A Recent Marshall Davis Publication “Christian Nondual Awareness
I experience Reality as nondual, and I express this unitive awareness in Christian language. I want to do more than talk about it in this book. I want to point you to it. Where to start? Let’s start by being aware of being aware, being conscious of being conscious, being mindful of being mindful. If you practice mindfulness, this is similar. Do not be mindful of anything. Just be mindful. Take a step back from the mind. I have been told I am out of my mind to be talking about Christian nonduality, and this proves it! Your family or church may say the same thing about you. Jesus’ family thought he was out of his mind also, so we are in good company.
All it takes is to sit quietly for a while and let the mental debris settle. Just a few minutes will do. Mind is like water; it takes time for it to clear naturally. My wife and I go swimming during the summer in a beautiful mountain lake near our home in New Hampshire. Sandy bottom. Clear water. So clear that we can swim a hundred feet from shore and see the bottom. When I walk into the water I kick up sand and silt from the bottom, and it clouds the water for a while. Only for a short time. The sand and silt quickly settle to the bottom, and the water is clear once again. So it is with meditation. It takes a while for the mind to clear. When I sit down to meditate I notice that my mind has been kicking up ideas, images and emotions; it has muddied the waters. After a few minutes these settle, and I can glimpse the bottom. At that point a shift happens.
It feels like waking from a dream, a daze, or a state of temporary insanity. It is as if I had been sleep-walking, and now I am awake. All it takes to be in my right mind is to sit quietly for a while and let things naturally calm. I don’t have to do anything. This does not mean there are no thoughts or emotions. It means that you are not captured by them or paying attention to them. They are like a television playing in the corner of the room, which you ignore because you are not interested. Your attention is elsewhere. It is all about attention. As we sit in meditation we cease to identify with the ideas, emotions and physical sensations that run through our brain and body. We are not pushing them away. We are not even letting them be. We are the space in which all those occur, like the sky is the space in which the clouds appear. We abide as spaciousness. That is a visual metaphor. Using an auditory metaphor, we can call this is the silence in which all noise appears. We can call it light by which we see everything. These are physical metaphors to describe the nonphysical. This has the quality of sacredness, and so I use Christian sacred language. This is the nondual Presence of God in whom we live and move and have our being. It is Being that encompasses and includes everything. In this Being–this I AMness–there is no individual self. Yet there is a Self.
I am not myself, yet I am. There is no time or space, but time and space flows from this. This is something that all people know in the innermost core of our being. It is what we were before our human bodies were born and what we will be after our bodies die. It is what we really are. This is accessible and knowable now. It is natural and simple. We are all aware of this at some level. All we have to do is notice it and pay attention to it. So sit back and let this Reality come to the forefront. It is similar to optical illusions in which there are different images in the foreground and the background, depending on what we focus upon. Oneness–unicity-is the background of everything we experience. We need only to shift our attention from the experience to the background. What we are searching for is the spaciousness behind our seeing. All we have to do is turn around and look. Look at what is looking. Notice what is noticing. See what is seeing. Know what is knowing. Be what is being. It is like falling backward into the arms of God. This is how I understand faith. Faith has nothing to do with ideas or doctrines. It is not believing six impossible things before breakfast, as the Queen said to Alice. It is not believing six impossible dogmas before we can be saved. It is letting go of all ideas and falling into the Unnamable Reality of God. It is ceasing to be ourselves and discovering what we really are.
All we have to do is stop, and it comes into focus. To use Christian vocabulary, this is about grace and peace. It is grace received by faith. By faith we see what is invisible, as Abraham’s faith was described. We don’t accept it on faith; we see it by faith. We look through the eye of Christ instead of through our own two eyes. Then the world opens up and becomes transparent to Reality. We see God from the inside, embracing the world, loving the world. God is loving the world through us. We are being loved as part of the world. Loving God, Loving our neighbor. Loving our enemies. As the Bible says, God is love. As a Christian I call this incarnated Love Christ, whom Christianity declares to be the incarnation of God. God in us before birth and after death; God in us as the indwelling Christ or Holy Spirit. I call this Christian nondual awareness. Those from other spiritual traditions would use different religious terms. I use Christian language.
The same Reality is communicated through various languages, traditions and ideas. This is expressible not only in human language. The heavens declare the glory of God. All nature proclaims God. That is why we sense Divinity so clearly in natural settings. Nature is the native language of God, before there were humans or scriptures, Greek or Hebrew. Our soul speaks this language. All we have to do is listen and respond.”