SEEK WHEN YOU ARE SOUGHT

8 Copyright 2018, John H. Davidson M.A. (Cantab)

John H. Davidson M.A. (Cantab)

Adapted from The Gospel of Jesus – In Search of His Original Teachings,

John Davidson, 2004.

Available from:
http://www.scienceofthesoul.org/product_p/en–176–0.htm

“Seek and ye shall find” is a saying of Jesus that has fired the imagination
of many. But who is seeking what?

It is generally understood that a seeker is one who is searching or seeking for the Truth
concerning life, feeling that there is some higher Reality to be apprehended and
experienced. Looking through the writings of the ancient Middle East from around the
time of Jesus, and searching especially among the early Christian writings, one finds
many references to this perennial quest. For the feeling is as old as man and arises when
the karmic burden on the soul is sufficiently light to permit it to rise up, to some extent,
of its own accord. Something of the warmth, longing, love, understanding and spirituality
of the higher heavenly realms, then filters through into the mind.

God, however, cannot be found unless He wishes it. The gnostic writer of the Untitled
Text in the Bruce Codex expresses the matter clearly:

Thou alone are the Infinite One,

Thou alone art the Deep,
and Thou alone art the Unknowable One.
And thou art He for whom everyone seeks,
and they do not find Thee,
for none can know Thee without Thy will,
and none can bless Thee without Thy will.

For an individual to experience the pangs of seeking actually means that Truth, Reality or
God is calling the soul. That being the case, it is sure that the sincere seeker will one day
find Him, for God would not call unless He intended the called one to be successful in his
search. This is what Jesus must have meant when he said (Matthew 7:7–8):

Ask, and it shall be given you;

seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
For every one that asketh receiveth;
and he that seeketh findeth;
and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

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There are a great many instances in the ancient mystic literature of the Middle East where
this saying is echoed, though whether it originated with Jesus or not is unknown. The
term is very commonly encountered, for example, in the Mandaean sacred poetry. The
Mandaeans are a gnostic sect who give allegiance to a pantheon of Saviours, some of
them obviously mythical, but among them being John the Baptist, to whom they may owe
their origins. Almost miraculously, they have survived from earliest Christian times down
to the present century in the marshlands of southern Iran and Iraq. The one to whom this
particular poem is addressed (in the The Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans) is the
mythical Saviour, Manda-d-Hiia (literally, ‘knowledge of life’ or ‘gnosis’ of life):

Those who seek of Him find,

and to those who ask of Him it will be given.
For to him that standeth at a closed door
thou wilt open the closed door.
In the Place of Light thou wilt wipe away
and remove from us our sins, trespasses, follies,
stumblings and mistakes....
Thou wilt raise us up as sinless and not as guilty,
as virtuous and not as vicious before thee, Manda-d-Hiia.

In another extract, the writer speaks of seekers as being sustained by the mystic Name,
synonymous with the Creative Word from which mystics say that the entire creation has
been created and is continuously sustained:

And those who seek from Him shall find,

and to those who ask of Him, it will be given.
Day by day, hour by hour, behold us
who exist in thy Name
and are sustained by calling on thy Name.

In the gnostic Pistis Sophia, Jesus speaks of “seeking... the mysteries of the Kingdom of
the Light”. The meaning, again, could not be clearer:

You have not left off seeking until you found all the mysteries of
Kingdom of the Light which have purified you and made you into refined
light, exceedingly purified, and you have become purified light.... Cease
not to seek day and night until you find the purifying mysteries.

Likewise, in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says:

Let not him that seeketh cease seeking till he find,

and when he findeth, he shall marvel,
and having marvelled he shall reign,
and having reigned he shall rest.

This enigmatic saying would seem to mean that when the seeker really begins to travel
the inner path, he “marvels” and is lost in awe and wonder at the things that are revealed
to him within. Then, progressing further, he regains his birthright as the son of the divine
King and “reigns”, becoming one with God. And becoming one with Him, he attains
“rest” – a term commonly used by the mystics of that time to mean the eternal beatitude,
bliss and peace of being one with God.

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Looked at from another angle, the quest for God is the search for the real nature of the
self, the soul. Hence, in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, Judas Thomas praises God,
saying, “he showed me how to seek my own soul”:

Glory to Thee, O God –

who did not withhold His mercy from me,
who was lost,
but showed me how to seek my own soul.

It is the Master who directs the attention of the soul so that its real nature may be
discovered. In fact, such seeking only comes about because the Master seeks the soul. As
Judas Thomas says of Jesus:

(Thou) hast shown me how to seek myself

and know who I was,
and who and in what manner I now am:
That I may again become that which I was:
whom I knew not, but thyself didst seek me out.

This is what is meant in the Mandaean texts, where the poet, writing in the name of the
Master, reiterated that the “chosen” ones are sought out and “raised up” by the Creative
Word itself:

Ye are set up and raised up, my chosen ones,

by the Word and Certitude that came to you.
The Word and the Certitude that came to the good,
the True Word which came to believers.
My chosen, ye sought and ye found,
moreover ye shall seek and ye shall find.

Since it is the Master who initiates the seeking, the writer of the gnostic Zostrianos
remonstrates with the soul to release itself unhesitatingly from this world when the
Saviour has come for it, counselling, “seek when you are sought”:

Release yourselves,
and that which has bound you will be dissolved.
Save yourselves so that your soul may be saved.
The kind Father has sent you the Saviour
and given you strength.
Why are you hesitating?
Seek when you are sought; when you are invited,
listen, for time is short.

This is the essence of the entire affair. When the soul is pulled, the only valid response or
duty is to ask, to seek and to knock upon the inner door until it opens. For once we feel
the call within ourselves, we will have no peace unless we do it justice, and answer it
from the depth of our hearts.

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