It will come as a surprise to no one that I’m not a Christian, but I do think Christianity is right and true in many respects. There is a way to follow Christian doctrine that is coherent with the spiritual reality of the world we live in.
I’m not going to spend this post going over what I think Christianity gets wrong. That would take too long.
As a starting point, let’s begin with my blog post on the common Christian trope that equates the Trinity doctrine with an egg with three parts that make up a whole—the shell, the white, and the yolk—or with the three states of water that make up the totality of water.
This three-part theory of the nature of God directly contradicts the notion that God is infinite, universal, indivisible, and all-powerful. The Trinity is the ultimate statement of God’s plurality, which is in direct contradiction to both the First and Second Commandments of the Ten Commandments that we have no other gods and that we not to make or bow down to any likeness to Him on earth.
If the egg and water theories are correct, then that’s just further confirmation that we should be worshiping and serving the entirety of the egg instead of only one segmented part of it.
It would be ridiculous for us to say that ice is the most important state of water, that we should be elevating it above the states of steam and liquid water, and that we would be lost, damned, doomed, and forsaken if we didn’t recognize the importance of ice above steam and liquid water.
Those arguments would only be valid if we venerated the whole rather than the part. It would be just as valid to venerate the eggshell as the yoke. It makes the most sense to recognize the wholeness of the egg as the entity we’re talking about rather than one discrete part of it.
The Abrahamic tradition distinguished itself from all the other world religions of the ancient world by essentially inventing a non-dualistic godhead. This godhead was specifically NOT represented by multiple deities or even by earthly forms of the same deity. That’s what makes the Abrahamic tradition what it is.
The vast majority of Christians can’t explain this inherent contradiction to the satisfaction of anyone who isn’t already a believer in this doctrine. I have yet to meet any Christian, including members of the clergy, who can explain this in a way that makes Christianity make sense.
The good news is that there is an explanation for this that does make Christianity make sense. Like so much about the Bible, the Abrahamic tradition, and all its many moral contradictions, these problems only make sense if we read the tradition non-dualistically.
Let’s go back to our egg theory and remove the idea that Jesus was divine and that he was both a part of God and synonymous with God at the same time.
Let’s remove the idea that Jesus was God in human form and that he possessed all the power and perfection of God in a human body that was born from a human mother and could be killed like any other human being.
Let’s remove the idea that Jesus is the secret key to salvation, that we should be worshiping and acknowledging Jesus as one and the same with God, and that failing to do so is demonic, evil, and the road to eternal damnation.
If we remove the key element of Jesus’s divinity from the equation, we’re left with a non-dualistic belief system that actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
Jesus is not a divine manifestation of God—not in that way—and Jesus is not a historical figure that early Christians made into something he wasn’t.
The Jesus story is another version of a similar story of life, death, and rebirth that appears all over the world in thousands of forms. The story follows the cycle of the seasons and commemorates the renewal of the natural world that makes all life possible.
One of these stories is the cycle of John Barleycorn in the Celtic-English tradition. The grain gets planted in winter, sprouts in a rush of vibrant, wild, exuberant, youthful growth in the spring, ripens and matures in summer, and gets cut down and killed in the autumn so John Barleycorn can be reborn the following year.
This story parallels the story of the deer, represented by Herne the Hunter. We see parallels in this story to certain Native American myths and rituals that venerate the deer as a divine being. The deer willingly sacrifices himself so the people can survive and be born to new life in the coming cycle.
The deer is conceived in the depths of winter, born in the spring, grows up over the summer, and dies in the autumn. These rituals portray the deer as a sentient being who comes to Earth willingly and willingly gives himself for sacrifice as an act of compassion to humanity so we can all live.
This story is repeated in almost every culture worldwide. The early Christians used a lot of pagan mythology to market their new religion to the world and this story is no different. The same language of sacrifice, rebirth, and new life has been co-opted by Christianity to this day.
So what is this story teaching us about non-dualistic realities?
