Humanity is in crisis, and on multiple levels. Hearing the word “crisis” we probably first think of climate change. Related to that is the environmental crisis, which is not only about pouring carbon into the atmosphere but spewing countless other chemical poisons that are impacting native plants and animals, harming our ability to feed ourselves, and triggering diseases of all kinds.

Not unrelated to the environmental crisis is a growing crisis of human relationships. Wealth and income disparity is as great as it was in the Gilded Age. At the same time, a tiny minority is using their wealth to achieve social and political domination around the world. Not surprisingly, democratic government, once thought to be the global answer to injustice and inequality, is rapidly losing credibility as it is increasingly manipulated by oligarchic power.

At the same time, and again not unrelated, millions are finding it impossible to find meaningful work with adequate compensation. Health care, housing, and a secure retirement are increasingly out of reach. More and more, the promised prosperity from technological innovation is not evenly shared but hoarded by the already wealthy. Few are even trying to hide that this will be the case with the newest wonder, AI. The difficulty of people creating and maintaining fulfilling lives is linked to the growing numbers of “deaths of despair” from obesity, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction (including the fentanyl crisis), and so on.

I lay all this out to make clear the real world in which religion and spirituality find themselves. No religion or religious figure, including Jesus, is of any value if it does not address the needs and suffering of people in this world. Unfortunately, the so-called world religions are all failing in this regard, as their primary focus is on institutional and cultural survival. Yet they all have an ancient spiritual dimension, though often ignored or even suppressed, which relates to people’s lives now. The rabbi Jesus of Nazareth knew and taught that spirituality, even if the church largely forgot it.

As I’ve said previously, Jesus as savior is a figure of less and less relevance to people, even among Christians. But since the church has done little to develop it, the image of Jesus as a flesh-and-blood human being is vague and uncertain. The result, on the one hand, is people leaving the church out of disinterest in him and, on the other, people creating a Jesus of their own liking. I knew Christianity had jumped the shark when I saw a t-shirt with Jesus as a Rambo-like figure, musclebound and armed with an M16.

The Jesus I described in my last post is, I believe, defensible and meaningful. To use the Bible’s own terms, this is Jesus as rabbi rather than savior.  It is not the Jesus the church has taught and, as a result, few people know him. Yet I think this Jesus has something to say that is important and valuable for us today.

What did rabbi Jesus teach? In short, and to use a word both ancient and contemporary, Jesus was a teacher of nonduality, the belief that all reality is essentially one. The term comes from the Sanskrit word Advaita, which means “not two.” Yet, using a variety of languages, this teaching is found in most religious and spiritual traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, indigenous spiritualities, and the mystical expressions of Christianity, Judaism (Kabbala), and Islam (Sufism).

A handy AI summary from Google says that nonduality

 … is a philosophical and spiritual concept emphasizing the fundamental unity and interconnectedness of all things, transcending the perceived separation between self, other, and the universe. 

… encourages the transcendence of dualistic thinking, such as subject-object, self-other, or sacred-profane.

… emphasizes unity amid diversity.

For Jesus, the primary expression of nondual awareness is love. Jesus’ famous summary of the Jewish law has usually been understood metaphorically, but he likely meant it more literally than we realize: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Every person is enlivened by the same divine Spirit (Genesis 2). When we love another person, we are both loving ourselves and loving God. When we mistreat another person, we are both hurting ourselves and ignoring our shared divine nature.

In Luke 10, when this declaration of Jesus is met with the skeptical, “And who is my neighbor?”, he replies with his famous parable of the Good Samaritan. It is Jesus’ unitive awareness that allows him, remarkably for his time, to look beyond human divisions like religion, race, ethnicity, gender, wealth, and power. All share equally in the same divine identity that he has. Thus, the parable teaches, the need of one is the need of all.

This is reiterated in the remarkable parable about dividing the sheep from the goats, told in Matthew 25 just before Jesus’ arrest. In the story all humanity is divided based on how they treated the Son of Man. “When did we see you?” they all ask. In reply he says, however you treated the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, or imprisoned is how your treated me. Every person, he is reminding them, bears the divine image.

But the nonduality of religion and spirituality is not an intellectual understanding to be learned as doctrine or theology, from books and lectures. Rather, it is a way of life practiced as the result of an awakening experienced through meditation, prayer, contemplation, and silence. For it is in silence that we discover that our true self is not our ego, the self of culture and society, the self experienced in random emotions, thoughts, and endless streams of conversation with ourselves in our heads.

Rather, our true self is what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” In this ancient spiritual tradition, this is our pure awareness of self and of the world. It is what is aware of our feelings and thoughts, not the feelings and thoughts themselves. It is pure consciousness. It is Being itself.

Ignorance of our true nature, of our divine self, and believing ourselves to be our body-mind, is the delusion which creates our personal suffering and the collective suffering of humanity. This fundamental truth has been taught in various forms by countless teachers over the centuries and is experiencing a revival today. One such teacher, Canadian Daniel Schmidt, in a short video summarizes the contemporary consequences of this delusion and its healing.

All of the world’s problems stem from the fundamental delusion of the mind that I am this limited character. This limited character has a tendency to grasp for what it wants. It is just a collection of conditioned patterns. And if we believe we are this character then we suffer and we create suffering in the world. The world becomes a reflection of that egoic consciousness. What we’re seeing around us is nothing but the culmination of egoic activity. So, when every individual awakens from their own character, then collectively we become free and that brings about a transformation on the planet. This brings a new earth, a new reality. Awakening is the answer to all of the world’s problems, on every level.

Jesus was such an awakened person. That experience is likely what the story of his baptism points to. It is what it means to call him “Christ”, literally anointed, and why Paul said he had the mind of Christ and that Christ was now his true self, for he had “died.”

If Christianity is to be of any value, it must rediscover this Jesus. Like every spiritual rebirth, it will involve a lot of dying. The dying of countless doctrines, rituals, and traditions that are not only irrelevant but actual obstacles to the freedom of discovering our true self, one with God and all creation. Only then can it show the way from the enslavement of ego consciousness to the liberation of Christ Consciousness.

Religion, including Christianity, will only be of value today if it leads to personal transformation. Our world is changing dramatically, and not in a good way. Its problems are growing and becoming ever more complex. We will not “technologize” our way out of them because, as that famous line from the Pogo comic strip said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

As Daniel Schmidt says above, people awakening to their true nature may be humanity’s only hope. The church, then, has a choice. Either continue to represent an institution-serving Jesus of its own creation, which is of little help and often a hindrance to the world’s transformation. Or, represent a Jesus that knew and taught the way of self- discovery and spiritual rebirth, which holds the promise of peace and freedom for all people.

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