In this episode I explore what we are if we are not the physical body or the individual self. I use Jesus’ parable of the empty house and the Zen koan of the burglar entering an empty house as aids to explore the Reality behind human nature.
In this episode I explore what we are if we are not the physical body or the individual self. I use Jesus’ parable of the empty house and the Zen koan of the burglar entering an empty house as aids to explore the Reality behind human nature.
Bodies are like houses we used to live in. Let me explain that metaphor by talking about real houses. If you are like me then you have lived in several houses during your lifetime. Some are more important to us than others, especially the house we lived in during our formative years of childhood. It is always nostalgic to return. Eighteen years ago I was forced to sell a summer house in NH that had been in my grandparents and parents family since 1940. The taxes just became too expensive for us. We tried renting it out, but in the end we had to sell it or lose it. It was emotional to do. It was the one place that had remained a constant in my life and the lives of our children as well as they were growing up.
There are a lot of wonderful memories connected that place. But nowadays when I see that house it does not hold the same attraction it used to. Now it is just a place I used to live in. I feel the same way about my body. This change in perspective came ten years ago when I woke up to the realization that I was not my body. And I was not the self that I thought dwelled in that body, calling that body “my body” as if I – the self - owned that body in some way.
Now it is not “my body” and the I is not “my self.” I am neither a self nor a body. What I am is no-self and no-body. I feel about this 70+ year-old body the way I feel about the 120+ year old house that I sold. This body is a place I used to live in back when I thought I was an entity that dwelled in a body, like an oyster in a shell, as Plato used to say. Now I know I am not.
Someone asked me what it feels like not to be a self. It is like moving out of a house into open space. The body was a very confining house. Now the universe is my body. Actually what I am is even bigger than the universe. The universe appears within what I am. It also appears as what I am. It is a sense of infinite spaciousness. It is also a sense of eternity.
Sometimes I think about what I believed about eternal life back when I was an evangelical Christian, and it seems so small. It was claustrophobic. It was everlasting existence as a tiny little entity. It sounds more like hell to me now, like eternal solitary confinement. Even the idea of resurrection was trading an earthen house for a heavenly house. It was exchanging a little self that lived for a few decades for an eternal little self that lives forever with God in heaven. Eternity was seen as a really, really long time. Everlasting life, as they used to call it. But when one sees that what we are is not a self in a body – earthly or heavenly body – then it changes everything.
Eternal life is seen not as never-ending time but timelessness. Eternal Life is not something you possess but something you are. The universe – as huge as it is – is too small to hold what we are. Just like it is too small to hold God. Therefore heaven is not some place in the universe and hell another place. The universe is in me. I hold the universe with all its dualities, and not the other way around.
The wonderful thing is that this reality is experiential. It is not a belief, and certainly not a philosophy or a theology or a religion. I look around me and I see it. Everything is transparent to Divine Reality. Everything is an expression of Divine Reality - including this body and self. This human being is an expression of Eternity. That is what it mean to be made in the image of God. Human bodies die, and the human race will go extinct, and this earth will be swallowed up by the sun and be burned up, and that is alright. It is all an expression of what I am.
Even consciousness is not what we are. Consciousness is within this. This is an area that people misunderstand about spiritual awakening. The way some people talk it sounds like they think their personal consciousness will continue beyond the death of the body. It doesn’t. It can’t. Think about it. Human consciousness is a product of the human brain. When the human brain dies the human consciousness dies. Yet what we really are does not die. What we were before human self-consciousness is what we will be after human self-consciousness dies. The good news is that as human consciousness we can be aware as cosmic consciousness now!
What we were before birth is what we will be after death and what we really are now. We can call this consciousness if we want, and a lot of people do, but it is nothing like human consciousness. It is as different from human self-consciousness as a rock’s consciousness is from human consciousness. It is the difference between being conscious and being consciousness. Consciousness is an expression of what we are, which is Being Itself. I am. I Amness.
Incarnated as humans for a few decades we identify with human consciousness and we think this is what we are. But we are more than that. We are also the consciousness of animals. We are the consciousness of all other humans who have ever lived. That awareness is the origin of the concept of reincarnation. Our individual identity is not reincarnated in successive linear lives, one after the other. The World Soul – which is our true identity – is incarnated simultaneously in every life form on earth now and ever in history and the future. And every life form in the universe – if there are other life forms.
We are Life. We can call this Consciousness if we want to. We can call it God. We can call it Life or Eternal Life. We can call it anything we want, but the words cannot touch it because it is everything. Words are designed to distinguish one thing from another and this is everything and not a thing. It is the All, which is how Jesus identified himself in the Gospel of Thomas. It is God. And that thou art, to quote the Upanishads.
This awareness is present, though not understood, in our human consciousness. Waking up to this “awareness as awareness” is enlightenment, liberation, salvation, redemption. The term we use depends on our religious tradition, but it is all the same. Boundaries between traditions blur and even disappear when this is seen, including the boundary between physical life and death.
So back to this house, this body. There is no personal self or soul in residence in here. In that sense no one is home. Yet this body is home because it is part of the universe which is an expression of the Eternal. We are home. We are already at the destination of the spiritual quest. No need to fly off to a distant heaven when the body dies. A lot of Christians talk about going to heaven in terms of going home. We are already home. There is nowhere to go but here. No time to go but now. The Kingdom of heaven is at hand. It is just a matter of seeing this.
I say there is no one home, but I could equally say the opposite – which is the tricky thing about nonduality. Opposites are equally true. I can say that someone is home, but it is not who you think. It is not some one; it is the One. The only One. God in us, Immanuel, in whom we also live and move and have our being. The NT testifies to this reality repeatedly. The apostle Paul wrote: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” This physical body is the Temple of God. God dwells here. God includes all things and all persons. You could say there is only one Person in the universe, and we are expressions of that One Divine Person.
Jesus told a story called the parable of the empty house. He compared the human body to a house. He compared the Kingdom of God to driving an evil spirit out of a body. As I have explained elsewhere, in biblical mythology evil spirits are symbols of the self. Christ drives the self out. What remains is Emptiness.
But the house is not empty in the sense of lacking something. That type of empty is nothing more than a fleeting spiritual experience. If it is that type, then the self will return later in another form to fill up the space. Nature abhors a vacuum. The same with the mind. The solitary self will simply be replaced with many selves – like he Man called Legion in the gospel story - and the person is worse off than before.
Emptiness is the initial discovery – that there is no one home. But this Emptiness is not lack of something. It does not lack anything because it is everything. It is the fullness of everything. It is as accurate to call it fullness as emptiness. It is the All. The Bible describes this as being filled with the Holy Spirit.
It reminds me of the Zen saying that enlightenment is like a burglar breaking into an empty house. I love that koan. It is a parable Jesus could have told. The key to this koan is seeing that even after the burglar enters the house, the house is still empty. When the burglar is in the house it is empty. That realization is satori. That is enlightenment. This is the Kingdom of God. No one is home … but God.
That is it for today. I do want to mention that I finished my new book “The Nondual Gospel of Jesus” and it is available in Kindle format on Amazon. It is a gospel written from the perspective of Jesus and highlights the nondual teachings of Christ.
Grace and Peace to you.