In chapter five of John’s Gospel, we find a story that teaches us an important truth about nonduality. It is the story of Jesus healing a man at the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. It is much more than just a miracle tale. Like all the stories about Jesus in the Gospel of John, this is intended as symbolic. It is proclaiming the ultimate healing that comes about by realizing one’s true Self and waking up to the Truth of Eternal Life.
On the surface this is a physical healing story, but it is really a parable about being made whole in a spiritual sense. I use the phrase “being made whole” in a literal sense. We are not little isolated parts of the whole, tiny psychological entities encased in human bodies of flesh. We are the whole. To wake up to the Kingdom of God is to realize that we are already whole. It is just a matter of recognizing this.
It is also a matter of intention. Jesus asks the man in this story, “Do you want to be made whole?” The intention of the man is the key. The Buddha called it “right intent.” Most people do not really want to be made whole. They have gotten used to the way things are. Most people have no true desire for liberation, freedom, salvation or enlightenment. We prefer bondage and spend our lives escaping from freedom, as Erich Fromm phrased it.
People convince themselves that there is something basically wrong with them. They see a fundamental dis-ease in their souls. Different spiritual traditions use different words and concepts to explain what is thought to be wrong. Hindus call it ignorance or bondage. Buddhists call it suffering. Christians call it sin and original sin – we are born this way, they say. Calvinists call total depravity. Christians see the whole world as fallen and we with it. We have fallen from our primordial paradise into a condition of lostness, sin and death and condemnation. It is a dark view of the human condition.
But Jesus does not accept this diagnosis or prognosis. Jesus sees the man’s innate wholeness and calls him to act upon it. Jesus tells him, “Rise, take up your bed, and walk.” And the man does exactly that. It does not say that Jesus healed him. Jesus simply tells him to get up. All it took was someone to point out to him that he was already whole and tell him to trust it!
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