Recently I received two comments from listeners about my episode on Nondual Meditation. One was from a listener from Canada by email. The other was in an online interview with Corey Farr who has a podcast entitled, “A Christian Reads the Tao te Ching,” which is an excellent podcast by the way. I will post a link to it. In addition to talking about my Christian version of the Tao Te Ching, Corey wanted to talk about meditation and referred that episode about nondual Meditation.
So I went back and listened to what I said, which is something I never do after I post an episode. Listening to it reminded me how uncomfortable I was doing that episode. I looked uncomfortable on video and sounded uncomfortable. I was having a difficult time explaining my experience and practice of meditation in words. Nevertheless the episode seems to have resonated with some people.
So today I want to continue that discussion. Today I want to describe, as well as I can, nondual awareness. I am calling it Christian nondual awareness, because I am a Christian. I experience Reality as nondual and I express this in Christian language. I want to not just talk about it but point you to it.
Nondual Christian Awareness
Recently I received two comments from listeners about my episode on Nondual Meditation. One was from a listener from Canada by email. The other was in an online interview with Corey Farr who has a podcast entitled, “A Christian Reads the Tao te Ching,” which is an excellent podcast by the way. I will post a link to it. In addition to talking about my Christian version of the Tao Te Ching, Corey wanted to talk about meditation and referred that episode about nondual Meditation.
So I went back and listened to what I said, which is something I never do after I post an episode. Listening to it reminded me how uncomfortable I was doing that episode. I looked uncomfortable on video and sounded uncomfortable. I was having a difficult time explaining my experience and practice of meditation in words. Nevertheless the episode seems to have resonated with some people.
So today I want to continue that discussion. Today I want to describe, as well as I can, nondual awareness. I am calling it Christian nondual awareness, because I am a Christian. I experience Reality as nondual and I express this in Christian language. I want to not just talk about it but point you to it.
Where to start? Let’s start by being aware of being aware, being conscious of being conscious, being mindful of being mindful. If you practice mindfulness, this is similar to that. But do not be mindful of anything. Just be mindful. Take a step back from the mind. I have been told I am out of my mind to be talking about nonduality as a Christian, and this proves it. Your family or church may say the same thing about you. But Jesus’ family thought he was out of his mind also, so we are in good company.
All it takes is to sit quietly for a while. Just a few minutes will do. Mind is like water and it take time for it to clear naturally. My wife and I go swimming during the summer in a beautiful mountain lake near our home in New Hampshire. Sandy bottom. Clear water. So clear that we can swim a hundred or more feet from shore and can look down and clearly see the bottom.
But when I am walking into the water I kick up sand and silt from the bottom, and it clouds the water for a while. But only for a while. The sand and silt quickly settles to the bottom so that the water is clear once again. So it is with meditation. It takes a while for the mind to clear.
After I sit down to meditate I notice that my mind has been kicking up ideas and images and emotions and muddied the waters. But after a few minutes these settle, and I can glimpse the bottom. At that point a shift happens. It feels like waking from a dream or a daze or a state of insanity. Like I have been sleep-walking and now I am awake. All it takes to be in my right mind is to sit quietly for a while and let things naturally calm. I don’t have to do anything.
Let me make it clear that this does not mean that there are no thoughts or emotions. It means that you are not captured by them or paying attention to them. They are like a television or radio playing in the corner of the room that you can ignore because you are not interested. Your attention is elsewhere. It is all about attention.
As we sit in meditation we cease to identify with the ideas, emotions and physical sensations that run through our brain and body. We are not pushing them away. We are not even letting them be. We are the space in which all those happen, like the sky is the space in which the clouds appear. We abide as that spaciousness. That is a visual metaphor, but we can also call this silence in which all noise appears. We can call it light by which we see everything. These are physical metaphors to describe the nonphysical.
This has the quality of sacredness, and so I want to use Christian religious language. This nondual Presence is God in whom we live and move and have our being. It is Being which encompasses and includes everything. In this Being – this I AMness – there is no individual self. Yet there is a Self. I am not myself, yet I am. There is no time or space, but time and space flows from this. This is something that all people know in the innermost core of our being. It is what we were before our human bodies were born and what we will be after our bodies die. It is what we really are.
This is accessible and knowable now. It is natural and simple. We are all aware of this at some level, and all we have to do is notice it and pay attention to it. So sit back and let this Reality come to the forefront. It is like those optical illusions were there are different images in the foreground and the background, depending on what we focus upon. Oneness – unicity - is the background of everything we experience. All we need to do is shift our attention from the experience to the background.
What we are searching for is right behind us in the spaciousness behind our seeing. All we have to do is turn around and look. Look at what is looking. Notice what is noticing. See what is seeing. Know what is knowing. Be what is being. It is like falling backward into the arms of God, which is how I understand faith.
Faith has nothing to do with ideas or doctrines – with believing six impossible things before breakfast, as the Queen said to Alice. It is not about believing six impossible things before we can be baptized or be saved. It is letting go of all such ideas and falling into the Unnamable Reality of God. It is ceasing to be ourselves and discovering what we really are.
All we have to do is stop, and it all comes into focus. To use Christian vocabulary again, this is about grace and peace. It is grace received by faith. By faith we see what is invisible as Abraham’s faith was described. We don’t accept it on faith; we see it by faith. We look through the eye of Christ instead of through our own two eyes, and world opens up and becomes transparent to Reality. We see God from the inside embracing the world, loving the world. God loving the world through us. Us being loved as part of the world. Loving God, Loving our neighbor. Loving our enemies. As the Bible says, God is love.
As a Christian I call this incarnated Love Christ, whom Christianity declares to be the incarnation of God. God in us before birth and after death and in us as the indwelling Christ or Holy Spirit. I call this Christian nondual awareness. Those from other spiritual traditions would use different religious terms.
I use Christian language. It is the same Reality communicated through various languages and traditions and ideas. This is not only expressible in human language. The heavens declare the glory of God. All nature proclaims God. That is why we sense Divinity so clearly in natural setting. Nature is the native language of God, before there were humans or scriptures, Greek or Hebrew. Our soul speaks this language. All we have to do is listen and respond.