Plausible, Yet Not Convincing

40. Jesus said, "A grapevine has been planted apart from the Father. 
Since it is not strong, it will be pulled up by its root and 
will perish."

41 Jesus said, "Whoever has something in hand will be given more, and whoever has nothing will be deprived of even the little they have."

42 Jesus said, "Be passersby."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
-
I decided to combine The Gospel of Thomas sayings #40, #41, and #42 together to reflect on and try to find a possible relationship between these sequential saying. I think they may relate to a KJV story supposed told by Jesus when his disciples ask him what to do to be-co-me with him. 

According to my memores they were told to "Go ye therefore unto all the world and preach the gospel. In my youthfulness I assumed that one's "gospel" was their own life story. The disciples had their own gospel/life stories, and as a disciple of me, I had my own life story. 

So, when I did take to the highway and spent years hitch-hiking and bumming around the country, the stories I told of my life (my gospel) was all about me. When I first started out I didn't have much in hand to tell, and what there was, wasn't even mine for the most part. The little I had was taken away.

The stories I told to strangers about myself were lies. Not intentional lies. I didn't know each of them were a lie at first. I had been in the Navy for four years and had visited many cultures around the Pacific Rim. I deliberately put a lotta notches on my gun through negligence and total ignorance of the law of the streets. I'm still ignorant of the streets. When I came to some town, either large or small, my entire focus was to get to the other side of it as quickly and expeditiously as possible. 

The only stories that seemed to be somewhat believable to the drivers who picked me up from the side of the road and the waitresses I talked to when I could afford a cup of coffee were my "sea stories" from when I was in the Navy. They told me that to accomplish what I set out to do by be-co-me-ing a friend of the world was to either learn to lie more convincingly or to stop lying. 

Basically, I learned from "going ye therefore" that I had to get my sea stories straight. I had to tell my stories as if they were the gospel truth. Unfortunately that appeared to require that I "know" what the truth was to be able to tell the gospel truth. To do that, I had to confront my worship of "graven images".

The only familiarity I had with the expression "graven images" came from the Ten Commandments. Namely, one of the Commandments stated that one should not worship them. I figured the meant along the lines of The Golden Calf, and maybe some of them Greek Orthodox icons or statues of Jesus and his disciples. 

It wasn't until I got a minimum wage job as a contract printing shop that I got a more complex idea of what more a graven image might be than religious relics. The main job this shop contracted for was imbuing big copper rolls with the images they would pick up ink and print text and graphic designs on various surfaces, usually some kind of paper. The name of this type of printing is called a rotogravure process. The big copper rolls rotated and printed the same pattern with every revolution they turned.

My job was to dip these big cylinders of copper into an acid vat to eat away the exposed copper to form the cavities that would hold the ink that would print the paper that passed by it. A lot of this company's business was with the tobacco companies, and the rolls I etched usually printed cigarette packaging. Slowly, I came to realize that the text on the packaging got there the same way the graphic images did. Words are engraved images the same as engraved pictures are. They're both graven images. 

The best selling book in the entire world is a collection of graven images that instruct the reader not to worship graven images. What a dilemma for the Bible-based religions... eh? 

As for how this relates to sayings #40, #41, and #42, and how they might possibly fit together in some unknowable linear fashion, I think #40 is about taking away the lies that have no subjective basis in experience, but are only the graven images one learns to quote as if they are derived from one's own experiential database. They are to be pulled up like a grapevine planted in the shade away from Father Sun.
 
Then, the process progresses to #41 where what little is left of the graven images one invests in is made bereft of all but the dubious contents of my own experiences (suspect because initially defined by graven images), and what is left is damned by faint praise.

The meaning of to "Be a passerby", is about how one allows "many things to pass without being duped." The way to do that is to abandon the assigned worth of passing thoughts by allowing them to be plausible, but without being convincing.