Part 5: Jesus and The Way

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March, 2015

Introduction

“Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law?” they asked.  Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All of the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.”  This teaching, found in Matthew 22:37-40, prompts me to wonder: how exactly is the second commandment “like” the first? The way I answer this question has changed my understanding of these verses and the gospel message at large.  

In Matthew 7:12, Jesus restates the second commandment as a summary of the divine law by saying, “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”  For Jews at the time, this teaching was nothing new.  It can be found in Leviticus 19:18. Shortly before the time of Jesus, Hillel the Elder, a Jewish leader who is considered among the religion’s most important figures, famously summarized Judaism by saying, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.”  This ethic of treating others the way we wish to be treated ourselves is commonly called “The Golden Rule.”  Some form of it can be found in every major world religion.  I suspect the Golden Rule may suggest a more profound and counter-intuitive implication than is generally recognized.

The Golden Rule

The Golden Rule is sometimes treated as something akin to a utilitarian inevitability.  The thought goes that, as social creatures, it is in our selfish best interest to cooperate.  Indeed, this often seems to be quite true, but as a way of life I believe the Golden Rule is far from a consistently applicable utilitarian ethic.  Quite the contrary. I’d contend that when conflict arises and the Golden Rule becomes inconvenient, the strong or clever impose their will on the weak.  This notion is what most evolutionary anthropologists consider the guiding force in biological evolution: Survival of the Fittest. 

Even for those who reject the notion of biological evolution, the psychological role that Survival of the Fittest plays is unambiguous through the history of human culture.  The ethic of survival drives individuals and empires, concepts and cultures – both memes and genes, as it were. Each individual biological organism or collective entity (in the case of communities, tribes, businesses, empires, etc) seeks its own survival and success. Survival of the Fittest assumes and demands self-centeredness.  To me, The Golden Rule is its polar opposite. The Golden Rule suggests that we should think of ourselves and others as interchangeable. It rejects hierarchy. On a deeper level, it removes the discrimination between Self and Other. It suggests that, like two waves in an ocean, we are interwoven and interdependent elements of a larger whole.  There is a harmonization wherein different components combine to create an effect that transcends any single component. If any one part demands priority of itself, the harmony is lost.  When I fall, I can point to where I tripped as the “cause”, but this is a gross oversimplification; my fall is equally dependent upon the state of my equilibrium and my central nervous system, gravity, the spin of the earth, the trajectory of our galaxy, the quantum/charge ratio, the weak nuclear force, and a near limitless variety of factors that constitute the state of the universe as it is.  Common causality takes the continuance of present patterns for granted, but all elements are in a codependent relation to everything else in the whole.  

I believe this often unacknowledged universal codependence expresses the deeper implication of the Golden Rule. My father once suggested that selflessness is the embodiment of Love.  I agree. That “God is love” and we are to behave “selflessly” would be recognized by many Christians as integral to the gospel message.  I would suggest that an understanding of metaphysical Self-lessness, and by extension Love, is the gospel message; it is “The Way” to the “Kingdom of God.”

Digression

My intention in this essay is to study the gospel message of Jesus using a nondual premise.  “Nondual” simply means “not two,” and in a spiritual context typically refers to the notion that there is no inherent separation between the spiritual and material, subject and object, God and man.  Nondualism contends that all that exists is of a singular nature or “substance.” For me, the notion of nondualism first took root when reading Matthew 22:39 and 25:40 a few years ago. At the time, I had no framework or language for interpreting the intuition.  I later found the teaching of nonduality and Self-lessness articulated clearly in Buddhism’s Platform Sutra and Lankavatara Sutra.  Upon closer inspection, I also found nondual suggestions sprinkled throughout the gospels.  The interpretation of the gospel message that has resulted takes me well outside of Christian orthodoxy, or at least the theology I was taught. As I have cautioned in previous essays, my thinking remains very fluid; there is nothing I will say here that I won’t be able to express more clearly and perhaps quite differently five or ten years from now.  Even a week from now. I assume that anything I suggest in this essay, even if generally useful, will be in need of significant revision and refinement. I remain certain of uncertainty alone. My views are studied speculation, and nothing more [7]. However, it seems to me that Christian theology has remained unnecessarily tied to a dualistic ontology for reasons that are, as best I can tell, simply a function of tradition.  

