The title for this episode may at first sound like a self-help guide, or in a nondual context a no-self help guide. I assure you that is not what this is. This is not a step-by-step guide to experiencing no-self. It is a description of two times in life that I saw that I was not a self, culminating in a third time which was an abiding realization of this reality.
No-self is not a term that one ordinarily associates with the Christian faith. It is normally associated with Buddhism. In fact Christianity appears to be all about self. In traditional Christianity a person is understood as a human self in relationship with a Divine Personal Self called God. That human individual self is believed to inherit everlasting life as an individual self by an act of faith and grace, living forever in fellowship with and in everlasting worship of a Divine Self called Father or Christ or the Holy Spirit or Holy Trinity. Like I said, it is all about the human self.
This is what my mindset was for most of my adult life. I was traditional Christian, conservative in my doctrine, and believing that Christianity was all about believing the correct doctrines about God and being in a right relationship with God. It was about a human self – often called a soul – that would spend eternity as an individual self in heaven or hell - hell if that self did not get the doctrine and relationship of faith right and heaven if the self got it right by the grace of God, of course. Even the virtue of selflessness was about taming the bad impulses of the self.
So it was quite troubling in an existential way to discover firsthand that I was not a self. There is no self to have a personal relationship with a Heavenly Self called Christ or God. In fact it was the self-orientation of the Christian worldview that made this discovery so difficult to accept. The Gospel of Thomas begins with these words spoken by Jesus: “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death. Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."
That perfectly describes what happened in my life. I am using the words “my” and “I” as helpful conventions of speech, but I saw there is actually no I or my. I kept seeking, as Jesus taught us to do: “seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive, knock and the door will be opened.” That is what I have done. I was never satisfied with what other Christians seemed to be content with. So I kept on looking for a deeper and deeper reality. When I found this Reality I was troubled. Troubled is an understatement. I was devastated. Like the prophet Isaiah said, “I am undone!” Then, as Jesus said, I was astonished. I was awestruck. No-self is beyond description.
So this is what I am going to talk about today. So it has an autobiographical dimension, but I am going to downplay that aspect. Elsewhere I have described my personal journey, so I am not going to include all the details here. I will give the bare essentials. There were the three openings to the Reality of no-self that resulted in realizing No-Self.
Like Moses spending 40 years in Median and Israel wandering in the Wilderness 40 years, it took 40 years for No-Self to be revealed as my true nature. Three experiences over 40 years. The first was in 1973, during my last semester in college, shortly after becoming evangelical Christian. One night I was standing outside gazing into the heavens on a late autumn day. Without warning I suddenly was not. There was no separate me. There was only the universe. There was only God. I began to tremble. It was “fear and trembling” as Kierkegaard called it. I had never experienced this before. The shell of the self cracked that night, and it never healed.
I tried to make sense of this sense of no-self in terms of my newfound evangelical Christianity, but there was no language for it. I found parallels in the Bible and in scholarly works like Rudolf Otto’s books The Idea of the Holy, and his “numinous” and “mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and his book Mysticism East and West – which compares Meister Eckhart with Shankara, but there was nothing in the Evangelical vocabulary to make sense of it.
It only lasted for less than a minute. But it became a touchstone for the rest of my spiritual journey. There would always remain the knowledge that there was more to the Spiritual life than what most Christians talked about.
The next time was twenty years later about 1993. I was participating in a week-long silent retreat at Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Washington DC. During one of the group meditation sessions this same phenomenon happened again, which had happened twenty years earlier. Only this time it was much longer and more intense. It was a sense of the complete dissolution of the self.
This was not just the cracking of the facade of the self, but the whole self just fell apart. What I used to think of as myself was no longer there. It was a terrifying experience because I was not expecting it or searching for it. It did not just last a minute or two like previously. This time it did not stop. It continued for months. I don’t remember exactly how long.
It was extremely disorienting. How do you live in the world if you are not a self? If you are not a person? If you are not an individual? I tried to process what was happening with the help of my spiritual director. Talking to her I likened it to falling headlong into an Abyss. But I was unable to integrate this new normal into my life. So I decided to do whatever I could to stop it and deny it and in effect suppress it. I stopped contemplative spiritual practices completely. I saw them as dangerous. I retreated into my previous conservative evangelicalism where I felt safe.
I denied what I had seen for the next twenty years. I again became a conservative evangelical Christian pastor. I was a good evangelical and believed it completely and I was successful as a Baptist pastor – American Baptist and Southern Baptist. Then I began to reexamine my life and my beliefs again. That led to a systematic deconstruction of Christianity.
I had been having physical problems and a physician diagnosed me with pancreatic cancer and told me that I did not have long to live. This was in 2012. It turned out the doctor had misdiagnosed me. But for a week until the tests were completed, I believed I was dying. That death sentence turned out to be the gateway to Life. It prompted a third opening to the awareness of being no-self.
This time there was no fear. There was peace. I knew clearly that what I truly was could not die. This realization of Eternal Life came in the form of a falling away of the individual self and a clear realization that what I am is not an individual psychological personality in an individual physical body. Instead I am the whole in which all phenomena happen.
This realization of No-Self and Eternal Life has remained to this day over ten years later. During this time it has integrated into this human life. The disorientation that I had felt the first two times gave way to orientation over time. Once again there were no words to describe it at the time. But in time I found a vocabulary in the language of nonduality and in the teachings of Jesus. That is why I call it Christian nonduality.
I want to note that I was not looking for this. I was not searching for liberation or awakening or enlightenment or any of those other terms that are so often thrown around. I was simply seeking to know God fully and was willing to pay any price. I think that is key to the spiritual life – intent and perseverance. But I was not seeking a spiritual experience or some state of consciousness. I was not engaging in a practice of meditation. I was not seeking to recover the first two experiences. In fact just the opposite. All three times this awareness as No-Self came unexpectedly and unbidden. In Christian language, it was grace.
Another thing I want to stress is how different this is from traditional Christianity. Traditional Christianity is a form of theism, which is about a right relationship with God, right doctrines about God and right living in obedience to God. This is not about any of those. This is beyond theism. I sometimes use Tillich’s term transtheism. The self that has relationships or believes things or does things is seen a fabrication of the mind, although a useful fiction for navigating human culture.
Nevertheless a Personal God and a personal relationship to God and Christ are still present in my life. I worship in church regularly. This realization of no self does not negate traditional Christianity. It fulfills it, just like Jesus said he came not to destroy the Law but fulfill it. Religion is still something that my mind and heart do while the True Self or no-Self is aware as the Reality that is beneath the masks of theism. Religion keeps the psyche occupied while No-Self abides in God.
I see myself as a Christian. But Christianity is just the clothing that nondual Reality wears in this life, the language it uses, the thought forms it uses. Reality also uses the language and thought forms of other spiritual traditions when expressed in and through other people. They are all one. This Reality is the Whole and the Holy, the True Self and No-Self. It is the One of which everything and everyone is an expression. This was realized through three moments in my life over a 40 year period.