NON DUALITY

with thanks to Fr Richard Rohr


So what is non duality? Non duality means the lived experience of seeing whole, of seeing that you and the universe are one. It is an inner gesture by which we entrust ourselves totally and unconditionally to life, perceived as our own life but also as greater than ourselves.

Non duality is a feeling of belonging to the universe rather than a feeling of alienation from it. In Genesis, this is by eating from the tree of life, holism, and not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, dualism, by splitting up experience and then rejecting of part of it.

As soon as we decide God is here, but not there, religion is dead. As medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said: “God enjoys himself … His own inner enjoyment is such that it includes his enjoyment of all creatures not as creatures, but as God.”

Jesus also expresses non duality. “My Father’s sun shines on the good and the bad; his rain falls on the just and the unjust.” “Let the weeds and the wheat grow together” “If thine eye is single, thy whole body will be filled with light” or “Nor should people say here it is or there it is, because the Kingdom of God is within you,” or “Whoever follows me must die to himself.”

We might well ask how can a person can follow anyone or anything after dying to his or herself, but Jesus is a model for our transformation. Jesus is the first Western religious teacher of the experience of non duality. In non duality, of course, there is no such thing as the West anyway, which is why Socrates said he was a citizen of the world. But at least in the region Jesus lived and died, he was the first religious teacher of non duality, though there were non dual philosophers.

Jesus’ teaching on prayer in Matthew’s gospel is also non dual. It is to pay attention to the limitations of words and ideas, to pass through silence like a merchant who sells every other thing he has, for the one pearl. The disciple is one with life, even in suffering and evil, which is possibly why Jesus taught non-violence.

There isn’t one early church Father who interprets Jesus as advocating anything but strict non-violence, and there are lots of stories of Christians being persecuted because they refused to serve in the Roman army. We are not here to condemn military service, or belittle the sacrifice of soldiers, that would be more duality. But non duality and non violence do go together in Jesus’ teaching, and listening to it from the point of view of the later just war tradition only seems radical, because it goes back to the non dual roots of peace.

“Love your enemies. Pray for those whose persecute you, so you may be children of your Father who makes his sun rise on evil and good.”

“Offer the wicked man no resistance. If you only love those who love you, what good is that?”

“Do not fear those who can kill the body, but only those who can kill the soul.”

And “Why do you call me ‘Lord Lord’ when you don’t do as I say?”

It is hard to live this, but after Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of the empire in 313 AD, it became almost impossible. Before that soldiers were refused baptism, and after it, only the baptised could be soldiers! It is very hard to see the non-duality of the sermon on the mount through an imperialistic lens. So when the Roman empire legitimised Jesus, St Anthony and the desert fathers and mothers fled into Palestine and Egypt to try to hold onto his teaching.

Anthony also displayed non duality. He said: “One who knows oneself, knows God,” and to this day Orthodox Christianity talks about theosis and deification, the process of our becoming God.

Anthony said this: “Understand that, be it the holy heavens or angels or archangels or thrones or dominions or cherubim or seraphim or sun or moon or stars, or patriarchs or prophets or apostles, or devil or satan or evil spirits or powers of the air, or man or woman, in the beginning of their creation, they all derived from One.”

And echoing St Paul he said this: “The Holy Spirit brings us back to our beginning, to recover our inheritance. There is neither male nor female, there is neither slave nor free.”

And this: “Wherever you go, have God ever before your eyes.”

Anthony’s followers, Abba Doulas and Abba Macarius said this: “One day when we were walking beside the sea I was thirsty and I said to Abba Bessarion, "Father, I am very thirsty." He prayed and said to me, "Drink some of the sea water." The water proved sweet, and I poured some into a leather bottle for fear of being thirsty later on. Seeing this, the old man asked me why I was taking some. I said to him, "Forgive me, it is for fear of being thirsty later on." The old man said, "No need. God is here, God is everywhere." The lesson again is not that sea water is sweet, but that non duality and trusting God means living in the now.

Abba Macarius was once asked, “How should one pray?” The old man said 'There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one's hands and say, "Lord, as you will, and as you know."

This type of prayer was systematically taught in the monasteries of Europe, as contemplation. Contemplation literally means doing a higher measure – it is realizing one is not one’s thoughts and sensations, body, our name and possessions, but that they are all in one, and we must not try to possess them but, let them all pass through us. Teresa of Avila said it like this: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing, God alone is sufficient,” and John of the Cross emphasised “Nada” or nothingness. For the Contemplative, God is not a thing, a mere object, God contains every thing, every object, every world, and to be possessive of these things is worse than death. St Benedict said to really live you had to face death each and every day.

There were three stages in this monastic teaching of Contemplation: Firstly, disidentifying with one’s obsessive thoughts and compulsive feelings, or Purgation. Most of us were in this stage.

Secondly, seeing your mixed motives and the mixed motives of all the structures you are a part of, or illumination. Some people were in this stage.

And finally, the union of one’s soul with God, or unification – which brings with it life in the One - relationality, vulnerability, intimacy, forgiveness and self acceptance. There is only one at this stage. For the mystic, there is no duality between creator and creation. The whole universe is an expression of this divine life.

But all this was lost with the strong resurgence of dualism at the Reformation. To define your institution, either Protestant or Catholic, and exclude the other from it, you have to prove you are right, and establish opposition. This is classic duality, and it leads church to become about belonging rather than transforming.

Fast forward to the 1950’s and 60’s and enter Thomas Merton, Cistercian monk, who said that the West no longer even understood its own tradition. “You are not contemplatives,” he said, “you are just introverts”. Thomas Merton’s classic book is: “New Seeds of Contemplation,” and his classic statement on the experience of non duality is that: “God is not someone else.” This isn’t bringing God down to our level, but it is living without separation from the infinite, the eternal.

In our own everyday experience, we divide the present into a memory and an imagination, so that we are never here, where eternity is. Thomas Merton said that modern people are always telling themselves the time, as though the time would cease to exist if they stopped talking about it, which in fact, it would.

Jesus said: “My yoke is gentle and my burden is light” – and the word yoke is from the same root as the word yoga – which means one, or unity, or non duality.

So may the breath of life stay with you and may the sacrament of the present moment stay with you, and may the peace of God which passes all understanding fill your heart and mind with the knowledge and love of God, and of his son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the blessing of God almighty, the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit, be with us now and remain upon us always.

Amen +