Christian theology has changed many times before, I would like to see what an alternative interpretation that aligns with nonduality would look like. Though a nondual understanding seems to have been present in certain early and medieval Christian sects (100-1500 AD), the push towards rationalism that accompanied Newtonian physics seems to have shaken out the mystic influence. Dualistic certainty (and determinism) reigned for a few centuries.  But with the rise of certified uncertainty in physics, math and language, its seems like many forms of Protestant Christianity have retreated to the illusion of dogmatic “certainty” by taking scripture to be the Word of God, literally. Other, more liberal views, have rejected dogmatism but retained the dualistic paradigm that is built upon materialistic naturalism (and hence, supernaturalism). But I don’t think this material primacy is necessary, beneficial, or even true to the message of Jesus.  The gospel needn’t be understood in a supernaturalistic way.  I think the teachings of Jesus are quite congruous with the perennial philosophy that is shared among all great spiritual traditions.  I also think nondualism aligns with present scientific and philosophical thinking much better than naturalism and supernaturalism. That is why I have felt compelled to closely re-examine the way I understand the teachings of Jesus.  All that said, nondualism is also incompatible with certain facets of mainstream Christian doctrine. For example, there must be a discrete permanent individualized Self for concepts like judgement and eternal life (if meant as life after death) to have meaning as relating to individual salvation.  Thus the need for some sort of substance dualism in mainstream Christian theology. But as I shall attempt to demonstrate, the Bible can be understood differently, and it seems to me that a reader’s metaphysical ontological beliefs precede and determine the interpretation of the Bible.  

I see the current mainstream Christian understanding of Jesus to more closely reflect the philosophy of Rene Descartes than the teachings of Jesus.  20th century theologian Paul Tillich expresses the foundational primacy of our philosophical framework in Systematic Theology: “In every moment of his work the historical theologian presupposes a systematic point of view; otherwise he would be a historian of religion, not a historical theologian. This mutual immanence of the historical and the constructive elements is a decisive mark of Christian theology.”  Historically, I think the mainstream versions of the Abrahamic religions have used a dualistic framework.  But they needn’t [16].  

I think comparing the teachings of Jesus to themes found in other religions is as valuable as studying the teachings of Jesus in their Biblical context.  Why? In short, I suspect that a spiritual truth that is truly universal – as I imagine God to be – is most likely to be experienced or understood universally; that means across every geographic area, culture, religion, and unfolding in different ways across time.  Leo Tolstoy, William James, Aldous Huxley and Bede Griffiths have written accounts that seem similar to my own spiritual exploration.  It starts with the premise that genuine seekers from all spiritual traditions are equally earnest and honest in both their desire and discovery of the divine.  I have no reason to think this is not the case, and no reason to believe one group is earnest and honest while all others are not. 

Imagine a Venn Diagram comprised of many circles, each representing a major religion or belief.  I am interested in identifying the intersection where all of these various circles meet. What characteristics are shared in all movements of spiritual revelation? Jesus says in Matthew 7:7, “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and ye shall find, knock and the door will be opened to you.”  I do not believe God’s truth or Logos is hidden within a single culture or dogma; rather, I believe it is hidden in plain sight.  In other words, all that exists would be able to seek and find the nature and meaning of existence.  The particular forms or expressions of divine inspiration do differ in various ways in various religions, but I am looking for where they align.  In Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich writes, “The encounter with great non-Christian religions, the evolutionary scheme of thought, the openness for the new which characterizes the pragmatic method, have had the consequence that experience has become not only the main source of systematic theology but an inexhaustible source out of which new truths can be taken continually. Being open for new experiences which might even pass beyond the confines of Christian experience is now the proper attitude of the theologian.  He is not bound to a circle the center of which is the event of Jesus as the Christ. Of course, as a theologian, he also works in a circle but in a circle whose periphery is extendable and whose center is changeable. “Open experience” is the source of systematic theology.” “He must take the risk of being driven beyond the boundary line of the theological circle. Therefore, the pious and powerful in the church are suspicious of him, although they live in dependence upon the work of the former theologians who were in the same situation. Theology, since it serves not only the concrete but also the universal logos, can become a stumbling block for the church and a demonic temptation for the theologian. The detachment required in honest theological work can destroy the necessary involvement of faith. This tension is the burden and the greatness of every theological work.”  In Matthew 23:8-12, Jesus seems to confirm this mystical notion that divine Truth is not necessarily found in common creeds. “But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

