The Tao of Christ

We are living in the Mind of God. We are ideas in the Divine Mind. You might say that the universe is a dream or a day dream that God is having, or a brainstorm that God is having. Indian philosophy says this world is a dream being dreamt by the god Vishnu. The Bible sees creation as more intentional. It says that the act of creation is consciously deliberate. God intentionally spoke this world into existence. But it is still all originating from the Mind of God. Its source is the Mind of God.We are not the time-bound physical beings that we mistake for ourselves. We are Being Itself. These physical forms are temporal manifestations of the Eternal. In essence we are the Source of all time-bound manifestations. We are the Mind of God. Abiding in the Mind of God is Awakening, Liberation, Enlightenment or Salvation. That is what it means by saying we are made in the image of God. The Changeless Eternal is our immortal Nature. Our mortal selves appear within that Divine Being. As Paul said, “In Him we live and move and have our Being.”  View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

Listeners who come from Christian backgrounds sometimes have a difficult time with nonduality because it feels like it is an abandonment of Christianity. One man on a Zoom meeting I was having with a church labeled it as occult. Occult is from the Latin word occultus, which means hidden or secret. There is nothing hidden or secret about nondual awareness. This is not secret knowledge. This is as open and obvious as it can possibly be. It is hidden in plain sight.Others note that I often quote other spiritual traditions, especially the Hindu Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching and the teachings of the Buddha. They think I am importing Eastern religious ideas into Christianity, and thereby compromising the purity of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” to quote the Letter of Jude. I am not compromising the gospel. This is the gospel of Jesus. All spiritual traditions point to the same Ultimate Reality. When Ultimate Reality is seen, one notices that. That is why I quote other spiritual traditions. One sees references to it everywhere, not only in religious texts but in poetry and literature. Aldous Huxley refers to it as the perennial philosophy, but it is not really a philosophy. It is a direct awareness of Reality that is expressed in a variety of ways in different cultures and religious traditions.Is nonduality non-Christian or unchristian? No! It is deeply Christian. It is the essence of the gospel of Christ that is also found in other spiritual traditions. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

A while back I received an email from a listener asking about the meaning of life according to nonduality. He reasoned that if we are not individual selves – if personal existence is an illusion and not real – then what is the meaning and purpose of our human lives. It all seems rather pointless, he reasoned. Those are not his exact words. In fact I cannot find the email, so I am not sure he asked the question in those exact words but that is the gist of it.I want to address the sense of meaningless of human existence if we are in fact not really individual persons and have no future existence as persons. Some teachers embrace this meaninglessness openly. Tony Parsons for example calls human life “wondrously, gloriously meaningless.” If you have heard Tony on video you can just picture him saying that and laughing. Here is another quote by him. “All that is happening is meaningless, but it is so beguiling and fascinating that the mind is absolutely sure it has meaning.”That is how Tony approaches this question. He celebrate meaninglessness. Others are not so happy about it. One Amazon reviewer of his book “The Open Secret” call his approach “meaningless nihilism.” I like Tony Parsons. He has a radical and simple approach that appeals to me, without all the religious and spiritual trappings. I like that. The strength of his message is that it is blunt and uncompromising, which is exactly what many people need to hear! But I would use different words. Nonduality is expressed in and through everyone differently. People express it differently. I would not use the word meaningless. I do not think that human life is meaningless. In fact it is very meaningful. But it not meaningful because we are persons. It is meaningful because we are not persons. And we sense that meaningfulness not as persons but as nonpersons. Yet this meaning is expressed through persons … like Jesus and like us.As a Christian I look to the teachings of Jesus. Nothing against Tony Parsons. I think he is great and I recommend his videos and books. But Tony Parsons is no Jesus Christ. I want to look at what Jesus says is the meaning of life. But first I explore where most people seek meaning in life and then compare it to what Jesus says. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

Last time I did an episode on the Beatitudes, not knowing if I would continue talking about the Sermon on the Mount or not. I am going to do at least this additional one. Jesus follows up his eight blessings by giving two metaphors that point us to our true identity. He calls us salt and light. In using these words he is employing images with a long history in various spiritual traditions, which explain our nondual nature. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

This episode is an interview that I did with Colin Chapman for his podcast called Red Church Door. The interview was recorded on May 10, 2021 and was scheduled to be broadcast about three weeks later. Colin is an Episcopal priest who is the rector of a church in Southern New Hampshire. On his website he says that his podcast “is first and foremost an open invitation to partake in a journey of spiritual discovery. It’s an exploration about how people understand, evolve, and deepen their relationship with God, how their stories relate to our own experiences, and how we can inform and nurture the spiritual growth of ourselves, our faith communities, and our society.”He came across my podcast “The Tao of Christ” while doing a google search for Christianity and nondualism. He emailed me and asked to interview me for his podcast. In this interview we talk about my spiritual background and how my interest in the Tao Te Ching began. We also discuss the definition of nonduality and how it fits with Christianity.Here is a link to Colin’s podcast website: https://redchurchdoor.org/ View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

I was reminded by a listener recently that Thich Nhat Hanh called Jesus the Buddha of the West. Buddha famously preached his first sermon in Deer Park which included his Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Jesus has an equally famous first teaching that is called the Sermon on the Mount. It begins with the Beatitudes, which are eight blessings, followed by what appears to be a ninth but is a really a continuation of the eighth. Jesus had an eight-fold path. Like the Buddha’s, the Christ’s eightfold path is an expression of what is often called nonduality today. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God. Like the Buddha’s the Christ’s eightfold path is about suffering, but Jesus comes at it a bit differently.  The Buddha’s approach is very logical. He sets forth a step-by-step analysis of the problem of suffering and presents a solution. Jesus just pronounces blessings -  eight blessings. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In this episode I explore the Biblical understanding of humans as composed of three parts: body, soul and spirit. I explain the function of each part and show how the three faculties of the spirit (intuition, conscience and communion) can lead to unitive awareness. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In this episode I describe unitive awareness by using analogies from everyday experience and awareness. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

I have been asked if I preach about Christian Nonduality from the pulpit in church as part of a traditional worship service. The short answer is “yes” but it is somewhat different than I speak on my podcast and videos. I expound a scripture passage, as is typical in a sermon. This episode today is an example. It is a sermon that I recorded at the end of March 2021 in NH and was shown during live in person worship at a church in NH on April 11, 2021. In this message I relate unitive awareness to the earliest and only first person account of the resurrection of Jesus in the Bible, as told by the apostle Paul. It is entitled “The First Easter.”View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In this episode I am going to talk about unitive awareness in the sense of seeing that we are all and in all. When the separate self is seen as illusory, when the ego pops like a soap bubble and the flimsy boundary between us and the world falls away, then we see our true nature is all and in all.There is one World Soul – or better yet World Spirit – who is the spirit in every human being. People think they are separate selves, separate beings but we aren’t. We are one Self, one Being incarnated in 8 billion separate bodies who are alive today. The reason for the anxiety, fear, angst and suffering that so many people have is because we think we are separate and different. We think that when these individual bodies die then we die. But we don’t.  Only one small expression of us dies. We are Life Itself.That is the truth behind the Scripture verses that talk about God being “all and in all.” The Letter to the Ephesians says, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” There is another passage from the Letter to the Colossians, written by the same hand at about the same time. It lists all different types of people “Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free” and then declares “but Christ is all and in all!”View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU