The Way of the New Essenes - Page 25

Leaving alone for now the Way of the Essenes, do you know your way? Mahatma for the “high-souled” Gandhi gives us clear directions: “the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” Now we know that losing the self is the goal, how do we get there? What path do we take? The Buddha’s fourth Noble Truth does state that there is, in Truth, a path to the end of suffering. As it happens, both Tao and Torah, words which sound curiously alike, mean “the way, the teaching.”

Also “high-souled,” the Essenes specialized in “being the change they wished to see in the world.” The earliest mention of this venerable tribe is by Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c. 20-54 CE), noting their concerns with piety, their dedication to honesty, their sense of community and their sacred vision of freedom. Since the recent discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a new interest was sparked in the Essenes and, through them, in the Hebrew Torah as a possible Wisdom Path, that is, as a way to losing the self. Yet, little is known about the other ways in which the same Hebrew Torah was received by the other tribes that existed next to the Essenes, at the time of Jesus. This difference in sensibility will be what we will focus on Sunday.  

This meeting will be as passionate as ever, as we will learn from the Essenes how to express the beauty we love to do: using our newly revealed archetypal and multifocal XPR lens to re-frame a new understanding of our collective religious history.  We will open to a new potential for Biblical understanding, that is, an understanding of the Self. We know that 2000 years ago—at the time of Jesus, the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) was read in twelve main ways, by twelve tribes named after their clan names. Here is where it becomes really interesting: what if each tribe was...