I find that the teachings of universal love, the Golden Rule, and perhaps most profoundly, Self-lessness, are pervasive across (at least the esoteric versions of) all religions.  The message of nondual Self-lessness and love that Jesus taught does not reconcile with the notion of eternal judgement as I see it, so I will simply ignore the apocalyptic element of the gospels (as I ignore the issue of karma and reincarnation in other religions) for now.  The notion of experienced existence extending beyond a single earthly lifetime weaves through all religious traditions, and so it is something I certainly intend to explore with great vigor at a later time. There are also ways of viewing “judgement” and reincarnation that I would like to consider more closely at a later time [15], but I am currently content to disregard this topic as non-essential to my current exploration.  Is that intellectually honest? I think it is as honest as I can be for now. In time, I hope for more nuanced understanding. I think every doctrinal interpretation of the gospel emphasizes some aspects and de-emphasizes others. Integral to how I interpret the teachings of Jesus is my belief that the Bible is not an inerrant recording of historical events or even the teachings of Jesus (per “Part 3”). I don’t believe God is actively managing the story revealed in the Bible.  I don’t believe God is fixing human error as it is injected along the way. The words attributed to Jesus vary from gospel to gospel, and so I consider them accurate approximations at best. I see miracles as neither impossibilities nor proof of deity; I see their greatest value to be allegorical, regardless of historicity. Miracles have been recorded in every religious tradition and I am inclined to think that paranormal events are very much a part of the natural order. But, like questions of an “afterlife,” those are questions that I aim to explore later, and are non-essential to my current exploration.  Even the resurrection is non-essential to my understanding. I see it as an event with enormous symbolic meaning, but inconclusive historicity [17]. I feel a nondualistic way of interpreting the gospels works for about 80% of the teachings attributed to Jesus and explains many of his most mysterious sayings (and studying the Greek expands the available interpretations considerably), though some of the most apocalyptic portions (e.g. Mark 13, Matthew 24, etc) are particularly difficult to reconcile with nondualism; these are the elements that most strongly support the view that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.  There is a wide disparity of views regarding the “historical” Jesus, none of which can be verified with confidence in my opinion. Obviously, the traditional Christian view is that Jesus was God incarnate whose purpose was atonement for sin. Some historians claim he was an apocalyptic prophet, others a political zealot, others that he never existed and is completely a fiction or composite, and so on. I think the gospels can be plausibly interpreted in a variety of ways, and each interpretation requires the dismissal or warping of other incongruent sayings. The one view that I reject outright is the claim that every word of the gospel accounts can be treated as historical fact.  I find too many contradictions on too many levels. Personally, I have come to understand Jesus as an enlightened mystic who was recognized by both himself and his followers as One with God [21]. I see him as communicating a nondualistic gospel of love and Self-lessness. 

