Judas Gate

We are faced with countless problems to solve in our daily lives as adults, some people are experts in making split-second decisions that turn out to be very accurately judged, while others are quite slow and it takes them a while to process the problem, mull over it, and come up with a decision, others just go to sleep in a bid to forget about it but inevitably wake up to it later on and become so overwhelmed they begin to cry.

We all process things differently, and frankly approach things differently too, it takes different strokes to move the world.

I was reading a while back on a concept on the disciple of Jesus in the Bible who betrayed him, Judas Iscariot, this theory proposed, and many would find this quite heretic, to say the least, it looked at things from the vantage point of Judas, because over time, people have mostly seen things from every other vantage point than that of the perpetrator, we find that even in our days now. From Judas’ point of view, the author of the theory proposed that Judas’ intent might have not been to sellout Jesus to his death seeing that immediately after he learned that Jesus was going to be killed he tried to redeem himself somewhat by giving back the money he was paid for his service and when this was not collected back by the Pharisees, he threw the money there at the temple and went out and in guilt or remorse or both, hung himself (Matthew 27:3–8). This means that Judas’ intention was not to harm Jesus but perhaps wanted Jesus to learn a lesson of some sort, or maybe he wanted Jesus to be more conforming to the Pharisees because he, Judas, used to be a tax collector and he was the one in charge of the bursary in Jesus’ ministry, he realized that Jesus’ non-conformity to the Pharisees was costing them money and they stood a better chance of making more money if they would join forces, therefore the plan was to sell Jesus out, scare him a bit and have him do their bidding and they would have more money to spend and live the lives Judas had always wanted for them (at least that's how I understood it so far), and just as plans mostly are, it didn't happen how he expected and realising the immensity of the damage he had caused decided in his own way to fix it and ended up eliminating himself for not being able to rectify the damage he had done.

The Judas Syndrome, a book written by Dr. George K. Simon Jr, quotes;

Achieving genuine faith isn't easy, but if it is achieved it can genuinely change a person's life, and easily the everyday troubles we face can be easily judged from the standpoint of faith, and the right decisions come to be made in every circumstance, but here's the hurdle, achieving genuine faith is not easily achieved and for the singular reason of trying to achieve it, good people end up doing awful things.

I first came across the term “Judas Gate ” while reading Jack Higgins’ ‘Toll for the Brave’, I looked it up on google images and I saw the image, amongst many images of the like, a large gate and a much smaller one inset on the large one, it basically is a gate or door with another bigger gate or door, and truthfully, in my 30something years of life, I had never known that it was called a Judas gate, but what struck me most was the origin of the term when I looked it up furthermore and found that the author was fond of using it in most of his writing, turns out I wasn't the only one curious about it, but not curious enough to email him and ask him about it as someone did, this is what Jack Higgins had to say:

For me, it’s the idea behind the coining of the name that struck me. Gates are usually set up for security reasons, from where I am from, the much bigger gates are always padlocked, but you’ll find the smaller ones open for ease of access, and if it’s closed, the occupants of the house have a system where they can put their hands in and move a little clip that secures it and go in without having to call someone from the main building to assist, this is for homes without security men, and recently there are much smaller window-like openings on the Judas’ gate so you can easily put your arm through and reach for the lock, sort of a ‘Judas Judas gate’, with all this mentioned above and knowing that gates are set up as security measure, it seems the Judas gate defeats the purpose altogether, just like Judas tried to defeated the Purpose of Jesus in the Bible.

In trying to achieve genuine faith, one has to be careful as there is no gauge on how much is enough, and this can lead to fanatism, the idea of fanatism is a whole project to write about, but in as much of a short time that I can; the mind of a fanatic is ruled mainly by strong emotions towards the object of attraction, so much so that the individual loses all sense of rational judgment and acts in a way that is abnormal, we have examples all over, from the fans who take off brassieres and underpants and throw them at their favourite stars on stage, to fans who faint at the sight of said stars, fanatics who throw themselves off buildings because their clubs lost a game, to those who make people commit mass suicide in the name of finding ‘God’, and the ones who kill in the name of ‘God’. All these have one thing in common, they do these actions without rationally thinking and evaluating the effects of their actions.

The human mind is such that when it is set on a course, it affects the very being of the owner, and if the environmental situations have to be changed, the human body can adapt easily but it takes the mind a while to conform to new settings, when, for example, a soldier has been in battle for months maybe years, on shipping back home, the re-integration process back into the environment lingers longer than the person physically being back home, the mind still remains in combat, and sometimes never really leaves the battlefield. In religious situations, when a person has been on a course of spiritual/mental exercise that has lingered for years, to readjust to a different ideology becomes almost impossible.

Our minds act as our own enemies when we are inclined toward convergent ideas.

Our eyes are the gateways to our soul, but our minds are the Judas' gates that defeat the purpose.

The Bhagavad Gita tells us that the mind becomes the best friend of a person who is successful in controlling it. But for a person who has failed to do so, it becomes his greatest enemy. In a fact, our mind is our only true enemy.

The more you read the more things you will know, the more you learn the more places you will go — Dr Seuss