There is a Choice We Make
There is one body and one Spirit . . . one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all (Ephesians 4:6).
According to the nondual understanding, this verse expresses a truth that, when understood, uproots ignorance, the belief of being a separate entity in the world.
In life, we have a choice. We can invest our faith in a personal identity believed to be separate from God, or we can find our true nature in God’s presence. But what does this mean?
Traditional Christianity is largely focused on personal devotion to Christ. The path of devotion is rewarding in itself, but a spiritual framework built upon separation is incomplete. (This article explores the concept of devotion in more detail.)
The traditional view presumes a personal identity or separate self—a constellation of perceptions, thoughts, memories, feelings, bodily sensations—and projects that apparently separate self somehow away from God in order to work its way back to God. But in what larger reality (larger than God) would this allegedly separate self and God co-exist? (See this article for more.) And what exactly do we mean by “God”?
In monotheistic religions, God is defined as the ultimate reality or supreme being. Our ultimate experiential reality is awareness, or being*, by which everything is known and outside of which nothing can be known. Using this definition, the experiential essence of God, supreme being, is awareness, or aware presence. (The aspect of will is explored here.)
So, provisionally, (1) God is aware presence, (2) aware presence perceives, and (3) God is one. Therefore, God’s aware presence is experiencing itself in the world of perception through our senses, moment by moment. It is God’s aware presence that knows these words. The case of mistaken identity is created in the ego-mind by the content of perception, by that which is known. Aware presence, the true self, is the knower of the known. In this sense, supreme “being” is a verb. It is an activity, a doing, a knowing.
To be knowingly aware of this innermost and omnipresent essence is to be present as awareness.
In this way we approach, to use religious language, oneness with the Father, oneness with the Spirit, oneness with Christ. We see the Kingdom of God in ourselves, in one another, and throughout.