As mentioned in the last essay, esoteric religious views that align with nondualism have long been held within the family of Abrahamic religions.  Kaballah and Hasidic versions of Judaism, Sufi conceptions of Islam, and mystic conceptions of Christianity are largely nondualistic, and Panentheistic notions of a nondual divine also permeate the short list of noteworthy Jewish philosophers, like Moses Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza and Martin Buber.  The great assertion of monotheism, found in Deuteronomy 6:4, can certainly be understood as a nondual proclamation: “Hear O Israel, YHWH your God is One YHWH.”  There are a handful of verses in the New Testament which seem to explicitly indicate a nondual teaching, especially in the gospel of John.  In Luke 11:34 [8], Jesus says, “The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye (opthalmos) is single (haplous), thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil (poneros), thy body also is full of darkness.”  I convey all this now because I will engage in some amateur etymology through the course of this essay, referencing root words from a Strong’s Concordance in an attempt to better understand possible variations for interpreting Biblical text.  The Greek word translated as “eye”, opthalmos, was also used to indicate a “faculty of knowing.” Indeed, “seeing” is still such a common metaphor for “knowing” that it can be used as a synonym. The word translated as “single”, haplous, can also mean “whole” from a root that indicates weaving together (as in a braid). This picture of union from duality reflects the notion of nonduality.  The word translated as “evil”, poneros, is listed in Strong’s Concordance as meaning “1. full of labors, annoyances, hardships, a. pressed and harassed by labors, b. bringing toils, annoyances, perils”, and “2. bad, of a bad nature or condition, a. in a physical sense, b. in an ethical sense.”  2b is the approach used through most of the New Testament for the word poneros.  But the primary definition (1a-b) suggests that a Buddhistic concept more like “suffering” (discontent) might be appropriate.  So I might interpret the verse as saying something like “Material form is illuminated by mind, therefore when your understanding is nondual, all material form is illuminated (known in truth), but when your understanding is compromised by difficulty, form is darkened (ignorance remains).”  A very similar teaching is found in Buddhism’s Buddhapālita-mula-madhyamaka- vrtti, “Unskilled persons whose eye of intelligence is obscured by the darkness of delusion conceive of an essence of things and then generate attachment and hostility with regard to them.”  These teachings advise that our way of comprehending the world, our ‘eye of understanding,’ determines the manner in which we comprehend the world. Without stripping away the Self that dominates our experience, we cannot see the world as it truly is.

Self

In his book, The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley asserts that “‘Our kingdom go’ is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of ‘Thy kingdom come.’ For the more there is of self, the less there is of God.”  In Galatians 2:20, the Apostle Paul says “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”  In Mark 8:34-37, Jesus teaches, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?”  It is noteworthy that in this verse both “life” and “soul” are the transliterated Greek word “psuche.”  Psuche is just one of three Greek words that are commonly translated as “life.”  It is the most commonly used root and translates as something like “psyche” or “mind.”  The transliterated word “zoe” means something more like spiritual vigor; it is used in the phrase “eternal life.”  There is a third word, “bios”, which is used on a few occasions to indicate biological life.  John 12:25 conveys a subtle difference (and I suspect more accurate understanding) of what may be the same teaching: “Those who love their psuche in this world will lose it. Those who care nothing for their psuche in this world will keep it for eternal zoe.”  I believe Jesus teaches here that shedding our attachment to individualized Self, the psuche or psyche, is the beginning of life, not the end of it.  What I am calling “Self” is perhaps more commonly referred to as the “Ego” in the domain of psychology proper.  But I prefer to avoid the word “ego” because it still connotes a sense of pride to me. I realize that “Self” has its own deep ambiguities since the word is used to profoundly different (sometimes even opposite) ways in various traditions of religion and psychology. By “Self,” I am referring to our intuited separation from the “objective world,” the sense of discreteness that typically accompanies our perspectival experience.  That perspectival experience itself seems to be the very nature of existence (all known sentient life at least), however, within our perspective are layers of conscious and unconscious content that help construct Self-Identity (including personality, memory, beliefs, volition, etc) into the seemingly discrete package I call “me.” It may be said the sense in which I mean “No-Self” is not different than the Upanishadic Atman, which is typically translated as “Self.”  Philosopher Daniel Dennett cleverly describes Self as a narrative “center of gravity.”  Like the “center of gravity” within an object or the center of a vortex, this center-point has a critical role in the way physical systems develop and interact, but the center itself is nothing but a useful abstraction.  You cannot extract a physical centerpiece. I would suggest this is analogous to the sense of Self we experience. In the next essay essay I will explore this subject far more deeply. But for now, the Google definition of “Self” as “a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others” will suffice as a conceptual framework.  

