The Hidden Parables

By Todd Michael

• Essene Studios  2004
  

CHAPTER ONE
THE MASTER PARABLE

           Although the thirty two parables are delivered in a well-established chronological sequence, the best place to begin their translation into modern terms is not at the first parable but at the fourth.  As you will see, the fourth parable, known as the Parable of the Sower, is also the “Master Parable.” This parable gives us the key or code necessary to unlock the deepest levels of meaning of all the other parables.

The parable of the sower is unusual because it is delivered in three distinct separate parts.  Each part has a distinct purpose.   Part one which is the first nine verses in Chapter 13 of Matthew relates the parable itself—the story of a man who sows seed, some of which fall on fertile ground some on infertile ground. In Part Three, verses 18-23, the story is interpreted directly by the teacher.  In the third part we are told what the characters and conditions in the story represent. 

Part Two, Matthew 13, verses 10 through 17, is nested in a most interesting position--between the story and its interpretation.  This section provides critical introductory comments pertaining to all the parables and introduces several key phrases and comments which set the stage for the entire sequence of lessons.  In this chapter, we will concentrate only on Part Two which will be referred to in the remainder of the book as The Key.  The information in The Key is deep and quite fascinating.  It begins with the disciples asking Jesus point blank why he teaches via the use of these enigmatic allegorical stories.  His answer, given in ten sequential statements, is as follows:

     Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but it has not been given to the rest. For whoever has, to him will be given, and he will have over-abundance. But whoever does not have even what he has will be taken from him.

     Because of this, I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled on them, which says: In hearing you will hear, and in no way understand; and seeing you will see, yet in no way perceive.

     For the heart of this people has grown fat, and they hear sluggishly with their ears; and they have closed their eyes, that they not see with the eyes, or hear with the ears, and understand with the heart, and be converted, and I heal them. But your eyes are blessed, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.

     For truly I tell you, that many prophets and righteous ones desired to see what you see, and did not see; and to hear what you hear, and did not hear. Then hear the parable of the sower.

         This passage, which rests so auspiciously between the master parable and its interpretation, provides very clear clues as to the true depth and purpose of the parable series.  The first clue is found in the first sentence, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven…”

It is important to understand what “mysteries” really are.  According to the Greek to English dictionary in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance the Greek word used here, musterion, technically refers to secret knowledge, knowledge which is silent, and transmitted by initiation.

         Through the ages, great knowledge has often been handed down from teacher to student through the process of “initiation.” Typically this means that a student undergoes intense or prolonged preparation well before the secret knowledge is actually given. Preparation may include a waiting period, educational activities and assignments, and in certain cases some kind of purification. Once these requirements have been established, a private ceremony takes place in which the initiate receives a particularly important secret about the way the life and the universe operate.

        And what are the great secrets thus passed from generation to generation in this classic way? A case can be made that a variety of key truths comprise the bulk of these “secrets.”  But two or three of these great truths appear and reappear so consistently that they seem clearly to be the greatest and most profound of all.

        First among such great secrets of the ages is that our attitudes, visualizations, and intentions have the power to change reality--that mind over matter is a process that can be learned and managed.

The second great secret of the ages that arises naturally along with the first, is that of all the attitudes and intentions available to a human being, the attitude of kindness and generosity, the mindset of love, is the most potent thoughtform possible.   Love--and selflessness in general--in all their manifestations as positive actions and attitudes, are the most powerful and effective tools available to human beings to influence the unfolding of reality in beneficial ways.

                                                THE SOURCES

At this point in our study of the key, the question arises: If Jesus was engaged in the process of  initiating his students, including us, into the mysteries, what are mysteries into which he was likely initiated?  The process of initiation subsumes a sequence of events in which knowledge is obtained through initiation then passed along through initiation.  In other words, if Jesus was going to pass along secret knowledge he had to have first been initiated into it himself.  This has excellent practical import because, if we can know which mystical sects or traditions likely initiated Christ, we can look at those traditions and learn a great deal about the kinds of secret knowledge Christ sought to pass along through his stories.

To answer the question of Jesus’ sources, remember first that Jesus was a Jew.  As such, any process of secret initiation he was likely to have undergone was very likely to have been through one of the Jewish mystical traditions.  And what Jewish mystical schools were active during Jesus time and available to him in his formative years?  The two most active Jewish mystical sources available in his day were the Kaballah, and the Essenes.

                                  THE KABALLAH

The Kaballa is a system of mystical doctrines and techniques over 4000 years old that predates all religions.  Creation, in the Kaballistic tradition is via a process of emanation by which a series of sephirots or worlds give rise to one another, father worlds emanating child realms or universes.   The geneology of worlds so created is represented by the Tree of Life which outlines a path of ascent to the highest levels of spirituality via exercises and meditations similar to Eastern yogic practices.  The Kaballah includes among other things, the idea of metempsychosis—roughly equivalent to reincarnation, thaumaturgy—the performance of miracles, and the use of the word Yahweh—the name or sound of God to achieve higher states of consciousness.

