Mystical Abiding

Living the Wisdom of the Divine Indwelling

In her book The Wisdom Jesus, Cynthia Bourgeault offers a subtle insight into how Jesus’s nondual teachings play out in human experience. Contrasting the mystical Christian path with eastern spirituality, she offers a poetic summary of the advanced found in the Gospel of John:

When Jesus talks about this Oneness, he is not speaking in an Eastern sense about an equivalency of being, such that I am in and of myself divine. What he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other. (The Wisdom Jesus, page 31)

Please don’t read this as some sort of debate going on between eastern and western expressions of mysticism: that would only make sense in terms of a dualistic (and exclusivistic) way of seeing, where only one poetry of the mystery can be “right.” The language of abiding, of mutual indwelling, is not a repudiation of the Oneness so beautifully expressed in Advaita Vedanta (or any other nondual wisdom tradition), any more. Are we one with God, or do we participate in the divine nature? Are we one with God, or do we mutually indwell with God? Is light a particle or a wave?