" The Kingdom of Heaven "
(malkuta dashmaya)
"Yeshua said,
“If your leaders tell you, “Look, the kingdom is in heaven,”then the birds of heaven will precede you.
If they say to you, “It’s in the sea,” then the fish will precede you.
But the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.
When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father.
But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.”
(Gospel of Thomas: saying #3, translated by Marvin Meyer)
The Gospel of Thomas describes the “Kingdom.” The Gospels of Mark and Luke use “Kingdom of God.” The Gospel of Matthew uses “Kingdom of Heaven.” These terms are equivalent. They refer to the same thing. What is that?
Yeshua, the Aramaic name of the person we think of as Jesus, spoke Aramaic to an Aramaic speaking audience. When they heard these words, malkuta dashmaya, they would not hear what we hear in the words kingdom of heaven.
The word malkuta, translated as kingdom, isn’t really kingdom at all. A more direct translation would be queendom, since malkuta is a feminine noun. In Aramaic feminine gendered nouns are a process not a thing or place. The breath you take is masculine. The breath you feel as you breath on your arm is feminine. So, malkuta is more properly reign or counsel. These are processes. It is the guidance aspect of counsel, not that which gives the counsel. It is the rulership more than the lineage of the ruling family.
The word dashmaya, translated as heaven, is the heavens, yes. But it is also so much more. Imagine being out in the wilderness of a desert at night. There is no light pollution to obscure the stars. The horizon is visible all around you no matter which way you turn. The dome of the heavens is all around. The feeling of the overwhelming vastness, beauty and glory of something that is huge and magnificent at the same time, this is dashmaya. The light, the energy vibration, that is the entire cosmos is dashmaya.
Holding these ideas in mind, re-read saying #3 from the Gospel of Thomas.
The Kingdom is not a place you can travel to, right? You don’t have to be a fish or a bird to get there. It is everywhere, both inside and outside you. It is interpenetrating everything. If we would like to know it, we must know ourselves. Then we would see that we spring forth from the source of all that exists. If we don’t know this, then we see ourselves as separate. Disconnected from the source we are poverty itself. Wow!
Neil Douglas-Klotz sums up the idea of malkuta dashmaya beautifully:
“Malkuta is the ‘I can’ of the cosmos, the awareness of the vision and power in waves of life, light, sound, and vibration (shmaya) all around us. Awareness of our own breathing, connected with nature around us, allows a deeper empowerment to stream into our own ‘I can.’ We can do this anywhere. Malkuta is not limited to any one sacred place or person, much less to a belief structure or institution.”
(Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus, by Neil Douglas-Klotz, p. 50)
I invite you to make the inward journey to the place you never leave. Take a deep breath, a spirit break, and FEEL the cosmos and your intimate connection to all that is. Breath it! Do this as often in your day as you think of it. We are aligning our false self with our True Self. This alignment is the reigning idea in malkuta; True Self reigns not false self. We are open to the guidance and counsel of True Self.
If it pleases you, take a deep breath and affirm:
Cleaning the gunk
from my lantern glass,
I allow the Christ Light
to shine through me.
I am the Light
shining from the hilltop.
Pure in heart,
I see the Christ in you.