Don’t let my seemingly religious words put you off, or lead you astray. Words are just words, whether they sound religious or mundane. Old Or new, no word is the REAL. At very best, words can only point to truth. Reality just IS and cannot be spoken.

When I say “Our Father,” I’m not referring to a fluffy, white bearded old man, floating around on a cloud in heaven somewhere. I’m not pointing to anything outside of your Self. Nothing personal or connected with the manifestation in any way. I’m pointing to the ineffable mystery and cosmos of wide open space…pure energy beyond comprehension, endowed with the capacity to know. What every object or thing is. The message I try to carry is about an all inclusive One. And you are that One. The very same One that functions this entire well ordered universe, bringing everything right down to the things on the Earth.

For some, the language I use may lend itself to obscuring the very message I try to convey. Words, that to some minds, refer to a personal God. A God associated with the manifestation and other than I. A God we asign attributes too. In my writings, I use seemingly “Christian” words as readily as I use non-dual terminology. Words like God, Father, Our Father, Lord, My Lord, Soul, Mother, Divine Mother, and so on. They all arise, come-up, or appear in the mind quite naturally to me. To this organism’s brain these words are all interchangeable with words like, Awareness, Presence, Absolute, Source, Source Energy, Intelligence-Energy, Totality, One, Self, Brahman, Atman, All There IS, and on and on. I find the former words endearing, endeared, comfortable and loving. All the above words arise quite naturally when I am quiet and still. They also arise quite naturally when I’m walking, driving, sitting, writing, excreting, or engaged in many other quite ordinary activities. Please don’t let my words obscure the obvious. The obvious I used to ignore. All these thoughts and words refer to the ultimate mystery of Life that can’t be known; I exist—that is undeniable. Just as undeniable as “you exist.” But how, what, and why? How can anyone know? Nisagaratta Maharaj’s teachings pointed to the one undeniable truth we can know: “I am.” The same one “I am” we all know our Self to be. But he also pointed to another truth, “there is something beyond the I am.” And this unknown, non-quality, or no thing is ultimately what we are. I am that! You are that! Absolutely everything is that!

Everybody’s understanding comes to them in its own unique way. A significant part of where I am today, but certainly not all, comes from Christian scripture and writings both ancient and new. When I was first led down the path of “christiandom” I couldn’t understand why. Later, the obvious answer to this question became clear: 1. My childhood experiences revolving around church, my parents attitude and behavior regarding church, and the beliefs I developed as a result. Later, these same beliefs were reinforced by society as a whole (my conditioning). 2. There is no such thing as “why”… beyond the mental noise of the unexamined mind claiming to be in control. I use the word “christiandom” above because of all the old terminology and language my readings employed. This religious sounding language actually seemed an annoyance at times when I was struggling to integrate the words used so long ago with the non duality perspective of today. But this is where I was led. The path I had to follow. And it all became quite clear. The simple message that Jesus proclaimed back then is: “I and the Father are one” and, “the Father is much greater than I.” Lo and behold, this is the exact same message non duality proclaims today. One without two! Or, in Advaita Vedanta, “One without a second.” I simply confused Christianity and church with what Jesus was teaching. The message he carried. Jesus and Christianity got mixed up in my brain. Jesus was not a Christian. Christianity did not exist by that word in Jesus’s time. Jesus was a wandering Jewish teacher of Truth. And the message he carried is the same message today: We are all one, separation the illusion. I and you and everything else is ONE.

If you examine most religions closely, you will find at their core this very same message. One is all there is! In Judaism: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one, there is no other.” That includes us. Nothing is separate from that. No “other” anywhere. One! This absolute declaration of oneness shapes the entirety of Jewish faith. At the core of Buddhism, especially so in Dzogchen and Zen faiths, they point directly to the experience of oneness as: “non conceptual, ever fresh, presence awareness, just this and nothing else.” In Islamic theology; “there is but one God, and Allah is His name,” and when asked, “Allah is no thing.” When you strip away all the dogma and rhetoric of the five major religions, they all point to the same one truth, one absolute infinite reality that cannot be divided, separated, or objectified, and is entirely present right now. I was raised within the dogma and misunderstandings of the Christian faith. An exoteric system that taught what I “should believe.” I now know, no one can teach truth to another. There is no other. Truth just is and cannot be taught. Seek and you shall find! Knock and you will be let in! Seek truth first and all things will be answered or dissolved.

The relative world includes a dualistic mind. Constantly vacillating and dividing between the interrelated opposites. What I identify with is key! And what I am is not contained in the mind (the mental process). In religious writings the split mind was referred to as “the narrow gate” and “the wide gate.” In non duality we learn the wide gate is our senses. Always leading us into the world outside of us. And the narrow gate, the unseen, is where we learn to turn our mind inward on itself. We use the mind to examine the mind. And we discover the false cannot stand up to investigation. Erroneous beliefs we have about ourselves fall away when they’re examined. All non duality teachings, ancient or new, lead us within. In ancient terminology, “the Kindom of Heaven is within you.” In modern terminology, “use the mind to examine the mind.” All religious words are only pointers, that somehow became separated in our minds from ordinary daily language. Creating “other.” All words can only point to truth. The one universal message of truth that can’t be said in words. Words they used a long time ago that sound archaic and foreign to our ears, and we couldn’t understand what they meant, become clear and obvious when restated today using familiar terminology.

So please, don’t let my words put you off. Use whatever words arise for you. My recognition, and the language I use, is but one expression of the vast multiplicity of infinite ways truth, peace, and love is realized.

Leo Hartong, the author of Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living, summed up his realization in a rare interview like this:

“If there is no difference to IT then the dream just will continue. There will be time, there will be preferences, there will be moods coming by just like it always did. In a way, it is same old-same old, but in a very familiar sense, not in a sense that it is a drag. It is like the urge to escape it or the urge to find something better is gone. It’s just the ordinary and the extrodinary are the same, the spiritual and the material have merged. There is not something very spiritual and something very material. Matter turns out to be energy patterns and spiritual turns out to be a thought pattern. What’s the difference?”