We Are One

Last week I had three Zoom meetings during which I spoke about Christian nonduality. Two were with individuals and one with a church group. As I was speaking one insight kept appearing. It was that all of us on these Zoom meetings were one. It was seen clearly that the one speaking and the ones hearing are the same one. As I spoke the feeling that accompanied this insight was palpable. We were one. There is only one.

In this episode I explore this nondual reality by looking at the Hebrew name for God Elohim, which is an expression of nonduality. It is both plural and singular, one and many. I explore the Creation stories of Genesis and see how these also are expressions of nondual awareness, which is our True Nature. 

Transcript

We are One

Last week I had three Zoom meetings during which I spoke about Christian nonduality. Two were with individuals and one with a church group. As I was speaking one insight kept appearing. It was that all of us on these Zoom meetings were one. It was seen clearly that the one speaking and the ones hearing are the same one. As I spoke the feeling that accompanied this insight was palpable. We were one. There is only one.

This is not a new insight of course. It is the core of nonduality, but it came across so clearly that I was thinking about it for days afterwards. As I pondered this, the Biblical depiction of God came to mind.  Especially the name for God. Usually I talk about the Hebrew name YHWH, the name revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush, which is translated as “I am what I am.”  Here I am talking about the other common word for God in the Hebrew Bible, which is the word Elohim.

From a scholarly point of view these two divine names are important. The two different words for God represent different layers in the Hebrew text. Different parts of the Bible were written at different times and places by different authors, and later were intertwined together. Biblical scholars can untangle the strands in part by seeing which word for God is used by the authors or final editors. I find that history of the text interesting, but I am not going to say anything further about that. 

Now I want to explore the word Elohim. It is a very interesting name for the Divine. It is an expression of nonduality. It is a plural word. The ending “im” is the plural ending in Hebrew. Yet it functions as singular. For example the opening words of the Bible are: Bereishit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et haaretz – In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The subject “Elohim” is plural but the verb “created” is singular. God is here both plural and singular. One and many. Many in the One. Nondual. 

There is another very important passage in this section of Genesis where God creates humans. It says: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make humankind in Our image, according to Our likeness.’” God – Elohim – refers to himself/themself in the plural. Sometimes this is explained away as the royal “we,” as if God were the Queen of England referring to herself in the plural. But there is more going on here.

Christians have said that this is evidence of the Trinity in the Old Testament, but that is reading Christian theology back into a Jewish text. This is not the Christian Trinity hiding in the ancient Hebrew faith. But the Christian trinity and this divine Hebrew plural are both evidence of the plurality/unity of God. God is one, yet more than one. Not a singular one, but nonduality that includes multiplicity.

This biblical nonduality points to nondual awareness. This is where biblical references connect to nondual reality. There is one Self. One World Soul. We all are it. We are all one. You who are listening to me are me. I am you. We are one. 

The persistent delusion of humanity is thinking that we are separate. On the relative level it is true that we have separate bodies with distinct personalities, but in essence we are one. We are all connected in a larger spiritual body. Just like the many cells of our human body are all together one body. The apostle Paul uses the metaphor of the Body of Christ, saying that we are different parts of the body but we are all one in the divine body of Christ. 

We can look at it another way. We are all parts of earth. We come from the earth and are made of the elements of the earth and return to the earth. We are always physically earth. The same earthly atoms or molecules are recycled through various life forms, over and over. It is a form of physical reincarnation, you might say. The molecules that composed the body of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Buddha or Jesus may be part of my body now. 

Spiritually we are one with each other and God. The creation story in the second chapter of Genesis says that humans are made from the dust of the earth. God breathed the Divine breath into the human and the human became a living being. The word for breath and spirit are the same. The Spirit/Breath of God resides in humans and gives us life. The word for God used in this part of Genesis is YHWH which is the sound of a breath. Inbreathing and outbreathing. That is where the word originated. This Life is the I AM.

The perception that we are separate and different from one another is illusion. We are one. There is one Divine Spirit, and we all share in it. We are it. When this is realized in consciousness it is expressed as love. This is the source of what Jesus calls the two great commandments that sum up and fulfil all the biblical commandments. These are the commands to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That includes loving our enemies according to Jesus. This is unconditional love.

Self-realization – realizing that we are one divine Self – makes unconditional love not only possible but natural. It is the natural expression of our being. We love others because we are others. Love of others is a form of self-love. We love our neighbors as ourself because they are our self. We love God with our whole self because God is our true Self. We love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength because our heart, mind, soul and strength are God. This is the soul returning home.

Love is the natural expression of Christian nonduality. This love is not limited to fellow humans because in essence we are not humans. We are every being on this planet. In the Genesis creation story after Elohim says, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness,” it continues and says, “and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the creatures and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” 

This verse has been badly distorted and misused in Western Christian civilization. It does not mean to dominate in a destructive way. It means to care for. It is another form of love. We are to love and care for the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and the creatures and all the earth, and every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” 

See how far Western Christianity has fallen from its biblical roots? We are to love the earth and all the creatures of the earth because we are the earth and all the creatures of the earth. There is one Divine Being expressed in all beings, all life forms and even forms that are not life. All the universe is us. This seemingly separate and objective reality is us. We are one. We love this Reality with our whole being because it is our whole being.

There is one more point I want to bring out of this creation story. It ends saying, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Here is male and female as the expression of the image of God. This Elohim God is not a Big Male Ego in the Sky. This Divine Self is imaged as male and female. This singular God uses the pronoun them. 

It seems to me that a variety of gender and sexual identities is expressed here in this Genesis story. The Biblical God, which is often thought to be exclusively masculine, is here described with the inclusive pronouns us/our. Elsewhere in the Bible God is described with feminine terms and imagery. The increasingly common use of the pronoun “they” as singular in American society points to inclusiveness when addressing people. This name of God Elohim is the same sort of inclusiveness. It includes all genders in the Divine Self. We are one. This oneness is expressed as unconditional love. 

As I mentioned at the beginning, this topic was prompted by the sense of oneness I sensed on Zoom meetings when seeing that all of us on that screen are one. The spiritual life is not an individual quest, even though we often make it into that. It is all of us discovering we are all one. We are in this together. We are one with each other and one with God. Self-realization is not just about realizing that I am one with God. It is realizing that we are one with God and each other.