. The question for believers is not “How do I identify with my spirit to escape the entrapment of my body?” but “How do I allow this indwelling wealth to permeate my entire being — my body, my mind, my actions?”

This perspective aligns more closely with the first hypothetical (spirit causing the material world including life) than the second. It implies intent and purpose on the part of the spirit. It suggests a creation story where the divine wills itself into materiality for the sake of relationship and elevation. However, it diverges from a simple “spirit-made-flesh” model by maintaining a sense of distinctness. The wealth remains wealth; the poverty remains poverty. They are not the same thing. Their union is a dynamic partnership, not a blending into one substance. The spirit retains its identity as a “distinct force” that acts upon and within the physical.

This leads to the next inevitable question: what aspects of our consciousness are this spirit? Is it a small, discrete spark deep within us, a “soul” that we must identify with against the rest of our being? Or is it a force that, in its desire to share, seeks to infuse and elevate the totality of who we are — our thoughts, our emotions, our physical experiences? In this sense, the “great wealth” is not just a part of us; it is a potential state for the whole of our being.

Saying 29, then, invites us to replace a narrative of entrapment with a narrative of voluntary, loving presence. If we read Saying 29 alongside Saying 77’s “I am the All” present in wood and stone, Saying 3’s Kingdom inside and outside, Saying 113’s Kingdom spread out but unseen, a picture emerges: Thomas presents Jesus as sharing a fundamentally ‘panentheistic’ vision. That is where the divine is not merely a distant creator nor identical with the universe, but rather the living reality in which all things exist, which exists in all things, as well as beyond all things. 

Interestingly, there is nothing in the Gospel of Thomas to suggest that this cohabitation of spirit in matter is limited to humans. Saying 77 is the most explicit: “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.” This extends the “I” of divine presence to the most ordinary inanimate matter — wood and stone — implying that no sharp boundary separates the human from the rest of creation in terms of hosting the sacred. The text’s focus on Jesus’s sayings towards human awakening, then, is not claiming that humans possess something other creatures or phenomena lack, but about humans becoming conscious of a reality that pervades all things.

Within this framework, where all is sacred, Saying 29 adds a distinctive aspect. It points to a form of variegated nondualism, which does not collapse matter and spirit into an undifferentiated blur. Instead, it acknowledges a distinction — wealth and poverty, spirit and flesh — before celebrating their reunion through indwelling. This could be regarded as a philosophical fudge, an inability to commit to either strict dualism or pure monism. But it might also be seen as something more elegant: a recognition that unity and separation are not static opposites but moments in a living flow. The spirit’s journey into the flesh is not a fall to be undone but a movement to be completed. Distinction exists for the sake of relation. Separation makes cohabitation meaningful. The wealth enters poverty not to erase the difference but to transfigure it from within.

The form of ‘nonduality’ expressed in the Gospel of Thomas differs from the Eastern traditions which are known for that view, in several distinctive ways. Unlike Advaita Vedanta, which declares that Atman (individual self) is ultimately identical with Brahman (ultimate reality) and that the phenomenal world is illusory (maya), Thomas maintains a real distinction between spirit and matter — the “great wealth” and the “poverty” — even as they unite through indwelling. The material world is not an illusion to be seen through, but a reality to be transfigured. Unlike Buddhism, which sees our liberation as us ceasing our attachment to material form, Thomas presumes an enduring divine presence (“the light within”) that can be discovered. The goal is not transcending the illusion of the self but integration of the self with the indwelling spirit. That also differs somewhat from how Daoism invites the seeker to merge into the rhythmic patterns of the natural world. Perhaps we could regard Thomas’s nonduality as an ‘indwelling nonduality’ rather than an ‘identity nonduality’: spirit and matter remain distinct even in their most intimate union.