The discrete, rational Self that is presumed by the western worldview can be traced back to the “rational animal” of Hellenistic philosophy.  Descartes hammered home confidence in a discrete Self with his 17th century assertion, “cogito, ergo sum”, “I think therefore I am.”  The notion that our discrete, rational Self is an illusion may be best known to western philosophy from the work of 18th century philosopher David Hume.  Many have since agreed, like the above-mentioned Daniel Dennett. Some to embrace the divine and others to negate it. Both biology and physics indicate an essential interdependency and mutual influence across scales, making even our appearance as discrete organisms dependant upon scale.  At the quantum level, the universe is interconnected in ways never dreamed by Newton, throwing into doubt humanity’s intuitive sense of space-time. To me, the most compelling arguments that Self is an illusory mental construct come from explorations into quantum physics and experimental psychology.  A slew of psychological research attests to the ephemeral and inconsistent nature of human self-identity. To see how easily and automatically our constructed perception can be mistaken, make a concerted effort to make English incomprehensible in your own mind. Can you? I know I cannot. Once constructed, our way of interpreting the world is incredibly difficult to strip away.  In fact, it seems that we can’t intentionally “unlearn” deeply embedded habits like understanding a language or interpreting visual signals as three-dimensional space.  The stripping away of the layers that make up Self has been a common theme among Spiritual teachers over time. “All the mystics agree that the stripping off of the I, the Me, the Mine, utter renouncement, or self-naughting—self-abandonment to the direction of a larger Will—is an imperative condition of the attainment of the unitive life,” asserts Evelyn Underhill in her book, Mysticism.  “The temporary denudation of the mind, whereby the contemplative made space for the vision of God, must now be applied to the whole life. Here, they say, there is a final swallowing up of that willful I-hood, that surface individuality which we ordinarily recognize as ourselves. It goes forever, and something new is established in its room. The self is made part of the mystical Body of God.”  As observed by the Apostle Paul and mystics of all stripes through the ages, the attachment to Self inhibits communion with God. The idea that the discreteness of Self is a construct of the mind may seem absurd to some, but the question of Self-identity is as old as philosophy itself and has far-reaching consequences. My next essay will focus on secular research into the nature of Self and the implicate unity of the universe. But for now, I wish to focus on the many religious expressions of this idea.  

I find Self-lessness most explicitly asserted in Eastern religions like Taoism, Vedanta Hinduism, and Zen Buddhism.  Self-lessness is the objective most earnestly shared by all mystic traditions. Echoing Jesus in John 12:25, the Tao Te Ching says, “Thus also is the Man of Calling: He disregards himself, and his Self is increased.  He gives himself away and his Self is preserved.” The Lankavatara Sutra is pithy about it, “This is called the Bodhisattva’s Nirvana – the losing oneself in the bliss of perfect self-yielding.”  Speaking from the perspective of Brahman (God), Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita says, “Renouncing self for Me, full of Me, fixed to serve only the Highest, night and day musing on Me—him will I swiftly lift forth from life’s ocean of distress and death, Whose soul clings fast to Me.”  The Abrahamic mystic traditions echo this view. Muslim Sufi Sultan Bahu writes, “No one ever found the Lord while living; except those who found Him by dying while living.”  Elsewhere he writes, “When the Lord revealed Himself to me, I lost myself in Him. Now there is neither nearness nor union, there is no longer a journey to undertake, no longer a destination to reach. Love attachment, my body, and soul, and even the very limits of time and space have all dropped from my consciousness. My separate self has merged in the whole; In that, O Bahu, lies the secret of the unity that is God. Such surrender is the very essence of Sufism.”  A Quranic verse oft-cited by Sufis, 50:16, reads, “I am very near to man, closer than his jugular vein and self. If anyone desires to meet Me, he can do so by commemorating Me.” Sufi Muslim Mansur Al-Hallaj wrote, “Between you and me is an I-ness interfering with me, Take away then with your I-ness my I-ness from between us.” In John 17:22, Jesus wishes to share his experience of Oneness with God with the disciples, praying, “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.”  The notion that Self is a mental construct is profoundly counter-intuitive.  Perhaps that is why Jesus spoke in parable and says in Matthew 7:14, “narrow is the way which leads to zoe, and few find autos.”  The Greek transliteration autos is typically translated as “it” for that verse, but the primary Strong’s definition for the word autos is “himself, herself, themselves, itself.”  I note this simply because it seems the verse may be read to suggest that few find the true nature of Self.  To me, the intuitive primacy and opaqueness of our experience as Self obscures a deeper unity that connects God to man.  To love our neighbor is to love God, for our neighbor may be understood as an expression of God. I think this may be the similarity Jesus cited between the two greatest commandments in Matthew 22:39.  Hinduism’s Isa Upanishad expresses this notion with startling clarity, “When a man sees God in all beings and all beings in God, and also God dwelling in his own Soul, how can he hate any living thing? Grief and delusion rest upon a belief in diversity, which leads to competition and all forms of selfishness. With the realization of oneness, the sense of diversity vanishes and the cause of misery is removed.”  To me, this nondual metaphysical framework can be found to some degree in the mystical understanding of all religions. It is the “Perennial Philosophy” and the most profound teaching that I find weaving like a single thread through all expressions of spiritual revelation.  

