This episode is about the Holy Spirit and how this important Christian belief and experience fits into nondual Christianity.
This episode is about the Holy Spirit and how this important Christian belief and experience fits into nondual Christianity.
I have not posted an episode for a few weeks. That is because I have not had anything I needed to say. The questions that people posed to me by email were already covered by other episodes. Then in two days I got two requests about subjects that I have not addressed in dedicated episodes. I am going to deal with the first of these today. It is about the Holy Spirit and how this important Christian belief and the experience of the Holy Spirit fits into nondual Christianity.
The Holy Spirit is important not only for the Christian understanding of God, but also in Christian living. The fruit of the Spirit are the signs of the presence of God in a person’s life. In Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity the Holy Spirit takes center stage in what are called the gifts of the Holy Spirit. What is called the baptism of the Holy Spirit can be a powerful experience of the power and presence of God in a person’s life. How does the Spirit fit into nonduality?
Nonduality does not negate these powerful spiritual experiences. Just as it does not negate the power of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, it likewise does not negate the power and experience of the Holy Spirit. Nonduality fulfills and completes the promise of union with God that is tasted in a personal relationship with Christ and is experienced in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in one’s life, whether that is through spiritual gifts or spiritual fruit or the day-to-day experience of walking in the Spirit and living in the Spirit. The same Spirit manifested in spiritual gifts and spiritual fruit is the Spirit of oneness known in nondual awareness.
All manifestations of the Spirit are fulfilled and completed in the awareness of oneness with God. In this regard the Trinity is a perfect symbol of unitive awareness. In traditional Christian theology God is said to be One God in three persons, who are identified as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christianity spent a lot of time in the early centuries of the Church trying to articulate exactly how the three persons of the trinity are related to each other and related to us.
But the Church got so wrapped up in theological hairsplitting that they missed the main point. The point is that three is one. Three persons are one God, and therefore God goes beyond the idea of persons. The trinity is a human attempt to understand the divine in metaphors that are meaningful to humans. Because we tend to see ourselves as persons, we tend to see God as a person. But we also sense God is more than a person, so we came up with the idea that God is three persons and yet at the same time one God. In another episode I refer to this as a Christian koan that has the function of a Zen koan, pushing us beyond the rational mind to the heart of God.
The truth is that there is no such thing as a person. It is a fabrication of the human brain. We think we are persons and so we create a personal God in our own image. What we think of as our image. The philosopher Xenophanes famously said that if horses could draw, they would draw their gods as horses. The same, he holds, goes for lions and oxen. We see ourselves as human persons so we picture God that way.
But we are not persons, and God is not a person, much less three persons. That is just a mental image that we impose upon the imageless God. To believe that our humanmade image is actually God is to worship an image, which is idolatry. Yet on a psychological level we relate to God as personal, and relate to the three divine persons of the trinity. That is fine on the experiential level as long as we don’t start taking our own metaphors literally.
Having said that, how does the Holy Spirit fit into the gospel of Christian nonduality? Of the three persons of the trinity, the Spirit is the closest to nonduality. Spirit tends to transcend the idea of person. Many Christians do not even think of the Holy Spirit as a person. Christians often use impersonal pronouns to refer to the Spirit, calling the Spirit “it” rather than “he” or “she.” So we sense that the Spirit transcends personal images. For that reason the Holy Spirit is most natural of the three images for nondual Christians to have for God.
I see the Holy Spirit as the presence of Jesus with us now, beyond the lifetime of the physical body of Jesus. Jesus said, “I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.” He meant spiritually. I think he was referring to the Holy Spirit, often simply called the Spirit. In fact the apostle Paul even calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Jesus. In talking about his physical departure and the subsequent coming of the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper (Counselor, Comforter) to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”
The word “another” used here means another of the same kind. Jesus elsewhere calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of the Father. Spirit is a more inclusive and unifying term to refer to the Divine. For that reason it is a perfect word for nonduality because it transcends religious differences. I see the coming of the Holy Spirit described in the Book of Acts on the Day of Pentecost to be a continuation of the ministry of Jesus Christ. In a sense you could say this is the Second Coming of Jesus. Not physically but spiritually.
The Spirit that was in Jesus is the same Spirit that hovered over the watery chaos in the early verses of the Creation story in Genesis. This is the Spirit that inspired the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament. This is the Spirit who inspires the sages and spiritual teachers and founders of various religious traditions throughout history. The Spirit is what unifies all religions in the one Perennial Wisdom that is known as nonduality.
This Spirit of oneness is reflected in the words of the Letter to the Ephesians, traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul. It says: “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 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.”
This one Spirit is the Holy Spirit. We are in this Spirit and this Spirit is in us. The Holy Spirit is understood in traditional Christianity to be the divine person who indwells us. We are temple of the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul says, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” The Spirit is normally distinguished from the Father who is understood to be the transcendent God. The Son is traditionally understood as the Person of God incarnated in Jesus. But it does not take too much thinking and examination of Scripture that see that these categories overlap and break down.
In Reality all these distinctions between the three persons of the Trinity dissolve in direct spiritual experience of the Divine. All is one, and we are one with the Father and Jesus and the Spirit. That is what Jesus was teaching during his prayer on the night before his death, which I think is the most important prayer in the Bible. Jesus prays for his disciples and then for future generations of his followers and says:
“I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
That prayer is the definition of Christian nonduality. Christian nonduality is being one with the divine Reality that we call God. This oneness is the Spirit of Unity, the Spirit of oneness. This Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Nonduality, the Nondual Spirit. Use whatever terms you want. This One Reality is the Holy Spirit.