John 14:6 – Humans are three-centred beings
John 14:6 is one of the most soundbite-able quotes in that incredibly soundbite-packed work, the Book of John. In response to a question by the disciple Thomas, Jesus replies: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!” Very catchy. But what does it mean?
Deconstructing John 14:6
According to Wikipedia, ‘the Way’ was a self-descriptive term used by the early church. Yet it may have adopted this term because of a deeper connotation. On the other two, the Truth and the Life, Wikipedia is uncharacteristically silent.
The original Greek word for ‘truth’ is lanthano, which the Abarim translation describes as “the slipping out of sight or awareness of something that was previously seen or known about, and which is still very much there.”
The word for ‘life,’ zao, also has a specific slant: it relates to being alive (as opposed to dead) rather than to the process or experience of living.
When we assemble these three meanings, John 14:6 reveals that Jesus is the path to follow to bring back into awareness something previously known and still relevant—which is the difference between being fundamentally alive or dead. While living, breathing, and thinking in what we assume to be a normal way, we are ‘dead’ in some unconscious yet critical aspect.
“A shambles”
This reminds me of another triptych, this one from British psychiatrist R. D. Laing who writes about trauma recovery in The Politics of Experience (1967):
“When our personal worlds are rediscovered… we discover first a shambles… genitals dissociated from heart; heart severed from head; heads dissociated from genitals.”
Laing, who extensively studied schizophrenia, describes a devastated inner landscape with little difference between the insane and supposedly sane: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience… Our collusive madness is what we call sanity.”
The recovery of connection to our hearts and—even more challenging—our genitals through trauma release is indeed akin to being dead and suddenly coming alive. I mean this in a very literal sense because trauma is always the result of emotional overwhelm and shutdown, leading to a reduced capacity to feel.
Both Laing and John 14:6 are signposting an inner deadness in our lives that Pink Floyd unerringly describe as ‘comfortably numb.’
There is one and only one means of genuine trauma release: non-judgment. In Matthew 7:1 Jesus tells us, “Do not judge, or you will be judged.”
Releasing trauma through releasing judgment reinstates our capacity to feel, through which we encounter the Truth—that “something that was previously seen or known about, and which is still very much there.”
The three-centred human
As we slowly reconnect with our dissociated hearts and genitals, we realise that humans are three-centred beings: head, heart, and genitals. The head is a thinking centre; the other two are feeling centres. Many people live exclusively in their heads, some have a limited heart connection, few have any genital connection at all—that’s why sexuality is humanity’s most controversial issue.
Spiritual teacher Georges Gurdjieff describes the three-centred human in terms of a three-story factory. The chemistry between the three centres—or storeys—creates the fully conscious human being, who is ‘alive’ rather than ‘dead.’
In In Search of the Miraculous Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, who studied under Gurdjieff, quotes him as saying that as well as describing the human constitution, “The three-story factory represents the universe in miniature.”
There are parallels between John 14:6, Gurdjieff’s factory, and verse 1:1 of the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, a work of Jewish mysticism of ancient origin. According to Torah scholar Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, this complex verse describes a three-tiered structure comprising Wisdom (Chakmah, masculine), Understanding (Binah, feminine), and Foundation (Yesod, sexual organs).
From this we can create a table of correspondences:
Early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich warns that “man is the only biological species which has destroyed its own natural sex function, and that… is what ails him.” ‘Natural sex function’ points to Yesod, Foundation, our connection to life itself.
The Way, the Truth, and the Life
From ancient scriptures to modern psychology, the message is the same: “Houston, we have a problem.”
Humanity is so deadened by collective trauma it no longer knows it is deadened by collective trauma. This is the “something that was previously seen or known about, and which is still very much there.” Oblivious, it slides into genetic decay while John 14:6 has been screaming at us for two thousand years: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!”
Not only does John 14:6 urge us to recover our lost deadness, it tells us what we will discover when we recover it. The Way, the Truth, and the Life are shorthand for the three centres themselves. The Way is the mind, which recognises Jesus as the path; the Truth is the heart, which instinctively knows what is right; the Life is the genital centre, point of connection to the source energy of the living God.
John 14:6 is a stunningly compact telling of all that ails humanity, and what’s critical for us to recover: the feeling capacity of the two lower centres, which heals the “shambles” that R. D. Laing identified as the cause of our collective madness.
The Way, the Truth, and the Life beckons. Will you follow?
Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
