Plainly Obvious Non-Duality and Emptiness in the Christian Tradition
Pulpit e-Moralisers Taking L's in this weeks Newsletter
I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. I and the Father are one."
I have been called again to question the thoughting of the townspeople….
Recently, I have been assaulted by various retweets of e-Christians slinging shade at Eastern practices. The usual and typical nonsense like levelling accusations of nihilism or whatever else at concepts like 'non-duality' or 'emptiness' as they're described in Buddhist philosophy.
I have many Christian friends, so I am not against this religion, seeing it mainly as a personal matter. But I do want to put this to bed once and for all, because these people won't leave it alone. Mistaking their doctrine for some kind of long-housed, non-mystical, communistic anti-life guidebook. Some even going so far as to slander the monks and mystics of their own traditions.
For the purposes of this newsletter - 'non-duality' and 'emptiness' (the naughty term in question) are interchangeable. I will simply refer to 'non-duality' to avoid confusing the matter. A matter that always creates a global flood of tears so violent that Noah himself could scarcely survive. (Incidentally, Kevin and I spoke about emptiness in this week's podcast; if you're interested in that, look out for that).
In Christianity, there is an explicit acknowledgement of many of the same truths as those that the hecking moralf@g proselytisers seem to be so frightened of (what's up with the anxiety and hysterical reaction thing, by the way? Is this what attracts these types to such religions? Funnily enough, as we will see, they've not genuinely participated in the peace the kingdom of God provides us - ironically).
Part of the issue is that esoteric truths in Christianity, I believe, is that they are in the form of convoluted and complex symbolic mythologies. They are nevertheless still there. And it's obvious once you see it.
The best example of non-duality in the Christian religion is the foundation myth of the religion itself:
"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
Genesis 2:17
Here are a few fun facts people less well acquainted with Christianity often get wrong about this myth. Without going into a full-blown symbology for which I'm not qualified in any case:
Importantly to my argument, there are 2 trees. 'The Tree of Life' and 'The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil' - the one we all know about.
God told both Adam and Eva they could eat from the 'Tree of Life, but not from the Tree of 'Good and Evil' or they would 'surely die' (Life/death? Something not there before they ate the fruit, right?).
After Adam and Eva supped upon the succulent fruits of the ToKoG&E, God allegedly placed cherubim with a flaming sword on guard, keeping mankind away from the Tree of Life after kicking their ungrateful asses out.
According to some scholars, in the Bible, the word knowledge often means experience. An essential point.
After eating from the tree of k of g & e, and getting blasted, losing access to the garden and the Tree of Life, they knew death.
God likes meats and not vegetables; he rejected Cain's offering of produce, preferring Abel's offering of steaks. This is not relevant; I just found it interesting while researching this.
So the key we need to remember is "The tree of knowledge or experience of good and evil…."
"The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful, and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too."
Recently, I released a 5 part practical course on physiological meditation. I described what meditation is in a way Faustian Westerners can understand. (Currently, it's for paid subscribers, pt. 1 can be found here if of interest)
Some who have worked through that course will recall that it elaborated on the processes of our mental apparatus in discriminating sense data collected from our external environments through our senses.
I described how this necessarily leads to day-to-day dualistic experience. As we know now, with the great benefits of science, this is a very effective survival adaption - if the billions of humans around the place are anything to go by.
Dualistic discrimination arises from the interaction of our nervous system and brain. We differentiate spatial forms and temporal notions from a soup of raw sense data we receive from the external environment.
What is non-Duality then?
For those unfamiliar with my other writings on this, non-duality describes a state of consciousness distinct from our dualistic consciousness - from a phenomenological perspective.
A term referring to a perception of state of mind that is beyond our day-to-day 'left-brained' rational or language-based discerning and reactive consciousness.
It is a state of mind beyond, or not contingent on, the subject/object differentiation that defines our day-to-day experience. It could be said that duality, from the point of view of experience, is something we mistake for objective truth, suffering for it greatly.
Meditation is one way to short circuit…or better, re-contextualise this tendency of the human brain and organism. In meditation, we can see clearly after a while that experience is just one thing; there is no experiencer and experienced. There is simply experience where subject and object dualities collapse. In this way we can connect with the Tree of Life, and temporarily forget about the Tree of Knowledge of Dualities.
From this perspective, the differentiation of sense data from our ecology and reactivity is a function of human knowledge. And from this knowledge we create maps of reality. We'd like to know if something is good or evil, quite legitimately. We also construct temporal notions of reality i.e. analysing what happened in the past for feedback, what is in the present and based on my maps, what is likely in the future.
(It's interesting to think about how with no dual notions to go by - how Adam and Eva were even meant to determine what good and evil were so as to avoid it)
So, the knowledge we build from experience determines how we react; in turn, this functionality feeds back into how the sense data is parsed out. It is a powerful feedback mechanism in which the 'self-aware' or 'conscious' agent (not what people think it is either, tbh) or organism can construct large maps of its environment and pass this on to kin, conferring substantial survival advantages.
Knowledge itself requires either hard or soft duality. As we all know since as a survival function, if we see a form of a lion against a background and in relation to ourselves in space and time, we need to think 'good' or 'bad' and react accordingly. Obviously.
So at this point, you should be starting to see the rather explicit foundational esoteric references to non-dual, primordial consciousness in the foundation myth of the Bible.
So you rightly ask - what is the problem with the discerning function then? Why did god say not to eat the fruit it produced?
There isn't an intrinsic problem with it in my view. I believe, however, that religions recognised that issues occur when it's out of control and doesn't recognise the superior oceanic intelligence to which it should be subordinate. When it’s out of kilter problems arise. One could say this is the root of all evil - or ignorance, as Buddhists would term it. This imbalance…or our lack of an idea of what’s really going on or what we really are - often occurs in the species and is likely due to shortcomings in neural architecture (imho).
In truth, even though discriminating consciousness requires the 'objectification of forms' from the complex undifferentiated soup of sense data, it is still very much a 'subjective objectification'.
It is on the objectification of sense data that we discriminate and react. Reactivity is the source of all our issues because it's almost entirely out of our control; we are passengers along for the ride if we're anything at all. I believe religions were in part kind of technologies that intuited the relationship between differentiation and reactivity, and offered solutions to try and keep it under control.
Christianity recognises the pain we experience in our reactions lies in our misunderstanding about the nature of our objectified sense data. We all think it's concretised and real that everything exists out there in a truly objective way while we're in here.
Of course, the Buddhist experience, for example, tells us rather rigorously; this is not ultimately the case - to varying degrees of extremity. And the latest in mathematics is rapidly getting us to a similar place.
So, in short, the Eden foundation myth tells us suffering stems from the reaction inducing discerning dualistic consciousness - the 'fruit' from the stems of the 'tree of knowledge of good and evil' - the tree of dualistic experience.
The Tree of the Experience of Dualistic Discernment and Consequent Reactivity. This is the term they should have used, imho.
In Christian mythology, as we're seeing, they are also making it clear that we can become revitalised by experiencing the 'eternal glory' beyond 'life and death' - beyond the relativistic falsehood of dualities. In Buddhism, interestingly, the term for this awareness that exists beyond duality is referred to with names like ‘the unborn’ ‘the original face’ or ‘your face before you were born’. The remarkable similarities in description should now be abundantly clear to you. The terms all refer to something supra-personal and inconceivable, that exists beyond mundane experience. A importantly beyond duality.
Indeed, the bible is replete with examples of non-dual experiences and states of consciousness, inferring very often that they are highly restorative:
"And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast."
1 Peter 5:10
The suggestion the Bible makes in such passages should be pretty clear now: the suffering caused by dualistic reactive consciousness can be modified, attenuated by resting in the truth: that dualistic experience is basically illusory and non-dual experience is truly as phenomenologically objective as you get, as much as it is possible for a meat robot. That this access to ‘the kingdom of heaven’ ensures the Christian ‘salvation’ and the recognition that life is eternal and beyond the duality of life and death.
The Bible has many interesting references to the curative properties of the 'non-dual' fruit of the Tree of Life:
And as I partook of the fruit thereof it filled my soul with exceedingly great joy; wherefore, I began to be desirous that my family should partake of it also; for I knew that it was desirable above all other fruit.
Nephi 8:12
And of course the Sufi mystics are great fans also:
I have put duality away, I have seen the two worlds are one.
Rumi
On reflection of all of this, I often wonder about the ritual of the Sunday mass, back when it wasn't BLM or LGBTQRSTUV…or performative moral grandstanding and LARPing like it mostly is today. Recalling my few experiences with it, it seems to me that it's replete with ritual referring to, or trying to induce momentary contact with, genuine forms of primordial transcendent experience beyond duality.
Particularly in the liturgy in the Eucharist. We are invited into the Paschal mystery offering ourselves to God. Receiving the Eucharist, 'uniting us' to the 'body of Christ'. Furthermore, to really drill it home:
Understand, therefore, beloved,
how it is new and old,
eternal and temporary,
perishable and imperishable,
mortal and immortal, this mystery of the Pascha:
old as regards the force
but new as regards the Word;
temporary as regards the model (gr. typos),
eternal because of grace
perishable because of the slaughter of the sheep,
imperishable because of the life of the Lord;
mortal because of the burial in earth,
immortal because of the rising from the dead
— On the Pascha, 2-3
I mean….look at that.
I'm not going into how a Buddhist term like emptiness (the term under attaq) is related to non-duality; however, let's just say there are literally no contradikshuns in this space.
So I hope this has been useful to you.
If you like this articool and the other stuff I do, I live and die by your shares, likes and comments now. Even though to live and die, as we've seen, is illusory.
Until next week
~A
this stuff is not just present in the western tradition but lies close to its very heart. for most of us the road to self-mastery starts with overcoming our vices, without doing that first there is no point in discussing the place of sunyatta in theology... "explain how this is orthodox" is a distraction from the work... in the traditional east the situation was different...