The topic of this episode comes from a Zoom talk that I did recently. The leader of a nondual group in a nearby town here in New Hampshire asked me to do a 90 minute satsang with his folks and others from the nondual community. When I got the Zoom link it had the title “Jesus as Nondual Teacher.” So that got me thinking about this topic. I thought I would give some thoughts on the subject in this 15 minute episode. I have mentioned most of these points before, but they are here in one place.
The topic of this episode comes from a Zoom talk that I did recently. The leader of a nondual group in a nearby town here in New Hampshire asked me to do a 90 minute satsang with his folks and others from the nondual community. When I got the Zoom link it had the title “Jesus as Nondual Teacher.” So that got me thinking about this topic. I thought I would give some thoughts on the subject in this 15 minute episode. I have mentioned most of these points before, but they are here in one place.
The topic of this episode comes from a Zoom talk that I did recently. The leader of a nondual group in a nearby town here in New Hampshire asked me to do a 90 minute satsang with his folks and others from the nondual community. When I got the Zoom link it had the title “Jesus as Nondual Teacher.” So that got me thinking about this topic. I thought I would give some thoughts on the subject in this 15 minute episode. I have mentioned most of these points before, but they are here in one place.
The first thing I need to say about Jesus as a Nondual Teacher is that the language of Jesus and the gospels is not the typical language of nonduality that we hear these days. Neither Jesus nor the early Christians used words like enlightenment or awakening or liberation. Certainly not Indian terms like moksha or samadhi or nirvana.
Instead Jesus used terms like rebirth – not meaning reincarnation but meaning being spiritually born again. He spoke of being born of the spirit, born anew, born from above. Of course terms like “born again” were appropriated and redefined by evangelical Christianity. That is the problem. What Jesus meant by the term is not what Evangelical Christianity means by the term. Jesus used these terms to refer to what is called enlightenment or we might describe as opening to Nondual Reality.
Jesus experienced this at his baptism, which was the seminal event in his life. It was his awakening experience, although it is not called that in the gospels. All four gospels picture it as the event that transformed his life and provided him with a message to proclaim. He called it the Kingdom of God. The experience itself is pictured in the baptism story in symbolic language because only symbolism can describe it. There are no words to describe it directly.
The gospels say that when Jesus came up from the waters of the Jordan River, the heavens opened. This was an opening to Divine Reality. The story says that the Spirit of God descended upon him like a dove. This is the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which is why Jesus is called the Christ, which means Anointed One.
The symbol of the dove represents peace and also recreation. It is a symbol borrowed from the Flood story, which was the recreation of the world after global baptism in water. It is death and rebirth, destruction and recreation, the end of the old self and the emergence of a new self. Lastly the baptism accounts say that there was a voice from heaven that names Jesus as God’s beloved Son. This is Jesus’ discovery of his true identity baptized in Divine Love.
Traditional Christians don’t really talk about Jesus’ baptism much. The event is not observed in most churches except the liturgical ones. Even then it is no big deal. Christians know when in the year Christmas and Easter is. But do you even know when the Baptism of the Lord is celebrated? In the church calendar it is the second Sunday of January. In most churches it is lost in the midst of New Years and Epiphany. Jesus’ baptism is certainly not observed in evangelical churches – not like the birth or death or resurrection of Christ. Yet his baptism is recorded in all four gospels – just as much as his death. His birth is mentioned in only two gospels and his resurrection in three. His ascension only in one.
Yet the baptism of Jesus was what started it all. It is the enlightenment of Jesus. It is why we call him the Christ, just like Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree is what made him the Buddha. The fact that most churches ignore or downgrade this event in Jesus’ life is an indication that they don’t really know what Jesus or his message are about.
That ignorance is actually stated over and over again in the synoptic gospels. The gospels repeatedly say that the twelve disciples did not understand who Jesus was or what his message was. They did not know Jesus’ true identity nor his true message. We read the gospels and we get the impression that the disciples are clueless. Furthermore the church that canonized the New Testament did not understand who Jesus was and what he was about. They made it about doctrines and rules and ecclesiastical structure, which is exactly that Jesus spoke against!
