Non-Duality

It is my sincere hope that I don’t lose you with this post. I say that because this one may seem extremely nerdy, as if I’m straying from telling my story. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one. This post tells an enormously important part of my story. Non-duality is the path of my spiritual journey, which seems to be the journey I was destined to travel from the beginning of my life. So please, bear with me.

I’ve always loved philosophy, but around the age of 35 I began to realize I also love teaching it. However, I don’t believe that most people (even those who know me quite well) understand what philosophy means to me. First and foremost, it has less to do with mental and intellectual understanding of the mystery of the cosmos and much more to do with the deep and exhilarating desire to directly experience the fullness of life. Spirituality and this kind of philosophy are intertwined for me.

Western Christianity in all its forms (Protestant, Anglican, Catholic), was an extremely oppressive and debilitating system for me as an adult. As a teenager, I could already sense the incredible contradiction upon which the whole tradition is based, but I couldn’t yet determine if this was just a masked paradox. But by age 21 my spirit began to feel the contradiction so deeply that I began the arduous path of deconstruction.

The Christianity in which I was born into and raised, Evangelicalism, claims that it is an experience of God mediated through a direct relationship with Jesus. This is falsehood disguised as love. Evangelicalism is based upon adhering to the right information, not experience. A personal relationship with Jesus Christ is given a lot of lip service, but what is expected is not a direct experience of God but rather falling in line with correct dogma. In fact, a direct experience of God is absolutely discouraged. In the more liturgical traditions, there is a little more honesty with this. The more Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions just pretend this isn’t the case.

Ironically, it was my time in Bible college that allowed me to question my Evangelical faith for the first time. Three subjects I studied converged to help me confront the issue head-on: Church history, philosophy, and logic. As I’ve mentioned in other posts and will probably continue to mention, I dislike traditional school and the American system of education. This dislike is nearly a fetish of mine. Lectures given by so-called experts while students frantically take notes in order to be indoctrinated and pass exams is how I’ve always viewed this system. So speaking up in class always felt like a complete waste of my time. I wasn’t trying to change anyone’s mind publicly; I just wanted to know things for myself. So I would listen intently to professors espouse what they believed, and then I would go read the texts they told me not to read so I could wrestle with all of it on my own. The collective data I received was not adding up for me, to the point where it became unbearable. So I took my questions to the place where I thought I would be loved and supported for seeking understanding: my evangelical church. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was chastised and berated for not falling in line, for not believing correctly. So much for trying to have a direct experience of God.

I’d had enough but I wasn’t yet ready to ditch Christianity. Around 2006, I began seeking refuge elsewhere and was drawn toward Eastern Orthodoxy primarily because it offered a more experiential approach to God, the very thing I’d been yearning for. While Protestantism and Catholicism claim that salvation is about being rescued from hell by receiving redemption for one’s sins through correct belief in Jesus Christ, Eastern Orthodoxy views salvation as Theosis: union with God through the mediated experience of Mother Church. Everything about the Eastern Church is very hands-on, from the music to the iconography to the incensed Eucharistic liturgy. It moved me deeply. I wanted all of it, and not just as a participant. I wanted to go all in. That meant becoming a priest. But something in me knew this would be a hard sell for Leslie and my three daughters, the oldest of whom was already in middle school. I did my research and discovered high-church Anglicanism. In my mind, this church would be a good middle-ground for me and my family: Protestant culture and hymnody meeting up with Eastern Orthodox liturgy and theology.

On paper, I had it all planned out. In practice, it fell apart pretty quickly. The parish we ended up attending and where I would be ordained was actually heavily Reformed Protestant, literally the opposite of everything I was interested in. We went there because the rector was yet another man I thought would be proud of me. Once I was ordained and became the rector of a small parish in California, I began doing what I was so eager to do: teach Orthodoxy and create an Eastern atmosphere. For about a year and a half it was truly incredible, but two things happened simultaneously that would not let me be. First, a prominent and vocal minority in our parish was committed to Reformed Protestant theology and culture. There was no way in hell they were going to let me turn the parish into an Orthodox one. Second, the very thing that seemed so appealing about Orthodoxy in the beginning, Theosis (becoming one with God), was feeling more and more like yet another contradiction, not a paradox. I would only survive a couple more years in this parish because I was being flanked on all sides, by parishioners and from within. Self-sabatoge at its finest. I’m thankful for it.

So this is one way, and probably the grandest way, of explaining the trajectory of my spiritual journey. I began life knowing that I am Divine. Then, at a very young age, my parents and their evangelical church taught me that I was separated from the Divine not just because I sinned, but because I actually had a sinful nature. And even then, I was still something separate from the Divine. Then I found Orthodox theology. It taught me there was a way back to the Divine, where we could co-mingle and "virtually" fuse together. But there was still the Divine, and there was still me. But I knew from the beginning that this was a lie. I’ve always known deep down that I am Divine.

Toward the end of my tenure as a priest and my identification as a Christian, I began reading Meister Eckhart, Richard Rohr, John Keating, Mirabai Starr, Alan Watts, and many others (who were more or less connected in some fashion to Christianity). They were all writing about non-duality. The light bulb came on so quickly and so brightly! They were teaching what I could feel I knew as a little child… there is only the Divine. Once I left the church, I felt free to read all of the non-dualists outside of any attachment to Christianity. People like Chopra, Tolle, Spira, Adyashanti, Dass, and Rudd, to name a few.

I was ready to jump straight back into what I knew from the beginning, but what I didn’t realize was that first I needed to let go of all the programming I received so that I could begin to remember what I had forgotten. That’s been the very painful and difficult process I’ve been undergoing the last few years. It’s all been so I could remember and begin again, anew, afresh.

Non-duality is the name given to this remembering: that there is only God, only awareness, only consciousness. There is only one. We are different perspectives or fractal images of that oneness.

I never needed to be redeemed by a Divine entity.

I never needed to become one with a Divine entity.

I have always been and always will be Divine.

Right now, it’s from a human point of view. It’s just a perspective.

It’s good to be back home.

I AM home.