The Nondual God:
Into the Mystery of Us
What kind of Being is God? For those of us who believe there is such a Reality, the question of God’s nature is, of course, the core question. Yet while generations of Western theological reflection have offered many qualities in response – omniscience, omnipotence and immutability, alongside compassion, mercy, and justice – there is yet no apparent consensus about what they mean or even whether all apply. But as the eyes of contemporary spiritual seekers have turned East, we have discovered an even more basic question: Is God a Being at all?
For the three major religious traditions that trace their lineage back to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, imaging God as a Being is baked into their roots. Shaped by the anthropomorphic and narrative orientation of the ancient Semitic mind, the theologies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have focused on a transcendent yet relational God, a supreme Being who stands outside creation even while embracing and suffusing it. By the time Jesus stepped forth in a revolutionary embodiment of that tradition, the Hebrew world was being increasingly steeped in Greek philosophy and its defining categories of substance and quantity, place and position. The fused frames of history and philosophy set the course for Christian theology for ages to come.
There is truth in the experience of a transcendent and personal God, certainly. Yet perhaps not the entire truth. For in another part of the world, a different consciousness of the divine took shape within different cultural and historical contexts. Instead of discovering the divine through its interaction with human history, first Hinduism and then its offspring Buddhism found the divine profoundly present within, as the very essence, the underlying Reality, of all that is. From within that experience was born the perception of the nondual God, of God not as a Being analogous to our own being, but as undivided Being itself. These traditions have brought us many and consistent reports of profound communion, union, even identity of human and divine, with the directive to abandon image and language altogether in surrender to Ultimate Reality.
Both East and West have benefitted from the dialogue in recent decades to find common ground in apprehension of this Ultimate Reality. Yet it remains true that in most Christian circles, the failure to recognize the person of Jesus as a unique and eternal expression of God is a stumbling block to reception of a nondual Reality encompassing God and creation. Yet if we could lower our defenses, make porous our boundaries, how much might the Christian tradition be clarified, even transformed? What new light might we discover if we were able to integrate the nondual God of the East with the transcendent and relational God of the West?
Born in Experience
We are not without common ground. The great religious traditions did not spring fully formed from the mind, nor were any the product of a single revelation. Each of them was born in human experience of the divine, and each matured through reflection on that experience.
But the experience/reflection dialectic is a delicate balancing act. The received historical reflection shapes the perception of experience just as surely as experience engenders reflection. We are thinking people, and the challenge of allowing experience to speak beneath or beyond language is not small. How will a new understanding emerge out of familiar formulations? From where comes the new wine that will burst old wineskins?
Here too is common ground. If we look to those of all times and places who discerned the foundational truths, we will find a single element: a silence that invites revelation. From the mountain caves of the Hindu masters and the Buddha under the bodhi tree, to Jesus retiring to the mountains of Galilee and Muhammad’s withdrawal to Mount Noor, the great wisdom figures of all traditions laced their lives with the silence that allows Ultimate Reality to make itself known. Speaking for the chorus of Christian mystics who over centuries have described direct experience of the divine, St. John of the Cross professes, “Silence is God’s first language.”
The silence that was once the constant climate of daily life is endangered in the modern world. Opportunities for the silence in which God may speak must be sought out, created. It should therefore come as no surprise that it is within the silence built into monastic life that a few modern Christian figures have discovered the headspring of all knowledge of God, and have named it nondual.
Looking East
Buddhism has more readily captured the imagination of spiritual seekers in the West than has Hinduism, so it may seem surprising that two of the most influential of the Christian explorers of the nondual God found their foothold in India. In the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism dating back to the seventh century, each found an elegant philosophy and a deep contemplative practice that met their Christian formation in doctrine and devotion. Two Benedictine monks, one English and one French, immersed themselves in study coupled with meditative practice that promised the deep contemplation they craved, and the promise fulfilled took them into territory they could not have imagined. Once initiated into direct knowledge of the nondual God, neither could see things any other way.
The particular circumstances by which each monk arrived in India shaped their sojourns. English monk Bede Griffiths had encountered Hindu thought as a result of his studies of philosophy at Oxford prior to taking monastic vows, and that study contributed to his later discernment of a call to a deeper experience of God than his Western monastic path offered. When he came to know a confrere of Indian descent who wished to found a monastery in India, Bede joined him enthusiastically.
From the beginning, Bede’s goal was the creation of an Indian Christianity that could hold the truths of Christ within the Hindu spiritual heritage, a “Christian Vedanta.” Though there is no indication that Fr. Bede sought guidance with a guru, his intense study of Hindu scripture and assiduous meditation practice gave birth to a deep intuition of the truth of a nondual universe. He saw a deep resonance between the Christian mystical tradition and the Hindu concept of nonduality: the unity of the individual self, Atman, with Ultimate Reality, Brahman, not as a union of two but as an identity of One. One of the first spiritual leaders to acknowledge the emerging science that proposed the evolution of human consciousness over time, Griffiths advocated for a renewal of Christianity that would welcome all religious traditions and the emerging wisdom of the sciences to open access to the one Ultimate Reality called by many names. In a dozen elegant and nuanced books, he unfolded an understanding of Reality that transcended both philosophies while retaining the insights of each. The genius of Fr. Bede’s mind and the depth of his heart offer the spiritual seeker a vision that holds together the nondual Brahman and the personal God in joint invitation to the fullness of creation, human and divine as one Reality. His impact on interreligious dialogue is felt to this day.