God as Being

In Exodus 3:14, God identifies himself as “hayah hayah.”  The transliterated Hebrew word hayah means “to be”, “to exist”, “to occur”, “to come to pass”, “to fall out.”  Verbs. This is typically translated as “I am that I am,” uniting subject and verb.  The Hebrew for this name, called the Tetragrammaton, יהוה, is a holy name [1] that is typically spelled YHWH (“Yahweh” with imaginary vowels added).  In this essay, I will stick with YHWH to express the notion of a divine placeholder (a more negative approach to theology), whereas “Yahweh” connotes a named discrete being in my mind.  Exodus 3:14 is alternately translated as “I will be what I will be.” I am = I will be. To be is to do. “I am” is the most primitive assertion of existence.  It suggests the ground of Existence from which human experience grows.  Existence itself. Is-ness. The root of Being.  20th century theologian Paul Tillich expresses this idea in a compelling way: “God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him.”  Frithjof Schuon says, “Existence is a manifestation of Being, and all existence issues from and belongs to Being in the same way that the rays of the sun are finally nothing but the sun.” Let’s revisit Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear O Israel, YHWH your God, is One YHWH.”  This strikes me as a profoundly nondual and even existential proclamation.  YHWH transcends description and definition, pointing beyond the limits of logic, language and human conception.  This is expressed repeatedly in the Old Testament. Psalm 145:3 says, “Great is YHWH, and greatly to be praised. His greatness is unsearchable.”  In Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, the Israelites are instructed that no material forms or images should be worshipped in place of YHWH as part of the Ten Commandments.  The transcendent and inexpressible nature of divinity is universal to the religious mind.  The Tao Te Ching says, “The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao.  The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” Buddhism’s Lankavatara Sutra says, “This teaching… is not the Truth itself. These teachings are only a finger pointing towards Noble Wisdom.  …they are not the Truth itself, which can only be self-realized within one’s deepest consciousness.” In Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita, Brahman sounds like YHWH, saying, “I am the Spirit seated deep in every creature’s heart; From Me they come; by Me they live; at My word they depart!”  Elsewhere, it continues, “I am – of all this boundless Universe – The Father, Mother, Ancestor, and Guard! The end of Learning!  I am OM! I am .. The Way, the Fosterer, the Lord, the Judge… Death am I, and Immortal Life I am, Visible Life, And Life Invisible!” 

