John Dupuy on Finding the Sacred Within and Without

The Gospel of Thomas turned up in the Egyptian desert in 1945, and only fairly recently has it circulated widely again. One line in it has stayed with me. Jesus says that God is within you and God is also without you. The other gospels tend to point inward: look for the kingdom inside yourself. Thomas keeps that idea but adds something to it. Yes, you will find it within, and you will also find it outside of you.

That double emphasis changes how I think about spiritual work. If the sacred lives in both places, then the practices we do on the inside and the effort we make on the outside both deserve respect. Neither one is a warm-up for the other. You tend to your interior life, and you also act in the world, and you treat both as holy ground.

When a person actually lives that way, something becomes possible. You can be of real service: compassionate, skilled, genuinely loving toward the world and toward every living being. To me that capacity is the whole point of a healthy Christianity, and I would say of any religion worth practicing. It comes down to compassion, love, and service.

So I want to thank Erik and everyone at Psychology of the Future for the conversation, and for the chance to share this work on recovery and on religious worldviews that keep growing and changing.