The Tao of Christ

A Case of Mistaken Identity

October 15, 2022 Marshall Davis
The Tao of Christ
A Case of Mistaken Identity
Show Notes Transcript

Sometimes I wonder if there is anything more to say in these episodes. Then I get emails from listeners which remind me there is still more to say because the gospel of nonduality is so easily misunderstood. Nondual awareness is so simple it is missed. It is so close that people don’t see it. It is hiding in plain sight. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it.” Tony Parsons calls it the open secret.

The common mistake I hear in questions and remarks is that people assume that what they are looking for is not here now. That it is out in the future. It is one practice or one insight or one teacher or one retreat or one teaching away. Then they will get it. They assume something is lacking now. 

The only problem – if you want to call it that, which it really isn’t unless you see it as a problem – is that we forget who and what we are. We have spiritual amnesia. The misapprehension of our essential identity is evident in most of the questions that people ask. Alan Watts has a famous book entitled “The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.” That title sums it up. I read it first over fifty years ago, but it was only ten years ago that I knew what he was talking about.

Watts was right. People don’t know who they are. That is the problem. For that reason every question they ask comes from who they are not. In other words it is a case of mistaken identity. 

Sometimes I wonder if there is anything more to say in these episodes. Then I get emails from listeners which remind me there is still more to say because the gospel of nonduality is so easily misunderstood. Nondual awareness is so simple it is missed. It is so close that people don’t see it. It is hiding in plain sight. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it.” Tony Parsons calls it the open secret.

The common mistake I hear in questions and remarks is that people assume that what they are looking for is not here now. That it is out in the future. It is one practice or one insight or one teacher or one retreat or one teaching away. Then they will get it. They assume something is lacking now. 

The only problem – if you want to call it that, which it really isn’t unless you see it as a problem – is that we forget who and what we are. We have spiritual amnesia. The misapprehension of our essential identity is evident in most of the questions that people ask. Alan Watts has a famous book entitled “The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.” That title sums it up. I read it first over fifty years ago, but it was only ten years ago that I knew what he was talking about.

Watts was right. People don’t know who they are. That is the problem. For that reason every question they ask comes from who they are not. In other words it is a case of mistaken identity. People don’t realize who they are. They think they are the role they are playing in this human life. They are like an actor who gets so absorbed in playing a role that they forget they are in a play. Life is a cosmic drama, and we are playing roles as characters. But we are not those roles. It is alright to play the roles. I enjoy playing my part, but I realize I am not the roles I play. 

The ego is a role we play, and once we see the ego is nothing but a phantasm, a mask we wear, we can never take it seriously again. That is spiritual awakening. That is abiding nondual awareness. It is always present. The questions most people ask come from the separate self. We are the undivided self. Jesus spoke from that perspective of the Unified Self and not the separate self of a carpenter from Nazareth. He kept saying, I AM. I am the Bread of Life, I am the Light of the World, I am the Way the Truth and the Life. 

Let me take a question I recently received from a listener as an example. He asked how to maintain nondual awareness. It is a great question because it shows there has been a glimpse of Reality and it also is an expression of the desire for abiding Reality. But the question presupposes that the one asking is not always dwelling in nondual awareness. That is mistaken.

The True Self is always dwells in nondual awareness. Look where the question is coming from. When one looks deeper than the separate self to where the question is coming from, the ego disappears in nondual awareness. That Source is the answer to the question and all questions. So it is a matter of giving up one’s mistaken identity and resting in who we really are. It is a matter of shifting perspective. 

Other people have told me that they have experienced nondual awareness or spiritual awakening or enlightenment or the Kingdom of God but then seemed to lose it. And they want to get it back again. They say they have tasted a bit of this unitive awareness and want to find a way to stay in it always, to maintain that awareness.

Here is the answer. Our True Self is always fully and completely one with the Divine in Nondual Reality. It cannot be otherwise. If we think we are not, if we believe we are not, then we are thinking or believing as the ego. This should be self-evident because the True Self, who we really are, does not think. It does not believe. It is. I AM. There is one nondual Reality and I am/We are this nondual Reality. 

Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” People heard him say that and thought he was blaspheming and so they crucified him. The later church believed what he said, but mistakenly thought he was only talking about his relationship to God as an individual separate human being, and they thought he was unique. So they deified him and called him the only-begotten Son of God. Christianity developed an elaborate Christology that identified only this one man as the I AM. They did not realize that Jesus was not talking about himself as a human being but speaking as the Divine Self.

So to get back to the questions.  People want to know how. How to realize nondual awareness, how to be liberated, and how to stay in this awareness always. In Biblical language, they are asking how to have eternal life, or how to be saved, or how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, how to abide in Christ. People think they are not there yet, and they want to know how to get there.

My answer is that your prayers have been answered! Where you are trying to get is here. You are what you have been wanting to be. What you are seeking for is right here right now. Jesus tried to communicate this in his famous parable of the two sons, often called the parable of the prodigal son and the parable of the elder brother. 

Both sons were looking for something, without really knowing what it was. They felt things were not right the way they were. So the younger son cashes in his inheritance and goes looking for it in a far country. Eventually the story says he realized that he had made a mistake, and that what he was looking for was back there at home. So he makes the journey home. He was thinking he had lost it and was hoping to regain it, hoping his father would forgive him and take him back.

You remember the story. He gets home and his father will not listen to his rehearsed speech asking for forgiveness and his request for restoration and forgiveness (which by the way completely negates the traditional Christian interpretation of the parable). The Father ignores the son’s words and welcomes him home back as if he had never left. 

The younger son always had what he was looking for. He had it before he left. He had it when he was leaving and when he was away, and when he was returning home, and when he got home. He always had it.  Nothing changed except his perception. The same with us. We always have that spiritual Something that we were looking for.

The older son’s story is even more relevant here. He is angry because that his younger brother was welcomed back. He also did not understand. He thought his brother had taken it and lost it and now was getting it back again, when he should not be able to. More than that, the older brother also thought he did not have It – this Goal of Life. He thought he had to work for it by being a good boy and obeying all the rules. The father finally says to the older son, “No, no, no, son. You misunderstand. All that I have is yours! It always has been.” You see the older son had what he was looking for all along as well, just like the younger son. But he also did not realize it.

Jesus is saying that whether we are like the younger prodigal son or the older resentful son. We already have what we are looking for. It is our birthright. It is who we are. We are sons and daughters of the King. We are heirs of the Kingdom. It is just a matter of accepting that, waking up to that truth, realizing this reality. No need to do anything to find it or earn it. The Real You, the True Self, is already awake and enlightened. Already the Son of the King. 

This means that all that is Jesus’ is ours. The divine awareness and God-consciousness that Jesus had is ours. His oneness with God is ours. His glory is ours. He say that clearly in John 17. No need to go to conferences and retreat centers. No need to go to California or India to find it. Why go across the ocean to find what is right in your own home right now? As Jesus said in other parables: the treasure is in the field beneath our feet. The lost coin is in our own house. The Pearl of Great Price is right there is plain sight. The Kingdom of God is ours. We are living in the Kingdom of the Father right now, yet people do not see it. 

Unitive awareness is our natural state. It is the Reality of who and what we are now. But people have forgotten who they are now. We are convinced we are little lost souls who do not have it. So we seek to find it, or be given it, or get it back, or learn some spiritual technique to keep it, so we don’t lose it again, and so we will always have it. The reality is that we always have it because we are it. You cannot lose yourself. There is nothing we can do to NOT be who we are. Try not being who you are? You can’t do it! So be who you are, right here and right now!