The Dark Night of Letting Go
The course for Bede’s French contemporary was more dramatic, more thorough, and more fraught. From his youth, Henri Le Saux had experienced a profound pull toward a radical contemplative life. When his monastic experience failed to offer him the depth of encounter he craved, his attention was drawn to the figure of the sannyasa, or hermit of Hinduism. Within ten years of his monastic profession, Fr. Henri formulated a mission to found an “enculturated” Christian monastery in India that might realize the best of both traditions, inviting the Hindu wisdom into what he believed to be the greater fullness of the truth of Christ. Once there, his path was seized and redirected by a Reality both unexpected and irresistible.
In Fr. Henri’s travels around India to learn of its spiritual heritage before beginning his work, he found his way to the ashram of Ramana Maharshi, one of greatest sages of modern India. Though viewing him only from a distance among the crowds that daily visited Sri Ramana, the encounter was life-altering. Not only the guru’s teaching but his numinous presence created within Le Saux a certainty of the truth of nondual Advaita that would never be shaken. Immersing himself in intense study of Hindu scripture and intermittent practice with another master, Sri Gnanananda, Fr. Henri was drawn more and more deeply into the recognition that the Christ of his lifelong search was none other than the nondual God not just in the human person, but as the human person, in particular manifestation of a single Reality. He adopted the name Abhishiktananda, “Bliss of the Anointed Lord,” and throughout his remaining years he balanced his work to establish an interreligious ashram for contemplative monks, with long periods of solitary intensive study and practice of Advaita. In his final five years, he at last gained his long-cherished hope of becoming the sannyasa, the hermit living within the nondual God.
Yet in this progressive fulfillment of his vocation, Abhishiktananda was plunged into an agonizing process of transformation. Abhishiktananda was to his bones a man loyal to the church and its salvific vision of God in Christ. His inner summons to the East had never been about reforming his faith, but about deepening the life in Christ that defined him, and his early writings display a sincere effort at the kind of synthesis Griffiths too had sought. Yet the further his meditation took him into the taste of nonduality, the more difficult it was for him to hold his experience within the boundaries of Christian doctrine. Journals and letters from his later years make clear that he realized not just a union but that Advaitic identity with God that the Hindu sages have named, in the consciousness Abhishiktananda simply calls the I AM. In experience beyond words, the I AM of God’s revelation to Moses was made known as the I AM of pure “Isness” transcending all sense of self or other. His distress at finding the most cherished doctrines of the church – incarnation, Trinity, redemption, all of them – slipping from his hands, finally gave way to the full embrace of the nondual God beyond translation. At last, much as Thomas Aquinas had done centuries before, Abhishiktananda decried all his previous writings as inadequate to the Reality in which he lived. The journey that began in the silence of wordless meditation opened into the silence beyond conception itself, into the Reality that is beyond One, that simply Is. The Reality that is beyond descriptors, even our loftiest.
The distress of Abhishiktananda must make us pause. We must be sure we understand it. This committed priest and monk did not throw over his great love of Christ for the nondual God of Hindu tradition. He found in his own direct experience of the nondual God the very reality, the Isness, of Christ. This was not a man seeking resolution of a personal quest. This was a man who pursued with passion and impeccable integrity the source of all life and wisdom, and in finding it also found his most cherished and deeply held beliefs completely shattered, “exploded” by the I AM that obliterates all categories and all distinctions. Instead of leaving behind a more faithful exposition of the truth he sought, he left a witness of the impossibility of articulation of the Reality that simply Is, its I AM, but more, of the promise of its realization by every human person. God not as a Being, but as Being Itself; human not as a being, but Being Itself. And the Kingdom of God as the nondual Reality which We Are.
A Nondual Jesus
Should this surprise us? With these new eyes, the nondual Reality of God and human may illumine everything we know about Jesus. When in the gospel of John we read Jesus’s declaration, “I and the Father are one,” must we take this as an expression of a unique incarnation of God in one man, or might we know it as the awareness of one man that all persons are one with and within God? And when he states unequivocally that “the kingdom of God is within you,” may we not see the kingdom of God as the divine nondual Reality at the heart of every human person?
Abhishiktananda’s chronicle of his time with his guru, Sri Gnanananda, resounds with the essence of Jesus and his teaching. That in the guru’s presence, he felt the radiating love of divine Presence that those around Jesus must surely have felt. That the I AM is everywhere and is everywhere the same, as Jesus’s embrace of the outcast and healing of the broken bore witness. That unless one dies to self, one will not know the greater Self in God. That “the real guru is within us,” the kingdom of God to which Jesus too pointed. That Being is eternal, with never a beginning or an end. That the I AM Is.
Abhishiktananda’s final word is his life, the very detonation of finality that is told of by all the greatest masters. The goal of all religion is to transcend itself in the release of the limited self into the only Self there is, thereby to become the very Love of the God in whose Reality we exist. Identity in and with God, with Ultimate Reality, is not an end, but a new beginning. The fully realized practitioner of Advaita may become a guru, to draw others into truth, but rather may continue to live in any role that serves the life shared with others. The Atman who knows identity with Brahman does not slip into passive eternal bliss, but continues to live in the world, carrying forward the God who dwells within those who walk through history. The personality of the individual is not lost, but carries through itself the Reality of the God of Love, moved by Spirit to enact creation in every moment of its daily tasks and interactions. But, says Abhishiktananda, instead of seeing things in their diversity, the one who knows himself in God knows the things of the world in their unity. And life is transformed. Then, says nondual philosopher Ken Wilber, “if wisdom sees that the Many is One, compassion knows that the One is Many.”
For so long as this nondual God is God, God will be both One and Many, in a. redefinition of relationship that transcends itself. If this doesn’t make sense, that is as it should be, for the Ultimate Reality in which we have our Being lives beyond words. But to invite the ineffable truth of this Reality, the encompassing Isness of I AM, into our living is to consent to becoming, to being transformed, to knowing who we are. And that is all we really need to know.
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