The Tao of Christ

In this episode I explore how the Christian doctrine of the Trinity points to nondual Reality and can usher us into unitive awareness. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

The doctrine of salvation by grace through faith is well known in Christian circles. But the principle’s real power is found when it is applied, not to doctrines but to Unitive awareness or Nondual Awareness. The Protestant principle is true after all, but applied to Reality and not to ideas. You can call it salvation or eternal life. Other spiritual traditions call it enlightenment or awakening. The Christ called it the Kingdom of God. The Buddha called it nirvana. Zen calls it satori. Here I am calling it liberation, which is a term used in both the East and the West. Salvation or liberation is awakening to our essential unity with Nondual Reality. This Liberation is by grace through faith. Liberation is by grace. That means that there is nothing that we can do to be liberated. There is nothing we can do to facilitate spiritual awakening. It is by faith, which is spiritually seeing what is physically invisible. Faith is trusting spiritual sight. All of us have it. It is a free gift to all. It is just a matter of recognizing it, and using it and trusting it. Instead we tend to ignore it. That is why the ordinary human state is called ignorance as well as blindness. What all spiritual seekers hope for – spiritual liberation, awakening, enlightenment, which is a word which is about seeing the light – is right before our eyes. All we need to do is open our spiritual eyes and trust what we see. That is liberation by grace through faith.   View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

You are not who you think you are. You are not WHAT you think you are. French Christian philosopher and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Even that does not quite communicate it. It makes it sounds like there are a lot of little spiritual beings having human experiences. There is only one Being, what Christian philosopher Paul Tillich called Being Itself or the Ground of Being. Another word for this is Spirit, and that is what we are. I would phrase it this way: We are not humans having a spiritual experience. We are Spirit having human experiences. This Spirit is that within which all experiences occur. All is One. We are One expressed in what appears to be many. We are Being appearing as human beings. Reality is One. I call that One Reality God. The problem with using the word “God” is that people mean very different things when they say that word. I am not using it as a traditional theist would use it. For that reason perhaps I should not use the word at all. But this is my religious vocabulary. If I can’t call Ultimate Reality God, then what use is the word God? The trick is trying to communicate this Reality, which seems to be nearly impossible to do. That is why the Tao Te Ching says, “He who speaks does not know, and he who knows does not speak.” And yet I speak. It is what I do. I am a preacher, and as the Scripture says, “How will they hear unless someone tells them?” So I speak. This episode is my attempt to express the inexpressible.  View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

Many Christians do not investigate – or even know about - the possibility of spiritual awakening because they do not hear about it from the pulpit or see examples of it in the Christian Bible. So they settle for a second-hand faith of believing in things. But the truth is that there are biblical examples hiding in plain sight. One of them is the Old Testament character of Job. Job is an Old Testament Buddha whose account of spiritual awakening is recorded in the Book of Job. The events that lead to both the Buddha’s and Job’s awakenings are similar, and I explain how. In this episode I investigate the age-old problem of suffering or problem of pain and see how it can act like a Zen koan to push us beyond theology and traditional religion into what is called unitive awareness or nondual awareness.In connection with this episode, I am offering my 2017 book Thank God for Atheists free for a limited time. From August 29 to September 2, 2020, you can download a free copy of the kindle edition of this book from Amazon. You can do a search for the title or my name or use this link: https://www.amazon.com/Thank-God-Atheists-Christians-Atheism-ebook/dp/B07116XX9X/If you happen to be part of the Kindle Unlimited program you can borrow this and any of my books at any time. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

In this episode I interpret Lewis Carroll’s enigmatic 1876 poem “The Hunting of the Snark” as an allegory of the spiritual life. In particular I see it as portraying the spiritual practice known as self-inquiry.If you are interested in reading the poem, here is an online version of it from the Poetry Foundation:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43909/the-hunting-of-the-snarkView Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

This is an experiential episode where I take the listener through the process of seeing God – experiencing the true nondual of ourselves and the universe – as seen in our own backyards.View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

This episode explores how aging is related to the spiritual life. In fact aging helps us in spirituality. It is an aid to what we call spiritual awakening or enlightenment, what Christians call salvation, the Kingdom of God or eternal life. We can see the value of aging in the four classical Indian stages of life known as ashramas. The aging process is about shedding the small self with all its attachments and identifying with the Divine Self. It is about dying to self, dying before we die so physical death does not catch us unprepared.View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

Today I am going to talk about Revelation and its relation to Nonduality. By the word Revelation, I mean the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian bible. But it is also related to the theological concept of Revelation, meaning that God reveals God’s self to us. The Greek word for revelation, found in the first sentence of the Book of Revelation literally unveiling or uncovering, which is exactly what spiritual awakening is.Spiritual awakening is an unveiling of what is and has always been. It is simply waking up, having our eyes open to the Reality that has been before our eyes all the time. As Jesus was so fond of saying, “Those who have eyes to see let them see. Those with ears to hear, let them hear.” A veil is taken off our eyes. Reality is uncovered so that we can see what has always been true.That is what the theological doctrine called revelation, and the New Testament book of Revelation, is about. It is not bestowing some new and secret knowledge to a spiritual elite. It is about uncovering what has always been apparent and visible for all those with eyes to see since the beginning of creation. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

Recently I received two comments from listeners about my episode on Nondual Meditation. One was from a listener from Canada by email. The other was in an online interview with Corey Farr who has a podcast entitled, “A Christian Reads the Tao te Ching,” which is an excellent podcast by the way. I will post a link to it. In addition to talking about my Christian version of the Tao Te Ching, Corey wanted to talk about meditation and referred that episode about nondual Meditation.So I went back and listened to what I said, which is something I never do after I post an episode. Listening to it reminded me how uncomfortable I was doing that episode. I looked uncomfortable on video and sounded uncomfortable.  I was having a difficult time explaining my experience and practice of meditation in words. Nevertheless the episode seems to have resonated with some people.So today I want to continue that discussion. Today I want to describe, as well as I can, nondual awareness.  I am calling it Christian nondual awareness, because I am a Christian. I experience Reality as nondual and I express this in Christian language. I want to not just talk about it but point you to it. View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU

Many Christians are attracted to the truth of nonduality. It resonates as true at a deep spiritual level. Deep speaks to deep, as the psalmist says. But they are wary because it does not seem to fit with what the Bible says. Scripture has a powerful hold on Christians, and we hesitate to stray too far from its authority for fear of drifting away from the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” as the Letter of Jude puts it.What most Christians do not realize is that the books that we have in our Bibles are just a fraction of the many gospels, letters, apocalypses and other Christian writings that were written in the first and second centuries, all claiming to be of apostolic origin. First and second century Christianity was very diverse and used writings that we would today call nondualistic. The earliest of these is the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas is as old as any of the gospels in our New Testament. Many scholars believe it is earlier than Matthew, Luke or John, and possibly older than Mark’s gospel. It is collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, reportedly remembered and recorded by the apostle Thomas, called the Twin. It is likely that the Gospel of Thomas includes authentic sayings of Jesus that are not found in our traditional four gospels. This episode explores many of those “lost sayings.”View Marshall's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marshall-Davis/author/B001K8Y0RU