Revealer · Sola Exemplum
Sola Exemplum
All books

Sola Exemplum

Sola Exemplum: Revealer

On the Dialogue of the Revealer — a human teacher reporting back on what he found.

The Revealer works through the Dialogue of the Revealer — a Nag Hammadi text in which Jesus instructs three students (Judas, Matthew, and Mary) through a series of questions and answers about how to cross over from this reality into what lies beneath it.

The book renames the central figure — he is not the Savior, who pays a debt you cannot pay, but the Revealer, who pulls back the covering and shows what is there. It's the same teacher, read in the register his earliest students would have recognized.

Questions answered

  • What if Jesus wasn't a sacrifice — but a scout?
  • What is he reporting back from ahead of you on the path?
  • What does stillness actually look like, when you're the one trying to arrive at it?
  • What does the crossing-over feel like from inside, and how do you know when it's starting?
  • What happens to the ordinary parts of your life once you've started to see through them?

Opening

A hand lifting the corner of a heavy cloth to reveal what lies beneath.

In December 1945, near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, a peasant farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging for fertilizer-rich soil at the base of a cliff. His mattock struck something hollow. He unearthed a sealed earthenware jar, nearly a meter tall, its mouth stoppered with bitumen. Inside were thirteen leather-bound codices — papyrus books containing some fifty-two texts, most of them unknown to the modern world. They had been buried there for approximately sixteen centuries.

Among these texts, preserved in Codex III as the fifth tractate, was the Dialogue of the Revealer.

The jar has been opened. The teaching has been recovered.

The shape of the book

  1. Introduction: A Text Recovered

    What the Dialogue is, how it came to be buried, why it was preserved rather than burned, and what translation choices this book makes in recovering its pre-institutional vocabulary.

  2. Coming to Stillness

    The text opens with the arrival of the moment when work is set down. Stillness — anapausis — is not exhaustion. It is the completed blade after the forge.

  3. Fear and the Collapse

    What happens inside a person when the system they have built their life on falls apart, and how the text's three students are taught to stand in it.

  4. The Lamp of the Body

    Interior order. What it means for the mind to be the lamp of the body, and why almost no one's lamp is lit.

  5. Before Heaven and Earth

    Origins: darkness, water, life-breath. The creation narrative read not as cosmogony but as a map of how consciousness emerges inside any given moment.

  6. The Place of Life

    Self-knowledge as the gateway. What it means to 'recognize yourself' in the sense this text intends.

  7. The Litany of Grasping

    The consequences of unconsciousness. The small ways a life slips and what the slip produces.

  8. The Edge of Heaven and Earth

    The vision of height and abyss. Transient vision versus eternal vision — and why most visions people have are the first kind.

  9. The Rulers and the Garments

    Archons, jealousy, and the garments of light. How domination installs itself through the emotion it provokes.

  10. Completeness and Lack

    Where the students came from, where they are now. Whatever comes from truth does not die.

  11. The Beginning of the Path

    Love, goodness, and the fortune of the undivided. What it means to become the one who is not pulled in two directions.

  12. The Works of the Female

    The text's most controversial passage, read in its first- and second-century context. What was actually being asked, and how it has been distorted in transmission.

  13. Dissolution of Works

    The final philosophical exchange. What is dissolved, what persists, what the students are asked to do next.

  14. The Closing Charge

    Anger, jealousy, and the final warning. The teacher's last instructions before the text breaks off.

  15. Epilogue: The Revealer's Invitation

    What the text asks of a reader who has followed the teaching to its end.

Coming to Amazon

Sola Exemplum: Revealer is being prepared for release on Amazon. Leave your email and you'll hear when it's available.