Article by Ralph Miller

National Geographic magazine recently made the stunning announcement of the lost gospel of Judas discovered in Egypt in 1970 which has now been fully restored, translated and authenticated. The gospel was written around 180 AD and contains the very controversial view that Judas’ betrayal of Jesus was organized by Jesus himself. Judas is portrayed as the most trusted disciple who was given this very difficult task. What a strange thing that history’s most famous traitor is cast in a completely different light.

Codex written in Coptic from the lost Gospel of Judas.

I’ve pretty much felt for a long time, that today’s Christian religions have very little to do with what the teachings and life of Jesus exemplified. Of course the gospel of Judas press releases would focus on the provocative … Judas now portrayed as the most trusted disciple, which certainly flies in the face of mainstream Christian doctrine. But there was something in this gospel that was far more interesting to me.

Much of the gospel talks about hidden mysteries that were revealed to Judas. The mysteries related to a world beyond our world. Actually most of the gospel talks about cosmology, angels, luminaries, the creation of humanity and the ultimate destiny of humanity. This information was given only to Judas. He was told of the mysteries of the kingdom...

“The souls of every human generation will die. When these people, however, have completed the time of the kingdom and the spirit leaves them, their bodies will die but their souls will be alive, and they will be taken up.”

This kingdom is another world, beyond this life. Beyond this world.

Much of modern humanity suffers from a mindset that was handed to us by our cultures, our parents, our teachers, our churches, etc. By mindset, I mean the collective beliefs we have about ourselves and the world we live in. Most of us grow up in cultures that include television, mass consumerism, consumption, competition and a great deal of fear. In fact fear based mentality permeates our lives. We are afraid of terrorists. We are afraid of our governments. We are afraid of not having money. We are afraid of getting old. All fear ultimately has to come from our fear of our own mortality.

We all have to die someday. Talk about stating the obvious … but how ironic that collectively we are in almost complete denial of death. The media propagandizes our minds about how to look younger, feel younger and continue the illusion of our immortality. We are frozen in the dream that consists of only tangible things … the house we live in, the car we drive, the money we have in the bank.

When we do face death we are ill prepared. At best we cling to a flimsy idea of an afterlife that we call heaven. We hope that our faith … or the good graces of our pastor, priest or rabbi gets us through to heaven. Jesus referred to heaven as the kingdom. Our idea of the kingdom of god or heaven is that it is another place that we will go to when we die. Our best idea of what a heaven is, unfortunately can only come from an earthly point of reference. What is it really? Streets of gold? A lot of great stuff? Will I be bored silly?

We naturally have great difficulty thinking of something beyond space and time because our world is in space and time … so we tend to try to drag finite, physical concepts into the realm of the infinite and timeless. No finite concept can even touch what heaven or the kingdom really is. The language of the gospel points to something that is beyond the beyond …

“Come, that I may teach you about secrets no person has ever seen. For there exists a great and boundless realm, whose extent no generation of angels has ever seen, in which there is a great invisible Spirit, which no eye of an angel as ever seen, no thought of the heart has ever comprehended, and it was never called by any name.”

The great shamanic teaching from the indigenous cultures that use the Ayahuasca medicine is that ‘Ayahuasca teaches us how to die.’ Our brains are actually designed to have a perception that transcends the physical. We are supposed to be able to see these vast realms. But we are collectively enchanted by the physical … we believe that only things we can see with our eyes and feel with our hands are real. Our brains have a natural visionary perception that for most human cultures today goes into an atrophied state before our teen years. This sacred plant medicine turns on the visionary brain … it naturally activates a latent potential.

The Ayahuasca experience shatters the illusion of temporal reality. You experience something way beyond the physical. You transcend time and space as we know it. Your familiarity with these realms is like a long lost memory … you remember. You realize you are something far more that what you had always thought. The experience puts you face-to-face with your ego; your illusion of who you thought you were, and at times it is difficult. But fear falls away … there is nothing to fear … you begin to feel safe.

© Ralph Miller 2006

Link to complete English translation - Gospel of Judas