In this episode I explore the idea that our cosmos is a dream that we can wake up from. I look at this concept from both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.

The Tao of Christ

Dream Within a Dream

In this episode I answer a question that a listener asked me a few weeks ago. I had a Zoom conservation with a young man who is a Christian who has had a spiritual awakening, and he asked me what my first thought was when it happened. No one had ever asked me that question. I have never asked myself that question. I thought about it for a minute and answered him briefly. The question has been returning to my mind every once in a while ever since, so I thought I would give a more complete answer. 

I am Not Going to Die

In 1970 when I was twenty years old and in college, I read a newly published book entitled “The Experience of Nothingness.” The author, philosopher Michael Novak, was visiting our campus, and I wanted to know what he had to say so I could engage him in conversation. I still remember his visit vividly fifty years later. I sat on the floor before him in a room on the top floor of the Student Union and asked him questions. His ideas resonated with me. At that point in my life I considered myself an existentialist, although I was seriously exploring spiritual traditions. In fact later that year I declared myself a Religion major, going “all in” on my spiritual search.  His book described my experience. It was a powerful awareness of the indescribable depths of existence. The only vocabulary I had to articulate my experience at the time was the language of existentialism. This Depth was neither something nor nothing. Nothingness described it as well as any word. Yet this awareness of No-thing-ness felt very spiritual, hence my attraction to spirituality and religion. The existentialist author Camus called this “the absurd.” He saw it as evidence of a universe without meaning. Sartre had a book called “Being and Nothingness.” Popularly the experience was called “existential angst.” These days that phrase is a cliché that means little more than a teenage or midlife crisis, but in the post-WWII, post-Holocaust, era it was powerfully fresh and profound. One was called to live an authentic life in the face of the emptiness at the heart of existence.  Now I look back on that time in my life and realize that I was in touch with the Holy and did not realize it. I was aware of the essence of the universe and human nature. This was God without all the fluff and religious tradition. This experience of bare essence that was powerfully present and real to me as a twenty-year old is what I would now call Reality, the Divine, the Holy, Godhead or God Beyond God. It is Godness, for want of a better term. God beyond images. It is Nothingness in the sense that God is not a thing among things or a being among beings.I tend to call it the Ground of Being or Being Itself as Tillich does, but I could equally call it Non-Being. It is the Source the duality of Being and Non-Being come from. I call this reality God, but this is not the traditional theistic Deity of Western religion. It is older than God. 

Experiencing Nothingness

I am presently in the process of writing a book, which I am calling “The Gospel According to Jesus.” It is the gospel story told from the perspective of Jesus, as a teacher of nonduality. In involves me very slowly studying the Gospel of Mark, both in English translation and the Greek text. Then comparing the passages to parallel accounts in the other gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. This process enables me to see things that I might not ordinarily see, and ponder things that I would not normally ponder.Recently one passage caught my attention. It is the story that takes place early in Jesus’ ministry where Jesus’ family comes Capernaum to find Jesus and take him home because they thought he had “lost his senses,” as one translation puts it. Today we would say he was mentally ill. A parallel passage in John’s gospel says that “he has a demon and is insane.” People were saying that Jesus was demon-possessed, which was the explanation in the first century for all sorts of mental and physical illnesses, from schizophrenia to epilepsy. According to the story scribes from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.”It got me thinking, “Was Jesus mentally ill?” 

Was Jesus Mentally Ill?

What if we had a gospel written by Jesus himself? Unfortunately there is no evidence that Jesus wrote anything. If we can’t have a gospel written by Jesus, wouldn’t it be wonderful to at least have a gospel written from the perspective of Jesus? Lots of celebrities today use “ghost writers” to tell their autobiographies. Would it be great to have a ghost writer or should I say “Spirit writer,” write an autobiography of Jesus? A gospel from the perspective of Jesus! That is the project that I am undertaking next: “The Gospel according to Jesus.” More specifically the Nondual Gospel of Jesus or the Gospel of the Nondual Jesus, since I am convinced that Jesus was a teacher of what is called nonduality. In this episode i describe the rationale and the method of this project. 

The Nondual Gospel of the Jesus

Money messes up everything, especially religion. That includes the type of spirituality that goes under the name of nonduality these days. As soon as a spiritual teacher starts to accept money from people for their teaching it has the potential to distort the message, the relationship, and the spirituality itself. I am not saying it is inevitable or that this always happens. But it can. Take it from one who made a living as a professional religious leader. In this episode I explore the ways that money can complicate nondual spiritual. I also look at what Jesus has to say about the topic on the Sermon on the Mount.  

Nonduality and Money

In the Sermon on the Mount we have the most complete biblical exposition of Christian nonduality. It is not the type of description of nonduality that one would hear today. It does not talk about consciousness. It does not present a monistic or panentheistic understanding of reality. Jesus speaks of how oneness with God and all things is expressed in behavior. Among other things he says it is expressed by loving our enemies. Nonduality is most clearly represented in the Old Testament with the biblical word shalom. The word is normally translated “peace” but shalom is not the absence of conflict. It is present no matter the circumstances. 

Nondual Shalom

In this episode I start with Alan Watts, “The Book on the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are,” and go from there exploring how we can see and know who we truly are. 

Knowing Who You Are

In this episode I share my personal journey to pacifism and from pacifism. I explore the teaching of nonviolent resistance and how it differs from nonresistance. I look specifically at Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and how it is an expression of nondual nonresistance to evil.  

