Nondual teachers love to claim that our being is ultimately God's Being, one and the same. The premise is that our conception of God as transcendent to us is due to our self-identification with the limited body and mind, making infinite God "outside" us, beyond limited finite selves. Religious practice then is the process of purifying or attenuating our limited separate self such that one recognizes one's being as in essence God's Being. And this, they say, is the true meaning of God: that we are one with God in essence.
The premise is wrong. And so is the conclusion. The premise assumes that all who speak about God do so from the vantage point of a separate limited self. It also assumes that God is an object of knowledge that one realizes by dint of one's self-directed spiritual practice. It further assumes that God is a "what" implying an impersonal entity or force or the like. None of these assumptions apply to the biblical God.
God is personal. God is not an object of knowledge. God is not graspable by self-directed spiritual practice. God is only knowable if and when God chooses to reveal Himself to us. And God transcends not only the limited separate self identified with the limited body and mind, He transcends even the infinite nondual empty luminous transparent Being that we experience ourselves as and think we ultimately are. In the final analysis, this so-called nondual insight is still an instance of self-grasping and self-reification albeit very subtle and difficult to see.
The historical Buddha saw through this subtle delusion, offering to the world a profound vision of non-self (anatta) and emptiness (sunyata). For all the subtlety and depth of nondual wisdom, it falls short of the penultimate insight of non-self and emptiness. Ultimately, even non-self and emptiness will need to be 'emptied' of their blindness to the relational presence and redemption of God in Christ: who is transcendent and immanent, and whose claim on us is irrefutable and whose grace towards us irresistible.
However infinite and luminous and transparent our experience of our being is, Christ has the power to break into our apparently dimensionless horizon, making his claim on us to set us irrevocably free—free to love and be loved by Him, free to commune in deepest intimacy and fellowship with Him, free to be fully united to Him, sharing in His eternal unimaginable Life beyond life after death.
Nonduality can take us some part of the way of self-therapy and self-cultivation. But in the end, it fails. Like everything else. Friends, come home to Christ, whether seeing yourself as limited separate consciousness or as unlimited nondual awareness. In God's estimation, one is not more worthy or deserving than the other. Both are equally instances of self-occupation (coarse or subtle; exacerbated or attenuated) and both are corrupted by sinful rebellion and selfish resistance to the One True God who has come down to our dusty earth, written Himself into our grand story, and graciously lived and died for us on the cross. This God has a name and a face: Jesus. Let's respond in faith. Our response will determine where we end up: in His majestic loving Presence forever or in the unquenchable fire of Gehenna.
This may not sound palatable to modern ears. But truth like bitter medicine is often unpalatable. As I've said before, I do not aim to be politically or religiously correct. Only correct. I trust that for me and my God, this is good enough.