A minority of the earliest Christians did get it. The apostle John got it. The Gospel of John is the most nondual of the four gospels. The only nondual gospel in the canon. There were other gospels that communicated the message of nonduality, but they did not make it into the New Testament. The Gospel of Thomas especially. Also the Gospel of Mary – that is Mary Magdalene. Those two disciples got it. There were a lot of other too. The Nag Hammadi library has them.
There was a minority movement within early Christianity that knew and transmitted and proclaimed the mystical gospel of Jesus. But they were marginalized by the mainstream church, which followed Paul and James, neither of whom were of the twelve apostles of Jesus. None of the books of the New Testament were written by the original disciples of Jesus. Most were written by Paul, who never met Jesus and was not familiar with his teachings. Christianity we know today is a product of Paul of Tarsus, not Jesus of Nazareth.
The minority movement based on Jesus’ original teachings were in churches in the first and second centuries, and they produced these alternative gospels. In time in the third and fourth centuries they retreated into the desert as the church became more and more institutionalized and worldly. They are known as the Desert fathers and mothers. They were ascetics and hermits.
By the fourth century the gospel of nonduality was seen as dangerous and heretical. It was labeled gnostic, and it was outlawed and the books banned. It was all downhill from there to where we are today, where nonduality is looked upon as something foreign to Christianity, rather than its core. It is viewed as an intrusion from Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism rather than the heart of original Christianity.
What exactly was the nondual message of Jesus? The synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – record it, even though they do not understand it. They record that after his baptism and a forty day period of integration (which is symbolic number and not literal) Jesus began preaching a very simple message: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!” When understood correctly, this is the gospel of nonduality.
Repent comes from the Latin and means to rethink. The word that Jesus used in Greek is metanoia or metanao. It means “beyond the mind.” Jesus was pointing people beyond the mind to a divine reality that he called the Kingdom of God, which he had experienced at his baptism. When he said “The Kingdom of God is at hand” he was talking about a divine reality that is present here now. That is what the expression “at hand” means. It means it is so close you can reach out and touch it.
Jesus made this meaning very clear when he said that the Kingdom is within you or in your midst, meaning all around you. He said that the Kingdom of God is all around us but people do not see it. Jesus was pointing people to nondual reality. Brother Lawrence calls this the Presence of God. Like everything else in gospels, his message of the Kingdom was also misunderstood by the disciples. It was even less understood by the next generation of Christians who wrote the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
The Kingdom of God came to be thought of exclusively as a future event to occur in history. As a student of scripture I have to admit that there seems to be an element of that in the original message of the historical Jesus. At least that is the conclusion of the majority of New Testament scholars; they see Jesus as an eschatological preacher.
I think it likely that Jesus’ message was to-fold. Jesus proclaimed a message of the Kingdom here and now, within us and all around us now – what is called by scholars “realized eschatology.” He also seems to have taught there would come a time in the future when all mankind would know this reality. When the whole world will wake up to Nondual Reality, if you will. That idea of an eschatological breaking in of the Kingdom is in the first three gospels.
The Fourth Gospel stresses the Kingdom here and now. Running throughout the Gospel of John is a series of “I AM” statements that Jesus makes. They all refer back to the name of God found in the story of Moses and the burning bush. God says God is the I am – or “I am that I am.” This nondual teaching reaches its pinnacle in the 17th chapter of John when Jesus gives his final teaching in the form of a prayer right before he is arrested. Jesus prays for future generations who will hear his gospel and says:
“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”
That message is unmistakably nondual in nature. This message runs throughout the Gospel of John. It is the point of many of the parables of Jesus in the synoptics. As I have said elsewhere, Jesus used parables like Zen koans to catapult people into the presence of God. It is found in the Sermon on the Mount as well. In short Jesus was a teacher of nonduality.