Relating these ideas to mainstream Christianities

My interpretation of Saying 29, and related sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, relays a different view on the nature of reality than that of mainstream Christian denominations. They generally maintain a sharper distinction between Creator and creation while still affirming the goodness of the material world. Drawing on the Genesis creation account where God declares the physical world “good,” mainstream theology holds that the material order was an originally good creation, but that when humans “fell” through becoming aware of death and wrongdoing, they disrupted that natural perfection. That means both humans require ‘redemption’ while wider nature is also imagined as distorted and awaiting human redemption so it can return to its past state. In any formulation of mainstream theology, nature after the Fall is seen as God’s handiwork but not God’s own being. The distinction between Creator and created remains. Therefore, Spirit is not seen as the deepest identity of the human person but a divine visitor who takes up residence within the believer. In this formulation, humans remain human and God remains God. Where Saying 29, in my reading, envisions a voluntary descent of wealthy spirit into poor matter for the sake of transfiguration, mainstream Christian denominations envision an original goodness that was marred, a God who remains other even as He (or it) draws near, and a redemption that restores relationship without erasing the fundamental distinction between the One who saves and the ones who are saved. Both views honour the union of spirit and matter, and both affirm that humans can “wake up” to God and be reunited with the divine life. But the Thomas saying suggests something closer to a recovered awareness of what was always already true — that the wealth was always dwelling in the poverty, waiting to be recognized — while mainstream Christianity tends to emphasize that reunion requires a divine initiative that bridges a real separation — the life and ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ. I wish to mention here, in passing, that this story of sacrifice-enabled redemption is not one that Jesus himself is reported as clearly articulating, and was developed after his death.

It might seem that my enthusiasm for Saying 29 means I see spirit and matter in the way suggested by its third statement. But I’m not convinced about that. Instead, I am attracted to how it treats all the various stories about the spirit-matter relationship as interesting and inspiring. That’s because I’m a firm believer in the fallibility of any story we can conceive about the metaphysical. As Lao Tsu wrote in ancient times, “the truth that can be told is not the eternal truth”. Hence the title of this essay: Transcending stories about spirit and matter to act from our wonder about both. It is a theme I will return to when concluding. 

Although I’ve been giving some respect, even reverence, to these newly discovered ancient texts, I’ve also been aware that scripture can be internally inconsistent, and so only ever offer a contribution to our understanding, not a prescription for it. In the case of the Gospel of Thomas, it contains some sayings which seem to be more negative about the material realm, including our bodies. In addition, some of the sayings seem incomprehensible, and even objectionable (such as the final one). Freed from any wish to believe texts word for word, we can treat them as tools, alongside other tools of spiritual connection and growth. 

Unfortunately, it appears that most mainstream Christian denominations have not recognized the Gnostic texts as scriptures that contain some spiritual lessons for us. The Coptic Orthodox Church, whose ancestral monks might have buried the codices at the Monastery of St. Pachomius following Bishop Athanasius’s Easter letter of 367 condemning non-canonical books, explicitly states that despite their titles, these “gospels” do not relate the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the canonical Gospels do, and are therefore not comparable to the New Testament. Evangelical scholars have emphasized that the Gnostic materials have a distinctly different “feel” from biblical Christianity, presenting Jesus more as a lecturer on metaphysical abstractions than the Jewish prophet of the canonical accounts, and they caution against taking guidance from them. Catholic and Protestant scholars now engage these texts seriously in academic contexts, not as Scripture, but as invaluable witnesses to the theological debates of the second and third centuries. To them, they reveal Gnostic Christianity as an early religious movement offering an alternate testament to Jesus’ teachings,  rather than simply the deviant cult described by orthodox writers.

We do see the beginnings of a theological impact within Christianity, through some of the Unitarian Universalist and Quaker communities. Both have engaged with the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi. Unitarian Universalists, with their emphasis on “deeds not creeds,” have found in these texts a model of reasoned dissent from absolutist orthodoxy; one UU fellowship hosted a Sunday service on “The Gnostic Challenge to Orthodoxy,” inviting members to read and “decide for themselves” rather than accept institutional condemnations. Quakers, with their emphasis on direct, unmediated experience of the Divine and the Inner Light, can also find resonance. For instance, local groups have hosted  lectures on the Nag Hammadi writings. I think this openness stems from shared convictions in both traditions: that revelation is continuous, that individual spiritual experience carries authority, and that ancient texts should be judged by their capacity to awaken presence and transformation rather than by their conformity to doctrinal agreements. My wish is that more Christian denominations take these texts seriously, including how they can point us to what teachings were imposed or excluded due to historical and institutional dynamics rather than any intellectual or spiritual merit. 

Reviving reverence for nature?