Contemporary author Michael Berg, presented a fascinating distillation of the Kaballah in his best selling book, The Secret.  According to Berg, the entire wisdom of all Kabbalistic teachings is reducible to one great secret which he states as follows:

The only way to achieve true joy and fulfillment

 is by becoming a being of sharing.

In  other words, the only effective route to the kingdom of heaven--the world of abundance, success, and happiness we seek to generate and inhabit--is by  constantly living and breathing generosity, the highest and most practical manifestation of love.

                                              THE ESSENES

          The Essenes were a highly unusual, free thinking, monastic community active in Christ’s place and time. Their thinking and their ways were so different than the establishment that they tended to isolate themselves in self sufficient settlements as far as possible from the rest of civilization.  Their most important community was known as Qumran where the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls lived.

          The Essenes were a very distinctive and intense group of people. They placed a great deal of emphasis on living a natural, healthy lifestyle and particularly on eating only raw, vegetarian, live foods. They believed in fasting to cleanse the body and mind and to attain mystical states of revelation.  They were highly disciplined, even strict, in their attention to work, selflessness, cleanliness, purity, and chastity.  The Essenes maintained their own economic system, based on natural laws of abundance, and believed that all man’s food and material needs could be attained without struggle, through knowledge of the laws. (footnote Szekely’s, Search for the Ageless, page 12.)

It seems only natural that Jesus of Nazareth, himself a very unusual and creative thinker who shunned the conventions of the establishment, would have spent a good deal of time with the Essenes in the rural areas of his small country during the “lost” years of his life between the ages of 14 and 29.  Many authorities even think Jesus was a fully dedicated Essene who lived and trained with them extensively.  It is my personal belief that he had in fact lived and worked in the Essene communities for a number of years but had branched out on his due to the fact that his ideas were so creative and out of the box.  The vast majority of biblical scholars would have to admit that at the very least Christ was aware of the Essenes and moderately influenced by their advanced philosophies.

What do we know of these people?  Manuscripts from the ancient Essenes come from two primary sources.  Manuscripts contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1945, and manuscripts from the Secret Archives of the Vatican translated by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely. Szekely derived his translations from previous translastion accomplished by St. Jerome and St. Benedict in the Middle Ages. In the fourth century A.D,  St. Jerome began to find fragments of a specific kind of manuscripts.  They had come to be in the possession of religious hermits living in small huts in a hidden valley of the desert of Chalcis.  As Jerome learned Hebrew and Aramaic he began to understand the significance of the Essene words and translated the fragments into Latin.

In the next century these translations came into the possession of St. Benedict who copied and preserved them in the library of his monastery at Monte Cassino.  Eventually finding their way into the Secret Archives of the Vatican over the next centuries, they were discovered by the young Szekely, translated into modern English, and published.  The most famous of these is The Essene Gospel of Peace.

Influences on the mystical order of the Essenes were eclectic and far reaching.  Szekely believes the Essenes existed as a brotherhood for centuries prior to the life of Christ, perhaps under other names in other lands.  Although a distinct belief system with its own character, the essence of the Essenes teachings—according to Szekely--derived from sources as diverse as the Zend Avesta of Zarathustra, the Vedas and the Upanishads, the yoga systems of India, Buddhism, Freemasonry, Gnosticism, and the Kabala.  And, of course, all of these hold at their core the fundamental ideas that 1) Intention creates reality and that 2) The most potent of all intentions is that of love.

Consider the following five-part Essene quote from the the Lost Gospels of the Essenes:

 
Blessed is the Child of Light
Who is wise in Mind,
For he shall create heaven

The Mind of the wise
Is a well-plowed field
Which giveth forth abundance and plenty.
For if  thou showest a handful of seed
To a wise man, He will see in his Mind’s eye
A field of golden wheat.
And if thou showest a handful of seed
To a fool, He will see only that which is before him,
And call them worthless pebbles.

And as the field of the wise man
Giveth forth grain in abundance,
And the field of the fool
Is a harvest only of stones,
So it is with our thoughts.

 As the sheaf of golden wheat
Lieth hidden within the tiny kernel
So it is with our thoughts.

As the sheaf of golden wheat
Leith hidden within the tiny kernel,
So is the kingdom of heaven
Hidden within our thoughts.

If they be filled with the
Power, Love and Wisdom
Of the Angels of the Heavenly Farther,
So they shall carry us
To the Heavenly Sea.


                                                         THE SYNTHESIS

As Hegel and Hesse demonstrated with such elegance, true evolution occurs via a dialectical process in which parent influences are merged into a synthesis.  The synthesis contains elements of the parent influences yet is entirely new and different.  The parables are the synthesis Christ offered.  They are the marriage of traditional Jewish ideas, Kabbalistic ideas, and Essene ideas.  Thus, the deepest messages of the parables contain elements similar to the parent influences yet far surpassing them.

