The Man Who Did Not Wake Up
In these episodes I am looking at the Gospel of John and interpreting it as a proclamation of the gospel of nonduality. Today we look at a person who is mentioned repeatedly in the first chapter of the Gospel of John: John the Baptist, not to be confused with John the apostle.
I am calling him “the man who did not wake up.” We could call him the unChrist or the unBuddha. When people came to John and asked who he was, he said clearly, “I am not the Christ.” He was a popular preacher in his day and even considered a prophet by many including Jesus. But he never saw the Kingdom of God, which was Jesus’ term for nondual awareness.
John the Baptist is described in the Gospel of Luke as a cousin of Jesus, just six months older than Jesus. He was a solitary prophet who lived, preached and baptized in the wilderness of Judea. It is possible that he was a sort of hermit like the desert fathers of the third century. There is some conjecture by scholars that he was an Essene or at least connected to the Qumran Community near the Dead Sea, which is famous for preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The gospels picture him as a charismatic figure who wore a tunic made of camel’s hair and ate a diet of honey and locusts. These locusts, by the way, are the fruit of the locust tree known today as carob. It has edible pods, the beans of which are used today as a chocolate substitute. So he was not eating grasshoppers, like so many readers assume, but was munching on something more like cacao or cocoa beans.
In all the gospels, including the Gospel of John, he is a transitional figure. He comes before Jesus and prepares the way for Jesus. He baptizes Jesus. He has a very similar message as Jesus, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” He points people to Jesus, but does not become a disciple of Jesus. At the end of his life he becomes uncertain about Jesus’ identity. From prison he sent a disciple to Jesus asking if Jesus really was the Messiah or whether he should look for someone else.
John is the portrait of a spiritual seeker who never finds what he was looking for. In the synoptic gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus gives this assessment of John: “Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet even the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” According to Jesus, John never made into the Kingdom.
John the Baptist is like the spiritual seekers of today. He represents the spiritually minded person who has a lot of spiritual ideas and says all the right things, but has not himself known the spiritual reality of the Kingdom of God of which he speaks. That is why Jesus said, “the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”
John had not entered the Kingdom. He had not awakened to Reality. He is like the seeker today who believes in enlightenment and desires it, but has not experienced it. Such people know all the right words and ideas. They have glimpsed the Kingdom from afar, enough to know it is real and true, but have not entered through the narrow gate. John had seen the Light but had not identified with the Light. The Gospel of John says of him: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.”
When John is asked if he is the Messiah, he admits he is not. So he was no imposter or charlatan; he was sincere. Then they ask, “Who are you?” John says he is “a voice crying in the wilderness,” quoting from Isaiah. That certainly describes a lot of people today. There are a lot of spiritual seekers wandering in the wilderness seeking for deliverance, for liberation, for salvation, for awakening, thirsting for it like a person seeking water in the desert.
John admits his spiritual condition. He said of Jesus, “I did not know him” even when he was baptizing him. John knew Jesus as his cousin. He even said he knew that Jesus was the “I AM” of Israel. John said of Jesus, “After me comes a Man who is preferred before me, for He was before me.’” This is a reference to Jesus’ statement “Before Abraham was, I am.” John even called Jesus the Son of God. John knew about Christ, but it was knowing at a distance. Dualistic knowing.
Spiritual seekers today can be very knowledgeable. But like John they have not awakened to Reality. Furthermore John seems to have died before he had that awakening. He was executed as a young man in his early thirties. We are intended to see Jesus and his cousin, who was nearly the same age and probably looked alike before of the family resemblance, as examples of two spiritual paths. One woke up and one did not. John was a seeker who never woke up. His life is a cautionary tale for seekers today.
John the Baptist is a transitional figure caught in duality but yearning for nonduality. Because of that he is a character that many people can identify with - people who have been seeking for years and not found. He also has something to say to those who have seen the Kingdom. For unless one has a sudden and complete awakening like Jesus did or like the Buddha did, we all are in transition.
Awakening is not a once-and-for-all event for most people. For some people it may be instantaneous and complete. But even Jesus took forty days in the wilderness to figure out what had happened. For many people awakening is a process of integrating the new reality one has seen into everyday consciousness. It is like a seed growing, which is why Jesus used that metaphor for the Kingdom of God so often in his parables. The seedling breaks through the ground to the Light in one moment, but that is just the beginning. Then it grows and matures and flowers. There is a process of opening up to Reality.
Of course that process is just our body and mind’s adjustment to Reality. Nondual Reality is always here now. It does not change. But our temporal experience changes. In that way we all are in transition. If you have had a glimpse of the Kingdom, you are like a seed that has sprouted and broken through the surface of the Ground of Being into the Light.
That process has perils, which is what Jesus’ parable of the Sower is about. There is no guarantee that the seed of the Kingdom will take root in our lives and flourish. I know that first hand because I pushed it away for twenty years, afraid of the consequences of the death of the ego. The growing seed needs to be nurtured. I wish I had someone to tell me that thirty years ago. It would have saved me a lot of suffering, which is why I am doing these podcast and video episodes.
One thing John says is very helpful in this regard. In speaking to his disciples about the relationship between him and Christ in chapter 3 of the Gospel of John, he says of Christ, “He must increase; I must decrease.” That sums it up the process. I - the self, the ego - must decrease and Christ must increase. Once we glimpse Christ as our True Self, the process begins. In time Christ increases and we decrease, until there is no self and only Christ.
John is a good example of a traditionally religious person, a devout Christian who knows there is something more but has not found it yet. As the prologue says, John understood himself as not the Light but bearing witness to the Light. That is a good description of the traditional devotional Christian path where the Beloved and the Lover are separate. Worship is an expression of this divine love. There is nothing wrong with traditional worship of God. It gives the ego something to do.
I do not reject the church worship or traditional Christianity. I love the church. I worship regularly in a traditional church. I still preach occasionally in such churches, when they dare to let me into the pulpit! But there is more to the Christian life than this dualistic expression of it. Most Christians are like John the Baptist. They are a witnesses to the Light only. They have not been consumed by the Light until there only Light.
The traditional Christian pattern of glorifying Christ and serving Christ is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. In traditional Christianity there is separation between the Christian and Christ. In the Kingdom of God there is no separation. There is union in the “I AM” as “I AM, just as Jesus talks about later in the Gospel of John. In the Kingdom of God, we are one with the Light of the World who is Jesus Christ. The spiritual life is a process of realizing fully that unity and identity.