Do you think that Jesus is just a moral example, that you can save yourself, that you don’t need a savior?

Jesus recognized that there is no separate self, only one body with many members. Reality is one body of consciousness interacting with itself from different vantage points.

1 Corinthians 12:12: Unity and Diversity in the Body

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.

Mark 12:28-29: The Great Commandment

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.’” [from Deuteronomy 6:4]

Ephesians 4:4-6: Unity and Maturity in the Body of Christ

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all [emphasis added].

Jesus understood the nature of reality to be one seamless whole or flow within awareness, and he saw how this understanding is the key to spiritual illumination.

Matthew 6:22: If thine eye be single [one], thy whole body shall be full of light.

Jesus recognized that the obstacle in the way of embodying this understanding is the perception of separation within the personal self.

Matthew 16:24: If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.

When Jesus said in Matthew 25: 40, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me,” he was expressing the awareness of oneness.

For the individual who feels isolated and lost in the world and who is seeking salvation or liberation from the suffering caused by the sense of alienation from the one body, the totality of reality—yes, Jesus is the good shepherd, the guiding light, the sage, the master, Lord, Savior and King.

What makes Jesus so special?

Jesus’s recognition of divine oneness was so transformative that it eliminated his personal identity—the thought complex perceived by the knowing—as he became one, not just with but as the knowing. Then he rose from that psychic death to become a carrier of the gospel, proclaiming unity with the Father. The “I Am” statement is not coming from a human ego.

“I Am” is the core embodiment of knowing: I am aware. I am present. I am aware presence—I Am.

It may be ironic, then, to focus on Jesus as a separate being rather than on the message of oneness. The message of Jesus was ultimately about alignment with the Father, the One, source consciousness, that from which all life springs. Those who held this understanding were said to be sons and daughters of God, members of the same family of shared being.

If reality is one, why does Jesus say, 'I never knew you; depart from me’ (Matthew 7:23)?

The ego or separate self is a complex of thought patterns and feelings. The ego is not the real self; the real self is awareness. Awareness is that which knows the content of experience. We could say that the One, awareness, wants to know itself, and when the façade of separateness is standing in the way, the experience is delayed.

There seems to be a difference between the nondual perspective and the consensus view of Christianity.

Consensus Christianity says, ‘Repent and let Jesus into your heart.’ The nondual perspective says that, from the point of view of the illusory separate self, yes, it is valid to repent and let Jesus into your heart. However, from the point of view of the divine presence of awareness, Jesus is already there.

The consensus view projects an artificial personal self away from the divine center in order to work its way back, while the nondual perspective starts at the divine center and stays there.

How else does the Christian nondual understanding differ from consensus Christianity?

One of the primary commandments of consensus Christianity is to love one another. It could be said that the Christian nondual teaching offers a deeper, richer understanding of what it means to love one another.

What is that deeper understanding?

Luke 6:31 says, “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.” The deeper understanding is that we be fair and compassionate with others because we share our being.

What is our shared being?

That which knows the world.

To embody the nondual understanding is to view all of life as varying vantage points of one fundamental source. Reality, or consciousness, is one immersive whole that appears as a multiplicity of separate people and parts. However, like the characters and objects in dreams, the appearance of separation is an illusion. Reality is a seamless flow within consciousness.

We identify with our body-mind, but our true identity is the consciousness or reality in which our body-mind appears.

When a coffee mug is examined from a limited perspective, it appears as separate in the observer’s mind. However, from the point of view of the witnessing presence, the action of grabbing a coffee mug from the cabinet and turning it over to examine the maker’s mark stamped into the bottom is one seamless experience. Division is created when the mind superimposes concepts, memory, expectations and preferences onto experience in order to create a narrative about the experience before or after it has occurred.

Since our true nature is consciousness and not the temporal body-mind comprised of thinking, sensing and perceiving, that which is experienced as the external world and that which is experienced as the internal world are not just inextricably connected, they are essentially one and the same in that there is only one experience involved here, not two. All phenomena, including external perceptions and the mind’s activity of separating and conceptualizing, is one unified experience within consciousness.

How else does the Christian nondual understanding differ from consensus Christianity?

Consensus Christians may agree that all sin is rooted in selfishness, and that when you get rid of the selfishness, something must come in to fill the void since nature abhors a vacuum. From the nondual perspective, when selfishness is gone, our essential nature of peace and happiness is revealed.

This contrast is especially prominent in the doctrine of total depravity from Reformed theology, or Calvinism, which asserts that humans are born with a sinful nature. According to the nondual understanding, the nature of the sin that humans are born with is simply confusion about who we are. When the confusion is removed, we are, in a sense, born again, and relieved of the limiting belief of being a temporary, finite self.

As an evangelical Christian, when I accepted Jesus into my heart, I secured for myself eternal life. I am no longer a temporary self. I will live on for eternity.

Indeed, your personal self has been set free from a limiting belief.

According to the nondual view, the personal self is a constitution of thoughts and feelings about a particular body-mind. A body-mind is an object in awareness. All objects in awareness are temporary. Only the knower of subjects and objects, our shared being, is ever-lasting.

What about near-death experiences, first-person reports of the personal self surviving death?

Within consciousness there are hierarchies. After the death of the body, personal attachments and characteristics established over a lifetime can linger in consciousness, comparable perhaps to the phenomenon of the optical after-image, when an image continues to appear in the eyes after a period of exposure to the original image. In a similar fashion our nightly dreams may reflect content from the previous day’s events as the mind unwinds.

Ultimately, the “I” which survives the death of the body is not the personal “I,” but the universal “I,” or consciousness.

A useful analogy is that of a whirlpool in a river. The whirlpool is an activity of the river, not an entity unto itself. The only way to separate a whirlpool from the river is by way of conceptual thinking or language. Concepts are ideas that the mind superimposes onto reality. When currents in the river change and a whirlpool loses its structure, the rotating mass of water disperses, and eventually becomes reintegrated with the broader body of the river. But all there was to the whirlpool was the river. The personal self is like a whirlpool in that it is a localization of activity within the broader medium of consciousness. All there is to the personal self is consciousness.

Maybe it’s my conditioning, and maybe I’ve grown too attached to my personal identity, but the idea of reality being so different from what I’ve come to know is troubling to me.

In the Thomas Gospel, saying 2, Jesus says, “He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.”

Here, reigning is not about power, it is about being established in your being as a vessel of light and love in the All of awareness.

What is the purpose of life?

To discover our true nature and to celebrate it with others, and by others I mean other manifestations of consciousness, other aspects of our shared being.

What is the nature of reality?

The nature of reality is subjectivity. Subjectivity, defined, is the quality of existing in mind. Beyond the scope of the reality we experience through seemingly limited and private minds exists an all-encompassing universal subjectivity, or universal mind, out of which all physical phenomena appear and by which all physical phenomena are known. This fundamental subjectivity cannot be captured with concepts, but we dip into this deeper reality when the activity of the mind dissolves during deep, dreamless sleep.

What is the nature of dreams?

The dream world is what consciousness looks like when perceived through the limited faculties of a dreaming mind. In the same way, physical matter is what consciousness looks like when perceived through the limited faculties of a waking mind.

How do you explain physical stuff, solid objects, matter?

Scientists are still looking for physical matter; they’ve only found spatially unbound quantum fields and quantum information. There is, of course, colloquial matter, which we experience when we knock our knuckle on the tabletop, but at the quantum level, physical matter is an illusion. The illusion is an appearance in consciousness.

Consciousness is the substance of perceptions, of experience, of reality.

Where does the content of our nightly dreams come from?

When a localized mind relaxes during sleep, the mental landscape widens and becomes more porous, and interactions can occur between the local mental content and the content of the broader medium of mind.

Who is the decision maker in my dreams, my dream character or me?

The dream character is like an avatar in a video game. The dream character makes no real choice. The dreamer, also, is like an avatar in a waking dream, God’s dream, we could say. The dreamer, the perceived personal self, also makes no real choice. The activity of choice arises from consciousness, the core self.

It is important here to understand the distinction between consciousness, that which knows our experience, and the mind, the content of experience.

Can you elaborate on the distinction between mind and consciousness?

There can be an infinity of minds, but there is only one, infinite, aware being or consciousness. Mind is the perceptual apparatus. Consciousness is the knowing. Mind appears within consciousness and mind requires consciousness. In order to know itself, consciousness does not require the mind because consciousness is by nature self aware; however, to know the world, consciousness assumes the form of a finite mind in order to experience subject-object relationships.

Mind is a function of consciousness or knowing, but knowing is not a function of the mind. The knowing with which all minds experience the world is a singular, unified consciousness, to use a scientific term, or cloud of unknowing, to use a less scientific and borrowed phrase that is perhaps closer to the truth from our limited point of view.

The mind is a composition of thoughts. Thoughts conceptualize raw perceptions. Thoughts report on and create past and future narratives around the knowing. Thoughts are an activity, not an entity. Thoughts have no independent existence apart from knowing. That which perceives a thought is not a thought. That which perceives a thought is beyond the mind.

As humans we are prone to identify with thoughts, thus our confusion about the nature of our being. Using religious language we could call this confusion our fallen nature.

The world is perceived through the mind, but only our shared and true identity, consciousness, is aware.

What do you mean when you say that God knows us only indirectly?

God or aware being knows itself through the perceptual faculties of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting in the same way that we know our dreams. We do not know the dream world directly, only indirectly through our dream character.

If the idea of God knowing us only indirectly is bothersome, it is perfectly fine to say that you do experience your dream character and dream world directly, that God does know you directly. Either way, the helpful part is understanding the dream analogy in relation to what could be called the waking dream, God’s dream.

Why does infinite awareness have to localize itself as a finite mind in order to perceive the world? If awareness is infinite, why can’t it know the world without seeming to become finite?

When you fall asleep at night, the number of dream narratives that can play out in your mind is potentially infinite, but if you were to experience them simultaneously, there would be no narrative at all, only darkness. So for infinite awareness to experience individual narratives, it must do so from the vantage point of a single subject of experience in time and space. That single subject of experience is each of us.

. . .

This morning I was thinking about someone whom I haven’t spoken with in a long while, then later today this person contacted me via text message. I know several people with similar experiences. Is there a correlation between the many minds, one consciousness model and this phenomena?

Could there be a more plausible explanation?

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