The Tao of Christ

There is a spiritual revolution underway similar to the Copernican Revolution in astronomy. Just as Copernicus and Galileo moved science beyond the geocentric view to the heliocentric view, so now there is a movement moving spirituality from an egocentric to a noncentric awareness of reality.View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

I just finished watching a Netflix show in which the main character wakes up to discover that she cannot remember the last few months of her life. She has amnesia. Amnesia is a very rare condition in real life, but it is a common theme in films. Some of the best movies on the subject are The Bourne Identity, Total Recall, and Paycheck. Two of those are based on stories by one of my favorite authors Philip K Dick. Other films on the topic are The Majestic, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento. There are a lot of books on the theme also. This fascination with amnesia makes you wonder why it is so popular.I think it is popular because at some level we recognize that this is our condition. It reminds us that we have forgotten the basic truth about our existence. We have forgotten who we are. We know we are not these fictitious characters that we have spent our lives creating. We are something more. We spend our lives trying to remember our original identity. That is what the spiritual search is all about.View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

What is the Eternal and how does one come to experience it? Eternal life is a matter of what you identify with. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In this episode I explore the idea that our cosmos is a dream that we can wake up from. I look at this concept from both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In this episode I answer a question that a listener asked me a few weeks ago. I had a Zoom conservation with a young man who is a Christian who has had a spiritual awakening, and he asked me what my first thought was when it happened. No one had ever asked me that question. I have never asked myself that question. I thought about it for a minute and answered him briefly. The question has been returning to my mind every once in a while ever since, so I thought I would give a more complete answer. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In 1970 when I was twenty years old and in college, I read a newly published book entitled “The Experience of Nothingness.” The author, philosopher Michael Novak, was visiting our campus, and I wanted to know what he had to say so I could engage him in conversation. I still remember his visit vividly fifty years later. I sat on the floor before him in a room on the top floor of the Student Union and asked him questions. His ideas resonated with me. At that point in my life I considered myself an existentialist, although I was seriously exploring spiritual traditions. In fact later that year I declared myself a Religion major, going “all in” on my spiritual search.  His book described my experience. It was a powerful awareness of the indescribable depths of existence. The only vocabulary I had to articulate my experience at the time was the language of existentialism. This Depth was neither something nor nothing. Nothingness described it as well as any word. Yet this awareness of No-thing-ness felt very spiritual, hence my attraction to spirituality and religion. The existentialist author Camus called this “the absurd.” He saw it as evidence of a universe without meaning. Sartre had a book called “Being and Nothingness.” Popularly the experience was called “existential angst.” These days that phrase is a cliché that means little more than a teenage or midlife crisis, but in the post-WWII, post-Holocaust, era it was powerfully fresh and profound. One was called to live an authentic life in the face of the emptiness at the heart of existence.  Now I look back on that time in my life and realize that I was in touch with the Holy and did not realize it. I was aware of the essence of the universe and human nature. This was God without all the fluff and religious tradition. This experience of bare essence that was powerfully present and real to me as a twenty-year old is what I would now call Reality, the Divine, the Holy, Godhead or God Beyond God. It is Godness, for want of a better term. God beyond images. It is Nothingness in the sense that God is not a thing among things or a being among beings.I tend to call it the Ground of Being or Being Itself as Tillich does, but I could equally call it Non-Being. It is the Source the duality of Being and Non-Being come from. I call this reality God, but this is not the traditional theistic Deity of Western religion. It is older than God. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

I am presently in the process of writing a book, which I am calling “The Gospel According to Jesus.” It is the gospel story told from the perspective of Jesus, as a teacher of nonduality. In involves me very slowly studying the Gospel of Mark, both in English translation and the Greek text. Then comparing the passages to parallel accounts in the other gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. This process enables me to see things that I might not ordinarily see, and ponder things that I would not normally ponder.Recently one passage caught my attention. It is the story that takes place early in Jesus’ ministry where Jesus’ family comes Capernaum to find Jesus and take him home because they thought he had “lost his senses,” as one translation puts it. Today we would say he was mentally ill. A parallel passage in John’s gospel says that “he has a demon and is insane.” People were saying that Jesus was demon-possessed, which was the explanation in the first century for all sorts of mental and physical illnesses, from schizophrenia to epilepsy. According to the story scribes from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.”It got me thinking, “Was Jesus mentally ill?” View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

What if we had a gospel written by Jesus himself? Unfortunately there is no evidence that Jesus wrote anything. If we can’t have a gospel written by Jesus, wouldn’t it be wonderful to at least have a gospel written from the perspective of Jesus? Lots of celebrities today use “ghost writers” to tell their autobiographies. Would it be great to have a ghost writer or should I say “Spirit writer,” write an autobiography of Jesus? A gospel from the perspective of Jesus! That is the project that I am undertaking next: “The Gospel according to Jesus.” More specifically the Nondual Gospel of Jesus or the Gospel of the Nondual Jesus, since I am convinced that Jesus was a teacher of what is called nonduality. In this episode i describe the rationale and the method of this project. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

Money messes up everything, especially religion. That includes the type of spirituality that goes under the name of nonduality these days. As soon as a spiritual teacher starts to accept money from people for their teaching it has the potential to distort the message, the relationship, and the spirituality itself. I am not saying it is inevitable or that this always happens. But it can. Take it from one who made a living as a professional religious leader. In this episode I explore the ways that money can complicate nondual spiritual. I also look at what Jesus has to say about the topic on the Sermon on the Mount.  View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In the Sermon on the Mount we have the most complete biblical exposition of Christian nonduality. It is not the type of description of nonduality that one would hear today. It does not talk about consciousness. It does not present a monistic or panentheistic understanding of reality. Jesus speaks of how oneness with God and all things is expressed in behavior. Among other things he says it is expressed by loving our enemies. Nonduality is most clearly represented in the Old Testament with the biblical word shalom. The word is normally translated “peace” but shalom is not the absence of conflict. It is present no matter the circumstances. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU