PREFACE
Jesus did not die without leaving us a book explaining his message. In it he offers an alternative to religion as we know it. This “way” resolves the religious, ethnic, social, and personal conflicts that cause so much suffering in the world today. Two thousand years ago, Jesus found everyone living just as they are today, mostly in what he calls “death.” Therefore, his mission was to teach a process of personal development which he called “life,” hence, the title of this book, The Way of Life. This is the first volume of the manual that he left us.
About Robert North
Throughout my young life when I had what some call “mystical experiences,” I was beyond happy. I was so quiet, so in love with others and myself, so clear, and so without worry. At those times, I knew that what Jesus claimed was right: an extraordinary kind of life is possible. But how do we live it all day every day? I became obsessed with that question. Deep down I knew that so-called “mystical experiences” were revelations about our full potential.
While searching for answers, I received fourteen years of Catholic education before joining the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuits), a Catholic order of priests. The Jesuit system places everyone on probation for the first two years. At the end of that period, the master of novices decides whether one possesses the character and intelligence to continue. When my turn came, the master of novices called me into his office and coldly told me that because my grades in Latin were so poor, I was unsuitable for the order. In an instant, I realized that the signals I had been picking up were correct: most of our superiors valued us for our scholastic achievement more than for whom we were as people.
Before I even reached my room, I began to have a minor nervous breakdown. I felt betrayed and assaulted, and I doubted my worth. Fortunately, the priest in authority over the next two years of study asked that I be put under his care for another probationary period. He valued character and saw that I had non-Latin talents. He was ashamed of the hypocrisy in the system and helped me to heal and to continue my studies for four more years.
My emotional trauma woke me up. I had been a fairly happy, sensitive young man. And suddenly, I was coping with worry and anxiety daily. I feared that “bad things” could happen at any minute. “How,” I asked, “can one live without worry and anxiety?” That was a very important question to me, especially in light of Jesus saying, “Do not be anxious about your life” (Matthew 6:25). “If I am worried and anxious,” I told myself, “I am not following him even though I have vowed myself to God in this religious community.” I finally left the Society after six years because I continued to be troubled. Religion did not offer practical solutions to my problems.
I then sought my answers in a doctoral program in humanistic counseling at the University of Florida. I looked within every theory, I enrolled in every outside growth experience available, and I carefully examined the research about successful and unsuccessful therapists. But I did not find my answers. No one could help me leave my emotional roller coaster permanently.
As I went on to teach in various colleges and universities, I began to study with various scholars of Scripture on the side. I wanted to focus on the New Testament Gospels because I sensed that Jesus had discovered mental health secrets and that I might be able to uncover them. All current translations, I soon realized, present much of the Bible incorrectly in linear paragraphs. My specialty became the discernment of how texts in the Bible were originally organized.
In the next twenty years, I continued to attend growth workshops. I went to an ashram to learn a version of Hinduism. I also read self-help and New Age philosophy books. They all left me empty. I also found myself becoming an outcast with friends and family. Because they were happy, they found my inner turmoil and questioning a distraction—at best.
In 1998, what I regarded then as a tragedy began in my life. First, I needed to declare bankruptcy after I could not find an investor to take to market software that I had developed. Second, I was accused in court by the mother of my son of untrue allegations. Unable to pay for an attorney to defend myself and unwilling to put my son through a fight for his custody and visiting arrangements, I moved to another state. I found myself near destitute in a cabin outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the high desert. Within a week of settling in, I knew in my soul that I had been given a chance to start over with nothing. I knew what success in education and business meant. I knew what having money and losing it felt like. I had met and lived with many wonderful women. I knew where those adventures would take me again. My son had transformed my life, and while I could learn more being his father, I knew that it was time for me to move on temporarily.
All of my life I had been haunted by Jesus’s statement to a young rich man: “Go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Mark 4:21). Over and over I had asked Jesus: “Why sell everything? What is that ‘treasure’ and where is it? and “What do I practically get out of following you.” Now I had a chance to find out.
To answer those questions, I decided to get on the scholarly bandwagon (see the Bibliography) and study a text discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. In the margin, a scribe called it the Gospel of Thomas. Initially it appeared to be a random collection of Jesus’s sayings, half of which had never been heard. The other half had a striking similarity to what is found in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The opening sentence of the book indicates that Jesus composed all of the material. (“These are the words, those hidden, which Jesus, who lives, spoke.”) But, because no one dreamed that Jesus wrote a book and because the document seemed to lack any organization that implied that a single author composed it, the work continued to be informally named after the scribe, Judas Thomas.
I was not fluent in Coptic, the language of the text, a version of Greek spoken in Egypt in 350 CE when the book was buried. But fortunately, an interlinear translation had been published. With its help and because I had been doing Biblical scholarship for 35 years, I determined that the text contained poems and that the stanzas were arranged in an arch. I discovered that I was confronted with a coherent work with a highly intricate organization, most likely composed by a single individual. And the more I looked at the evidence, the more I became convinced that Jesus was the probable author.
As I spent seven years in the desert studying it, I found what I had been searching for: yes, my personal answers. Jesus truly did know how to live all day, every day in full joy. His message taught me how to leave sadness, regret, and worry while growing in what he called life.
We are evolving ever more advanced ways to resolve social and personal conflicts. It may appear that we are making progress, but we are doing nothing more than swapping chairs on the Titanic. Jesus will show us that out of what he calls death (which is how we all live to some degree now), we only create more death. To progress, we must become more alive. We will then recognize the obvious solutions to what appear to be intractable problems. He argues with irrefutable logic that our first educational and political priority should be advancing on the Way of Life.