The Jesus story isn’t so much a historical narrative as a representation of the non-dualistic oneness between humanity and God. Jesus is a characterization of humanity in its idealized, God form.
From a non-dualistic point of view, Jesus could only be one and the same with God if we all are one and the same with God—which is exactly what non-dualism is. Jesus was one and the same with God because he was human. We all are.
Every Bible story is an archetype for the individual and Jesus is no exception. Each of us goes through a process of being born, growing up, and coming the fullness of maturity in our God-given mission.
Each of us comes to Earth to carry a message to the rest of humanity. That mission varies for each of us, but the mission always involves helping others, leading them to a deeper connection with God, and making the world a better place.
Carrying this message and fulfilling our mission takes lifelong sacrifice that only ends in our deaths. None of us can escape this. We die and are born to the eternal life of the historical legacy we created. This legacy lives after us and continues to spread the message through the people we touched and the works we left behind, whether those works were good or bad.
This is the Jesus archetype that applies to every single person on the planet. We all go through this in the cycle of human life. This is the image of God in which we were all created.
Each of us is both the manifestation of God and God itself in human form—which is what Christianity says Jesus is/was. This is the divinity we should be worshiping and elevating through the belief in Christ.
Christ isn’t the name of a single individual. It’s a state of being not unlike the state described by the word, Buddha. It’s a perfected personification of this archetypal character that represents the individual in our most divine state.
So in that sense, Christianity is right and correct and coherent with reality.
Most Christians don’t know that this interpretation is in fact canon with Christian historical doctrine. This view has become relegated to the esoteric archives of Christianity, but it’s a valid form of Christian belief supported by many of the tradition’s most venerated church fathers.
Unfortunately, most Christians will call you a demonic heretic if you try to explain this to them nowadays. Christians have called me demonic for trying to explain non-dualism to them.
To them, placing the human being on the level with God is the essence of Satanism. Most of these people don’t understand their own religion well enough to know that the Abrahamic God was and still is non-dualistic.
The whole Abrahamic tradition only makes sense from a non-dualistic point of view. The tradition has too many problems, contradictions, and moral quandaries to work any other way.
The Trinity makes sense from a non-dualistic point of view, too.
The triangle is an ancient esoteric symbol with multiple meanings in the mystical tradition and this is one of them.
The word the Christian world translates as “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost” is taken from the Jewish concept of the Shechina. This is a warm, nurturing, worldly, mother goddess counterpart to the distant authoritarian father godhead portrayed in the Old Testament.
The Shechina is seen as living much more closely with humanity, interacting with us more directly, and offering us the more nurturing, loving guidance of God to counterbalance the strict judgment and punishment of the father God.
The non-dualistic Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit represents the family triangle of father, mother, and child (represented by the Son). Each of these three offers a face or characterization of God as it manifests in the world (which is what the Christians say the Trinity does).
The difference between the non-dualistic Trinity and what most Christians describe is that all three represent humanity, both collectively and individually. None of these realities is separate from us. Each of us IS the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are one and the same with them the same way we’re one and the same with the One, Infinite, Indivisible Holiness of God.
This is the essence of non-dualism. The Trinity itself is an archetype for the individual. It can’t be anything else because God is infinite. There is nothing that it is not. There is nothing about us that is not one and the same with God.
None of the elements of the Trinity are separate from us. We are each of them and we are the unity of them.
Again, this is a canonically valid interpretation with a long tradition in the Christian world. It’s criminal that this tradition has been hidden from Christian believers and they’ve been taught to consider it demonic. This is another example of deliberately hiding the truth to keep people in the dark and lead them astray.
Christian believers should be up in arms over this. This interpretation of Christianity could have been used for generations to bridge the gap between Christians and the rest of the world instead of the rest of the world pushing away.
Christians could have been using this to find common ground with people and maybe even win them over to Christianity instead of demonizing everyone who might actually have agreed with this. Some of these people might have been able to accept Christianity as their own instead of seeing it as some kind of mental disease based on elitism and paranoid delusion.
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