As conscious organisms, our relation to this ground of Being, the implicate whole, may be like that of a son to a father.  The gospel of John seems to be comparing Jesus to God in this way, using a philosophically loaded word to describe the way Jesus modelled this relationship: “Logos.”  According to Strong’s Concordance, Logos is defined as “word”, “speech”, “discourse”, “reason” or “cause.”  But Logos is a word with a rich and nuanced history in Greek and Jewish philosophy connoting the notions of natural order and divine reason, though there are a wide variety of scholarly views on the many nuanced uses of the word [2].  Logos was a term popularized by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus around 500 BCE.  He is perhaps best known for his view of impermanence, with sayings like “you can never step in the same river twice.”  One of his surviving fragments reads, “This Logos holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it.  For though all things come to be in accordance with this Logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is.”  Jesus conveys this same inscrutability of the Logos when asked about the parable of the sower (“the seed is the Logos”) in Matthew 13:13-14, “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: ‘You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.’”  The term Logos had been used by philosophers like Plato, Zeno and Philo by the time the gospel of John was composed, and I suspect it was used with a Hellenistic audience in mind.  In Being and Time, iconic 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger suggests “Λόγος (Logos) as “discourse” means… to make manifest what one is ‘talking about’ in one’s discourse…”  This is how I understand John to use the word as applied to Jesus. Jesus is the Logos, the method of discourse through which God’s “Way” is made manifest.  The Logos can be understood as synonymous with the nature of God in John 1 [3].  Proverbs 8:22 seems to suggest something similar, saying of Wisdom (Chokhmah, synonymous with Logos in many mystic traditions [4]), “YHWH possessed me from the beginning of his Way, before his works.”  I am struck by the root meanings of both YHWH (hayah) and Logos as verbs; both convey a sense of process.  But for the human mind (and English language) which likes to break apart the doer from the doing, it is natural to make the doing into a noun that essentially personifies the action.  Boxing is a process. It’s an activity. But it can be used as a noun to convey this activity.  I can say, “boxing has made me strong,” or “boxing has taught me resilience,” or “boxing has given me great wealth,” or “boxing has blessed me.”  I suspect YHWH and Logos may be better understood in this way; not as discrete entities apart from action, but as personifications of process.  Perhaps more like “Tao” than “King.” I think an important distinction can be made between the existential activity of God, and the role of God: this idea may be reflected in the Old Testament in the phrase “The Lord (YHWH) our God (El’ohim)” and in the New Testament in the phrase “The Word (Logos) of God (Theos).”   With an understanding of this distinction in mind, a chain reaction follows that stretches from Genesis to Jesus.     

The “likeness” of God in which man is made in Genesis may be seen as that state of being that recognizes existence.  Hayah.  To be.  We exist as beings that can experience and contemplate that “I am.”  This existential understanding ascribes primacy to mind not matter in the Universe.  Max Planck, one of the founders of quantum physics, contends, “I believe consciousness is fundamental.  I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”  To see God as Being-itself rejects the atomistic premise that tangible matter has ontological primacy as what is “real.” A materialistic paradigm underlies both secular and religious mainstream views in which “God” is an object to exist or not exist.  Hinduism’s Bhagavad-Gita describes the divine as preceding the physical, and preceding our perception of it: “That which is not seen by the eye, but by which the eye is able to see: know this alone to be Brahman (i.e. God), not this which people worship here.  That which cannot be heard by the ear, but by which the ear is able to hear: know that alone to be Brahman.” When the notion of Self-lessness is combined with the idea of God as Being-itself, it is possible to see why nondual mystics would say “I am God.”  If Self is stripped away and God is the ground of Existence, the assertions that “I am God” borders on tautological. It is not different than Paul saying, “it is not I that live, but Christ that lives in me.”  Paul is saying he is an empty vessel through which Christ shines; this is the universal proclamation of mystics. In Science and God, Peter Russell relates that “the great Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi said: “I am” is the name of God…  In the twelfth century, Ibn-Al-Arabi, one of the most revered Sufi mystics, wrote: “If thou knowest thine own self, thou knowest God.”  Shankara, the eighth-century Indian saint, whose insights revitalized Hindu teachings, said of his own enlightenment: “I am Brahman… I dwell within all beings as the soul, the pure consciousness, the ground of all phenomena… In the days of my ignorance, I used to think of these as being separate from myself. Now I know that I am All.”  Peter Russell writes, “This sheds new light on the Biblical injunction ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ I do not believe it means: ‘Stop fidgeting around and recognize that the person who is speaking to you is the almighty God of all creation.’ It makes much more sense as an encouragement to still the mind, and know, not as an intellectual understanding but as a direct realization, that the ‘I am’ that is your essential self, the pure consciousness that lies behind all experience, is God.” 