In this essay I have focused on the relationship between Spirit and Matter. That’s partly because of what I stated at the beginning of this essay: many people have argued that the greater dualism in Abrahamic religions led to a desacralisation of nature in our minds, which provided a conceptual basis for its oppression and destruction, thus bringing us to the ecological predicament we face today. Therefore it is interesting that the Gnostic texts of Thomas and Mary invite a rethinking of Jesus’ view on the spirit-matter relationship, and thus the extent to which we might recognise wider nature, and all its living beings, as divine. Therefore, theoretically, they could provide a way for some Christian communities to revere nature more than at present. However, my exploration of this topic with Saying 29 as my prompt has led me to a slightly different conclusion. 

The desacralisation of nature in the West cannot be attributed simply to Christian dualism. If that were the case, we would expect more consistently nondualist spiritual paradigms to have fostered greater care for the natural world. Yet the evidence is mixed at best. Advaita Vedanta’s profound nondualism has not prevented widespread environmental degradation across the Indian subcontinent. Balinese Hinduism, with its animist sensitivity and daily offerings to spirits inhabiting every aspect of the natural world, has not shielded the island from ecological degradation. From living in Bali these past years, I have noticed that even cultures rich in nature-based ritual can prioritise social conformity, communal status, and correct performance over ecological protection. I now hypothesise whether the actual relationship with nature is less to do with dualism versus nondualism as metaphysical positions, but the deeper human tendency to fixate on concepts to believe in rather than experiences to inhabit. When theology becomes a set of propositions to affirm rather than a way of perceiving and relating, any tradition — dualist or nondualist or somewhere in between — can become a barrier to the very connection it purports to describe. Indigenous communities who maintain reciprocal relationships with their lands offer a different model, but their care for nature seems rooted less in the sophistication of their concepts about the divine and more in the daily reality of immersion within and dependence upon the living world around them. Their knowledge is not primarily believed; it is lived and felt.

This is where the Gospel of Thomas reveals its deepest wisdom. For me, the beauty of Saying 29 is not that it offers a more interesting nondualism than the alternatives. It is that the saying models a respectful agnosticism toward the various ways we might conceptualise the spirit-matter relationship. It presents two hypotheticals — spirit causing flesh, flesh causing spirit — and calls both wonders. It then names the observed reality of their cohabitation or indwelling as a source of amazement, without insisting on a single explanatory framework. The saying does not invite us to resolve the mystery but to marvel at it. And in that marveling, something can shift. We are no longer trying to get our theology correct so that we can act rightly. We are instead welcoming spirit and matter as participants in some unfathomable dynamic relation, feeling our way into gratitude for the very fact of existence, and engaging the world from that openness and excitement. When theology falls away, what can remain is wonder. And wonder is a more reliable invitation to reverence than a doctrine could ever be. 

I think there is a lesson here for people who experience a disintegration of their old identity and worldview as they awaken to metacrisis and collapse. As is happening with so many people I know, we can become curious about religion and spirituality. The craving for an ordered world, that is agreed upon by a peer group that one is pleased to feel a belonging to, can manifest in both secular modernist and religious traditionalist ways. It comes from the ego’s desire for illusory safety through certainty and agreement, rather than an open-minded and open-hearted presence, curiosity and wonder about existence. In some cases it also engages the ego’s desire to be better than others in some way. My experience aligns with the mystical teachings of many traditions: once we recognise the subtle cravings within ourselves, we can release ourselves from them, and return to loving curiosity. After all, the nature of universal love transcends our attempts to categorise and explain it: something I sang about in the first song I released (Trust We Get There). It is unknown whether religious institutions will help those people who come through their doors in response to metacrisis and collapse to then embrace ‘uneditable’ love… but it is something we could seek to influence. 

Below I share a reflection exercise I used with myself to explore the feelings from some different stories about matter, spirit, and myself.

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In our next Salon of the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative on March 2nd we will explore the issue of dread, and to live with that feeling once we anticipate societal collapse. One view is that we can’t live fully with such a feeling unless we have a form of spiritual awakening, so we sense a deeper Ok-ness about life and death, and what might occur in the future. That is one reason why I have been making more time for my own spiritual life and also engaged in comparative religious study. I hope to share more reflections from that in due course.

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Reflection Exercise on Matter, Spirit, and Self

It can help to have someone read the following prompts slowly to you. You will lie on a bed and shut your eyes to then imagine a series of different potential realities and notice how they feel. 

Lying down, with eyes closed, imagine or perceive, being full, like an inflated balloon, of energy or spirit. Imagine how your body and your mind are the project and purpose of that spirit within you, animating you from within. Sense how that feels. 

Don’t rush, but next, in the same position, think of your whole body itself as a divine expression in a sacred universe. Imagine the whole room around you as vibrating divinity, just like your body. Consider that the whole world flowed into creating your consciousness right now, where you know it exists. Sense how that feels. 

Next, think of a divine spirit outside of you, which loves you, and you can speak with, not to ask to inhabit you, but to guide you and await your reunion with it after death. You might want to think of this entity as a human-like being, perhaps like a perfect version of a male or female parent. Sense how that feels. 

After rising from the exercise, take some time to reflect on which conceptualisations affected you and in what ways. Was there more energy in some moments, more loving consciousness in some others? 

Know that these descriptions of reality can be tools for your spiritual aliveness and engagement, rather than truths to remember, proclaim or argue over. The differences in these concepts could therefore be seen as a richness, rather than a complication.

My previous writings on Christian Mysticism

In “Next Time, Let’s Put the True Christ Back into Christmas,” Prof. Jem Bendell argues that seasonal appeals to “restore Christ” often ignore Jesus’ radical teachings. He critiques both commercial consumerism and cultural Christians who defend tradition while neglecting Jesus’ rejection of wealth, status, and coercive power. To truly centre Christ, Bendell urges attention to his solidarity with the poor, nonviolence, humility, and inner transformation rather than nostalgic or politicised slogans.

In “Reclaiming ‘Kyrie Eleison’ this Christmas” Prof. Jem Bendell reinterprets the traditional chant *“Kyrie Eleison”* — usually rendered “Lord, have mercy” — as an ancient plea for healing and wholeness rather than penitential guilt. Drawing on Greek roots and Jesus’ actions in the Gospels, he argues the phrase originally invited divine care and unconditional love, not juridical forgiveness. This shift reveals how institutional religion has obscured Jesus’ message of non-judgment, grace, and inner healing, and invites a mystical reconnection with Christian roots.

In *“Christianity and Hope — when the Pope does hopium, what do the mystics do?”* Prof. Jem Bendell critiques the past Pope’s Christmas message urging hope for a materially-better future as linked to love, arguing this reflects ideological “hopium” shaped by privilege and cultural assumptions. He contrasts that with a mystical Christianity where unconditional love isn’t tied to expectations of worldly outcomes. Drawing on theology and mystic teachings, Bendell suggests true Christian hope is more like deep faith and open-hearted acceptance in adversity, not optimistic certainty about global improvement.

In *“Let’s Not Become Attached to Collapse” Prof Jem Bendell draws on *Anthony De Mello’s* teachings to show how attachment — even to collapse narratives — can become a new ego-story that undermines presence, peace, and love. Awareness of societal breakdown can awaken compassion, but clinging to certainty about collapse — positive or negative — reinforces illusion rather than freedom. True spiritual practice, he argues, involves noticing and releasing such attachments, meeting each moment with openness and unconditional compassion.

In *“Mary Magdalene and the Mariam Mantra” Prof Jem Bendell reflects on the non-cannonical *Gospel of Mary Magdalene* and his crafting of a *Mariam Mantra* inspired by its message of sacred interbeing and inner awakening. He highlights Mary’s teachings — unity, compassion, and direct experience of the divine within — contrasting them with hierarchical, patriarchal Christianity that marginalized feminine spirituality. Performed at a kirtan, the mantra embodies cosmic love and challenges cultural distortions of early Christian mysticism, inviting renewed attention to mystic and feminine dimensions of faith.

*“Heartfullness: The Way of Contemplation”* by Reverend Stephen G. Wright is a 12-step contemplative guide for those seeking spiritual depth beyond institutional religion amid metacrisis and collapse. Bendell’s book review focuses on how it invites a “detox from ego addiction,” fostering sustained loving awareness of the sacred and unity with the Divine. It emphasizes the contemplative path — openness, non-attachment, and heartfelt presence — over techniques, drawing on perennial mystical insights to support inner transformation and spiritual awakening in challenging times.