         If we consider the Essene and Kaballistic influences on Jesus’ personal evolution as a synthesis we can now understand his words at a much deeper level.  Look again at the first two sentences of the The Key:

        And answering he said to them. Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but it has not been given to those. For whoever has, to him will be given and he will have over abundance. But who ever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him, because of this I speak to them in parables…

        To paraphrase, he tells us that he wants us to know the secret knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven through the parables, that this is what there are all about. It is therefore critical to translate this phrase with care so as to unlock its true depth.

        Remember that one of the primary ideas of this book is that Jesus was knowledgeable in advanced concepts such as those found in modern physics and modern psychology.  If he were in fact attempting to communicate such advanced concepts, this intention would be clearly reflected right here at the very beginning of his ministry with parables, right here in the key explanatory passage.

        The term traditionally translated as “kingdom” is from the Greek word basileia. As traditional translations indicate, this word can be translated as “kingdom.” However, according to Strong’s Concordance, basileia can also be translated as realm.

        A realm…what could he mean by that? If he were somehow “trapped in the past” trying to talk to us about advanced concepts of time and space he knew we would be studying now so many years later, why would he use the word “realm?” What would a modern scientist call a realm? Would it be too big a stretch to think that the modern words “dimension” or “universe” would be a more accurate and meaningful translation?  By extension, would it be reasonable to suggest that a metaphysician might use the term “personal reality” when referring to a “realm?”

        But the complete phrase, realm or “dimension” of heaven, what could that mean precisely? The Greek term used here for “heaven” is ouranos. Strong’s Concordance translates ouranos as follows:

        Ouranso, oo-ran-os; perhaps from oros (through the idea of elevation); the sky; by      

extension, heaven (as the abode of God); by implication, happiness, power, eternity.

        As indicated, in order to translate ouranos correctly, we have to first go back to the word oros which means “to lift or to rise.” It is as though “heaven,” as used in this context, is more a verb and less a noun or thing. Heaven is a process--of elevation, of rising, of lifting--a process characterized by happiness and power, a process that has always been going on and will always go on, in “eternity.”

And where is this higher dimension or universe found?  He was absolutely clear on this point when he told us, “Heaven is within.”  This dimension of heaven is a state of mind.  The entire universe is a state of mind.  Thus the phrase, “kingdom of heaven” becomes, in modern terms:

        “A universe or dimension, a personal reality, which is a process that occurs within,  The kingdom of heaven is a process of rising, of being lifted up, into a dimension of happiness and power--the ability to change things--a universe that is always present and will always be present, a universe of Mind.”
  
        To put it all together, when Christ says that he is speaking in parables because he wants us to “know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven,” he is saying that he wants us to initiate is into the great secret—that our thoughts and intentions create and shape our separate universes, our personal realities, and that we can create and enter entirely new dimensions, worlds lifted to higher levels with our very thoughts and visualizations—lifted into universes of happiness and personal power through the power of love.

                            KEY STATEMENT NUMBER TWO

Recall that the second statement in the Key is as follows:  For whoever has, to him will be given, and he will have over-abundance. But whoever does not have even what he has will be taken from him.   What could this mean exactly?  It certainly doesn’t sound fair.  That those who are already lacking would have what little they have taken away.  What was he talking about?

He was talking about a prinicple of propagation that is at the core of all the great mysteries of reality creation, the principle of expansion.  This can be stated most succinctly as “Whatever you focus on expands.”  If your thoughts and intentions dwell on what you have, what you have will expand and you will have more, even to the point of over-abundance. 

The Greek word used for over-abundance is perrisseuo which translates as “To superabound (in quality or quantity), be in excess, be superfluous; also, to cause to superabound or excel…”  Your reality will be a direct reflection of the sum total of your thoughts.  If you tend to concentrate on what your lack or any of its most suble ramificatons, your lack will expand.  If you concentrate, focus, and dwell upon what you already have, your reality will morph into a new state, a state that is not merely abundant but goes beyond to a state of excess.

And why would that be a good thing?  Because excess supply can be given away.  When you create more than what you need for yourself, even in abundance, you have created enough for others as well.  Now you have become a miracle worker who can improve the lives of everyone around you in many different ways.

                                          THE THIRD GROUP

               (Note, as of 8/29/04 these two sections are unfinished)

Because of this, I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled on them, which says: In hearing you will hear, and in no way understand; and seeing you will see, yet in no way perceive.

        For the heart of this people has grown fat, and they hear sluggishly with their ears; and they have closed their eyes, that they not see with the eyes, or hear with the ears, and understand with the heart, and be converted, and I heal them. But your eyes are blessed, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.

                              THE FINAL KEY STATEMENT

For truly I tell you, that many prophets and righteous ones desired to see what you see, and did not see; and to hear what you hear, and did not hear. Then hear the parable of the sower.