Buddhism’s Platform Sutra articulates this in a striking way: “Doubt not that Buddha (I might prefer to say “God”) is within your own mind, apart from which nothing can exist. Since all things and phenomena are the product of mind, the Sutra says: ‘When mental activity rises, various things exist; when mental activity ceases, various things exist not.’”  The Lankavatara Sutra says, “(ignorant philosophers) do not recognize that the objective world rises from the mind itself; they do not understand that the whole mind-system also arises from the mind itself; but depending upon these manifestations of the mind as being real they go on discriminating them, like the simple-minded ones that they are, cherishing the dualism of this and that, of being and non-being, ignorant to the fact that there is but one common Essence. …the objective world, like a vision, is a manifestation of the mind itself…”   I perceive the world (i.e. the world exists for me) only as long as I exist to perceive it.  In this way, consciousness is the process of creation from the perspective of any given being.  Without consciousness, creation ceases to exist for the perceiver. It is the ‘a priori’ which precedes the sense of “I am” that is fundamental to our temporal understanding of the world.  In this view then, death is no different than sleep. There are dozens of verses in the Bible that equate death to sleep [5], as Jesus does in Mark 5:39 when he says, “Why do you make this uproar?  The child is not dead, but asleep.”  Both are just the darkening of conscious awareness.  Experientially, it seems to me that the only difference between them is contextual: our expectation as to whether we will awaken or not.  If God as Being–itself is fundamental to the very fabric of the universe, “I am” transcends death.  When the Self-centered experience of “I” is seen to be a fleeting construct of local perspective, an illusion of sorts within a larger whole, the sense of Self can be lost without losing anything, for there is nothing to be lost.  At the end of his ministry, Jesus is the ultimate example of Self-lessness in death.  As the gospels relate the story, Jesus is innocent of any crime except recognizing his Oneness with God.  For this, he is put to death. He is willing to die, to accept death as a “ransom” that others might understand that death is not the end [6].  In the mystical conception of consciousness that I am advancing, death is not the end of anything except the “I am” experienced by one biological organism.  As such, “I am” not David Neupauer. “David Neupauer” is simply a name used by one biological organism that experiences existence as “I am” for a moment in time.  Hopefully I will have died to myself long before my physical organism expires. When “David Neupauer” ceases to exist as a material expression of “I am,” nothing will be lost but an impermanent form of “I am.”

God Incarnate

What do I make of the claim that Jesus was God incarnate?  Did Jesus himself make this claim? In John 14:28, Jesus says, “I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.”  In Mark 10:18, he says “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” These verses suggests that Jesus is not under the impression he is God in the way generally attributed to him in mainstream Christianity.  He seems to recognize himself as a partial or subordinate representative of God, something more like the Logos, a discourse through which God can be understood.  In John 14:6, Jesus says “I am the way, and the truth, and the life (zoe). No one comes to the Father except through me.”  In the Christian interpretation I grew up with, statements like John 14 are generally understood to be referring to incarnated divinity in the human personhood of Jesus.  I would contend that the phrase “through me” denotes Jesus as Logos to be a model or gateway, the discourse through which the nature of God is revealed.  “Through me” is not a reference to his temporal being, but a reference to “The Way” he is modelling.  In John 10:9, Jesus says as much, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture [13].”  In John 12:44-45, it says, “Jesus cried and said, He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me.  And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me.”  Throughout the gospels, I understand references Jesus makes to himself as references to “The Way” that he represents as personification of the Logos.  Then again, in John 10:30, Jesus famously says “I and the Father are One.”  But there are many references where he calls disciples his “brothers.” He indicates himself to be a Son of God, not God incarnate (as God could possibly be fully and literally represented by any finite incarnation).  In John 10:33-36, it says: “The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?  If he called them gods to whom the Logos of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?”  Here, Jesus seems to be very clearly saying: I am not the first to call myself “Son of God,” it is in your own scriptures! In these verses, Jesus is referencing Psalm 82:6, which reads, “I said, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.”  John 20:17 reads, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”  In John 14, Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.  Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” The expression of Jesus, “I and the Father are One,” is an assertion made by mystics of all religions through the ages. It is Upanishadic assertion that Atman is Brahman.  Seen in this light, we can interpret Jesus as representing the relationship that all who follow The Way, the Logos, can have with God – the ground of all Being.  Jesus embodies this unity, he is the incarnation of it.  In Matthew 10:40, Jesus says, “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.”  This is the invitation Jesus extends to all, it is the good news of the gospel: join him as sons of God.  

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