Glimpses of Spiritual Awakening

I have exploring Biblical stories of spiritual awakening for a couple of months now. I am going to finish this series today by talking about spiritual experiences that fall short of full awakening but have some of the same qualities as awakening. I am not sure what to call these glimpses of Nondual Reality. You could call them partial awakenings, mini-awakenings, temporary awakenings, preludes to awakening or glimpses of spiritual awakening. You probably know what I am talking about. You may have experienced what I am talking about. 

View Marshall's books here:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

Transcript

I have exploring Biblical stories of spiritual awakening for a couple of months now. I am going to finish this series today by talking about spiritual experiences that fall short of full awakening but have some of the same qualities as awakening. I am not sure what to call these glimpses of Nondual Reality. You could call them partial awakenings, mini-awakenings, temporary awakenings, preludes to awakening or glimpses of spiritual awakening. You probably know what I am talking about. You may have experienced what I am talking about. 

The apostle Paul calls them “visions and revelations from the Lord.” They are genuine spiritual experiences and they can transform a person’s life, but they are not as thoroughly transformative and permanent as true spiritual awakening. The experience of Blaise Pascal’s “night of fire” in 1654 comes to mind. It was a “one off” as they say these days. Yet he never forgot what happened that night, and it colored the way he saw the world for the rest of his life. That is true of a lot of spiritual seekers today who are interested in nonduality. 

The nineteenth century American Transcendentalists knew this experience. Emerson’s essay entitled “The Over-Soul" begins with these words: “There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect.” He talks about faith coming in moments, and then he continues: “Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.” 

As I looked through the Bible for stories of spiritual awakening I found several of these experiences. They are not spiritual awakening, but they are dramatic and life-changing spiritual glimpses of Reality. The gospel story of the Transfiguration of Jesus is one such experience. The disciples Peter, James and John had a glimpse of Jesus’ true divine nature. But the story makes it clear that they really did not understand what they were seeing at the time or afterward. 

The resurrection appearances of Jesus experienced by the disciples were such glimpses of awakening. Jesus was fully awakened. When he died, the Reality that he had realized continued to shine through the veil of time and space in a powerful way for forty days after his death in the form of resurrection appearances of the Master to the disciples. But they rarely resulted in full spiritual awakening in his followers. I think the exceptions would be John and Thomas. 

One of the biblical examples of partial or momentary spiritual awakening was the apostle Paul. If you have been listening to me for the last five years – almost six years - you know that I am not a big fan of the apostle Paul. I consider him to be the primary reason Christianity lost its way early in its history. Christianity turned away from Jesus’ gospel of spiritual awakening, which he called the Kingdom of God, to a gospel of conversion, doctrine, laws, and ecclesiastical authority. This began with Paul, and I think also James the brother of Jesus. 

Paul of Tarsus was a strict Pharisee, who was obsessed with Law, sin, guilt, judgment, punishment and the wrath of God. He constructed a form of Christianity – Pauline Christianity - that focused on those aspects, complete with a whole theological system of salvation including atonement, sacrifice, and justification. He speaks against the other apostles and the early Gnostics who had a different gospel. Historically Christianity chose to follow the gospel of Paul as written in his letters rather than the gospel of the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus as written in the gospels. 

Yet there are parts of Paul’s writings that reveal that Paul had a glimpse of spiritual awakening. He talks about it in his second letter to the church in Corinth, Greece.  He writes to them, “I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know — God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows — was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.”

He talks about himself in the third person here, but all biblical scholars believe he is speaking of himself.  The fact that he speaks in the third person shows that this was not an egoic experience. He knew there was a deeper sense of self experiencing this. He describes it as being caught up to the third heaven. 

The first heaven is what we call the atmosphere, where birds and clouds exist. The first century worldview understood there being a firmament beyond the first heaven in which there were the sun and moon and planets and stars. That is the second heaven. The third heaven was beyond that; it is the Realm of God, the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God.

Paul said that he was caught up to this spiritual realm beyond time and space. He had no sense of his body. He repeats twice “whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows.” So this was something beyond the categories of bodily experience. He says he was “caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.”

Paul had an experience that he was admits he is unable to understand and unable to talk about. I think it was a mystical experience of Nondual Reality. This experience seems to be different from the conversion experience he had on the Damascus Road. That famous experience recounted three times in the Book of Acts was a vision of Jesus and considered to be his conversion experience. In the Acts of the Apostles he talks about that experience. But he never talks about this third heaven experience, which was a glimpse of nondual reality because he couldn’t.

Yet his spiritual writings are colored by this glimpse of spiritual awakening. This is what accounts for the statements he makes about his sense of oneness with God and Christ. He says in his earliest letter, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” That seems to be based on seeing that the separate self no longer exists. Instead Paul identifies with the Divine Self.  If you read this sentence in context, it is mixed up in Paul’s mind with his theology of the law, righteousness, sacrifice and grace. Yet beyond this theology he seemed to know no-self to be his True Self and identical to Christ. 

There is another beautiful nondual metaphor that he uses in his first letter to this same group of Corinthian Christians. It is the Body of Christ. "For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free — and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For in fact the body is not one member but many.... Now you are the body of Christ, and members individually.”

The metaphor says that seemingly separate individuals are part of one body which is Christ. This is a vision of oneness in which individuals are known to be part of a bigger whole. He goes on in the next chapter (the so-called Love Chapter) to talk about love as the ethical expression of this essential oneness. Then a couple of chapters later he talks about resurrection and he envisions a time when “God may be all in all.” 

There are other such nondualistic passages in Pauline literature.  The consensus of Biblical scholarship considers that several letters attributed to Paul were actually written by Paul’s disciples after his death. These have some wonderful passages. One is in Ephesians: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”  Here the Pauline theology seems to be trying to reconcile his Christianity with the nondual vision.

In short people in the New Testament had glimpses of Nondual Reality. Paul was one of those people. He tried to reconcile that glimpse of Reality with his Pharisaic Judaism. That produced Pauline Christianity. We can sift through his writings and find these gems of nonduality, but we have to admit that we have to sift through a lot of chaff to find these kernels of truth. 

In the end we need to be grateful for any and all of these glimpses of nondual Reality in Scripture and in our lives. For they are real in themselves, and they can be precursors of a fuller and more complete spiritual awakening.