The Tao of Christ

This episode is a response to questions I receive every once in a while about pain and suffering and how they are addressed in Christian nonduality. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In this episode I explore how the figure of Santa Claus can teach us about the illusory nature of the self and point us to nondual reality. It was inspired by an article by Paul Jordaans, entitled “The Santa-Clausness of Life.” Here are the links to his site and two articles:http://www.parkinsjordaans.nl/downloads/16_The_Santa-Clausness_of_Life.pdfhttp://www.parkinsjordaans.nl/https://cysticfibrosisnewstoday.com/forums/forums/topic/sunday-morning-37/View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

The title for this episode may at first sound like a self-help guide ... or in a nondual context a no-self help guide. I assure you that is not what this is. This is not a step-by-step guide to experiencing no-self. It is a description of two times in life that I saw that I was not a self, culminating in a third time which was an abiding realization of this reality. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

The topic of this episode comes from a Zoom talk that I did recently. The leader of a nondual group in a nearby town here in New Hampshire asked me to do a 90 minute satsang with his folks and others from the nondual community. When I got the Zoom link it had the title “Jesus as Nondual Teacher.” So that got me thinking about this topic. I thought I would give some thoughts on the subject in this 15 minute episode. I have mentioned most of these points before, but they are here in one place.View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

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