In this episode I talk about the Apostle Paul and how he and his teachings fit into Christian Nonduality. I explore this Damascus Road experience of Christ and his later experience of nonduality. I show how and why there are both dualistic and nondualistic elements in his writings.
In this episode I talk about the Apostle Paul and how he and his teachings fit into Christian Nonduality. I explore this Damascus Road experience of Christ and his later experience of nonduality. I show how and why there are both dualistic and nondualistic elements in his writings.
Today I am going to talk about the Apostle Paul and how his teachings fit into Christian Nonduality. I mention the famous Turkish apostle every once in a while in my teachings, and not always in a flattering way. I see him as the chief reason why Christianity abandoned the nondual message of Jesus. Today’s Christianity is based much more on the teachings of Paul than on the teaching of Jesus. As I have said often Paul never met the historical Jesus and was not familiar with Jesus’ teachings.
Paul completely changed the course of Christianity. The Jesus movement probably would have remained a small Jewish sect and eventually lost to history if Paul had not been such a powerful force for including Gentiles. Without Paul Jesus of Nazareth would have likely been no more than a footnote in the history of Middle Eastern religion. In that sense I am grateful to Paul. He made Jesus a household name. But he also changed the Christian message from the gospel of Jesus to a gospel about Jesus. Consequently Jesus’ original nondual message has been all but forgotten by the church.
Paul interpreted Jesus in the light of his rabbinic Pharisaic training and the Jewish temple religion. To him we owe the interpretation of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for sin. With that idea came the dualistic notion about the human condition as separation from God. That is the root of his problem. He talks a lot about Law and punishment for sin and the wrath of God because that is what he learned from his rabbi Gamaliel. To Paul’s credit he offers a solution for that human predicament. He found a way out of sin and guilt, which is good, but it is very different than Jesus’ way. Paul’s gospel was not Jesus’ gospel.
Paul reminds me of sidewalk evangelists who use Paul’s writings – especially in Romans - in their evangelistic pitch. They beat you over the head with the Law to convince you what a terrible sinner you are – piling on the guilt and shame and judgment and the fear of hell and the threat of being lost for all eternity. After they have knocked you down as far as you can go, then they offer you a solution to the problem that you didn’t even know you had until you talked with them. That is evangelical gospel; that is dualism. Dualistic thinking dominates Paul’s writings, which is why I am not a fan of the apostle Paul.
But having said that, glimpses of nonduality shine through Paul’s writings here and there, and I want to concentrate on those now. First of all I want to make it clear that Paul’s spiritual experience on the Damascus Road of the risen Christ was NOT a nondual awakening. Sometimes interpreters want to make it into that. I do not see any of the characteristics of nondual awakening in Paul’s Dmascus Road experience. It was a powerful conversion experience and it changed his life, but it was not nondual awakening, as far as I can tell.
The typical Christian conversion experience today tends to be based on Paul’s conversion experience, and for that reason Christianity tends to be dualistic. If Christianity had been based on Jesus’ nondual awakening at his baptism, then Christianity would have become much more like Buddhism. But now Christianity is much more like Islam.
I see Paul more in the mold of Muhammad than Jesus. Muhammad also had a very powerful spiritual experience – actually a series of them – as he received the revelation of the Quran. At heart of that revelation was the experience of the One God, which is a good thing. But the one God was then interpreted in a very dualistic way in Islam. Consequently I see very little nonduality in Islam, except for Sufism and later in Baha’i, which was an offshoot of Islam.
Yet having said that about the apostle Paul, I do catch glimpses of nondual seeing here and there in his writings. I think they come out of a later spiritual experience that Paul had which was nondual. He speaks in Second Corinthians 12 about a man in the third person, but all commentators say he is talking of himself. The third person style is significant because it reveals that this was not his normal egoic self. He writes:
“I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.”
He does not talk any more about the “surpassing greatness” of this spiritual experience. In fact he hesitates to describe it for fear of seeming conceited. He says, “but I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me.” I think he had a glimpse of nondual awareness, what the Zen tradition calls satori. What he writes elsewhere points to this. My favorite verse in the Bible is actually from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. He writes, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” That verse sums up my by Christian experience.
In Romans he is very insightful in describing the two selves that he sees in us, what he calls the old self and the new self, or the old man and the new man. He sees one as our new nature in Christ and the other being our old human nature. In First Corinthians he speaks of the spiritual man and the natural man. This is exactly what nonduality describes as the small self and the big self, or the human self or ego and the divine Self.
There are other passages that make me think that Paul did know nondual Reality – at least in part. He says the point of the gospel is that “God may be all in all.” The second chapter of First Corinthians is wonderful. He writes:
Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. … as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. …. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.”
This is beautiful nonduality! Then in the later Pauline writings Ephesians and Colossians – which many scholars believe were written not by Paul but by one of his disciples writing in his name – there are passages that speak of Christ being all and in all and the unity of all things in heaven and earth. He writes: “With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”
He writes of Christ saying “the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” He says in Colossians that “Christ is all, and is in all.” He also says of Christ, “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Passages like these and others make me think that Paul knew nondual reality at least in part. He glimpsed it. But he did not make it the centerpiece of his gospel. He was too bound to his rabbinical training. I see the same thing in many Christian preachers and teachers today. They glimpse nondual reality in part, but they don’t trust that experience. They back off from it and retreat into the traditional dualistic forms of Christianity – like I did earlier in my life. They hesitate to dive into nondual awareness completely, for they know it will mean parting with traditional Christianity and being labeled a heretic. I on the other hand have come to trust the Spirit more than religious tradition. I dive in headfirst.
When reading Paul’s letters we have to realize that he was not perfect and what he writes is not perfect. He knew in part and spoke in part. He admitted that in his famous love chapter of I Corinthians 13, saying, “For we know in part and we prophesy (preach) in part, but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. … For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Duality is imperfect. It is about the parts. Nonduality is the perfect. It is fullness. Paul knew in part and I am grateful for those parts in his writings. We can recognize those parts as evidence of the truth of nonduality in his experience.
What I like most about Paul is what he says about his reliance on firsthand experience and not religious tradition, even though he did not follow through with that as completely as I would have wished. At the beginning of Galatians he makes the point that he did not receive his gospel from the twelve apostles. He writes: “For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ…. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son IN me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus.”
Paul trusted firsthand direct contact with the Divine. That is the power of his gospel. That is Christian nonduality. It does not depend on secondhand religious tradition. It depends on firsthand direct awareness. When reading the apostle Paul it is important not to make his teachings into another tradition, but go directly to the Source. From the Source we can judge Paul’s writings, and the teachings of all spiritual teachers – including me. Please do not trust my word. I see only in part also. See for yourself. For as Paul says, we have the Mind of Christ.