Nondual Nonresistance

Today’s topic comes from a listener in Alabama. He happens to be a retired United Methodist minister with a doctoral degree, so you know these questions are well thought out. He emailed me a response to my talk entitled "Living in the Mind of God." He has five basic questions. Here are the questions he asks:--  What happens to "me" after physical death? --  What about the resurrection of the physical body, or even a spiritual body? --  Is there no afterlife, no spiritual "me" to re-unite with my love ones and friends, and living for eternity in heavenly bliss?  --  Within the Mind of God, do we as individual personalities just disappear?  Are we no more than just a memory in the Mind of God, if even that?--   What is the point of awakening"" or "realization" or "salvation" if this is all a dream taking place in the Mind of God?  Does it change anything?  Isn&apos;t the "person" still just a thought form in the Mind of God?  Is it like one of my dream characters saying, "this isn&apos;t real, it&apos;s just a dream", but it doesn&apos;t matter and nothing changes?  And then I wake up from my dream and that "character" is gone and all there is is just a memory in my mind, if even that.Well that is a lot to deal with! I will do my best to answer them. 

What Happens after Death – A Nondual Explanation

Nonduality is transparency. The physical world is seen as transparent to the Unitive Reality that lays beneath, like looking through a clear lake’s water to the lake’s bottom. Furthermore we see ourselves as part of the world as transparent to Reality. Apparent differences are seen as expressions of an underlying Unity. Using theistic terms we could say that the creation is a reflection and expression of its Creator. Transparency also applies to ethics. One of the most frequent downfalls of spiritual teachers – both Eastern teachers and Western preachers – is the lack of ethical transparency. Teachers and preachers often are not what they appear to be. Moral failings come to light and a leader falls from power. Often these moral failures have to do with money, sex and power. It is not surprising that Jesus deals with these topics on his Sermon on the Mount.

Spiritual Transparency

I woke up early recently and lay in bed for a while resting in, knowing and enjoying this Reality that we call nondual awareness or unitive awareness. I was wishing there was some way to communicate this reality. At the time I seemed to know the exact words to express this. But when I tried to write down the words later that morning, it was impossible to do. Words seemed empty, flat and trite and could not express the richness of this reality. Yet in this episode I will try to express the impossible, for as the Bible says, nothing is impossible with God. 

Expressing Nonduality Directly

The Sermon on the Mount is about how to live the nondual life. In this episode I explore Jesus&apos; teaching found in the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Matthew about spiritual transparency - making the two one, the outer like the inner, the upper like the lower, and male and female into a single one. Jesus taught nonduality and how to live the nondual life. 

Making the Inner like the Outer: Living a Nondual Life

We are living in the Mind of God. We are ideas in the Divine Mind. You might say that the universe is a dream or a day dream that God is having, or a brainstorm that God is having. Indian philosophy says this world is a dream being dreamt by the god Vishnu. The Bible sees creation as more intentional. It says that the act of creation is consciously deliberate. God intentionally spoke this world into existence. But it is still all originating from the Mind of God. Its source is the Mind of God.We are not the time-bound physical beings that we mistake for ourselves. We are Being Itself. These physical forms are temporal manifestations of the Eternal. In essence we are the Source of all time-bound manifestations. We are the Mind of God. Abiding in the Mind of God is Awakening, Liberation, Enlightenment or Salvation. That is what it means by saying we are made in the image of God. The Changeless Eternal is our immortal Nature. Our mortal selves appear within that Divine Being. As Paul said, “In Him we live and move and have our Being.”  

Living in the Mind of God

Listeners who come from Christian backgrounds sometimes have a difficult time with nonduality because it feels like it is an abandonment of Christianity. One man on a Zoom meeting I was having with a church labeled it as occult. Occult is from the Latin word occultus, which means hidden or secret. There is nothing hidden or secret about nondual awareness. This is not secret knowledge. This is as open and obvious as it can possibly be. It is hidden in plain sight.Others note that I often quote other spiritual traditions, especially the Hindu Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching and the teachings of the Buddha. They think I am importing Eastern religious ideas into Christianity, and thereby compromising the purity of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” to quote the Letter of Jude. I am not compromising the gospel. This is the gospel of Jesus. All spiritual traditions point to the same Ultimate Reality. When Ultimate Reality is seen, one notices that. That is why I quote other spiritual traditions. One sees references to it everywhere, not only in religious texts but in poetry and literature. Aldous Huxley refers to it as the perennial philosophy, but it is not really a philosophy. It is a direct awareness of Reality that is expressed in a variety of ways in different cultures and religious traditions.Is nonduality non-Christian or unchristian? No! It is deeply Christian. It is the essence of the gospel of Christ that is also found in other spiritual traditions. 

Is Nonduality Unchristian?

The Tao of Christ is a podcast which explores the mystical, intuitive, and contemplative side of Christianity. It explores what has been historically called the unitive life and union with God. I call it Christian nonduality, nondualism, and unitive awareness. God has been speaking since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, long before there were human beings, written scriptures and religious traditions. In this podcast I explore that wider revelation. I interpret the Chinese classic the Tao te Ching from a Christian perspective. I share a book I have written on Christian non-duality, as well as presenting recent teachings. The Chinese word Tao means the Way, which is how Jesus referred to himself, saying, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” It is what the Gospel of John calls the Logos, or the Word, when he writes: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” According to the Book of Acts the earliest Christians called their spiritual path simply “the Way.” This podcast is about this ancient and primordial Way. This is the Tao of Christ.

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The Tao of Christ

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