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What Robertson appears to be saying, and quoting B. F. Westcott, famed New Testament Greek scholar, is that Jesus is not denying the present reality of the death of Lazarus. Obviously, his body is in the tomb. However, Lazarus is alive, too: "Lazarus is now alive.” A resurrection of any kind is only one aspect of overall Life, which has neither death nor life. Any resurrection, as well as everything, including conception and birth, is part of the Life. Likewise, Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life,” which in the theology of John is to say, “God is the resurrection and life” or “I, as one with God, am the resurrection and the life.”
In mystical thought, we each are the resurrection and life, in that we each bear this Life. To touch deeply your friend, is to touch God, thus, to touch resurrection and life. To touch deeply the stranger, even the enemy, then, is to touch resurrection and life. Therefore, we are a living Christ, each of us, in that we, by means of sharing in the Divine Life through Grace, are means for persons to touch the living Fact, the one Life, and the single Beauty.
The Christian witness is not just to tell about Christ, but also to share Christ through the vulnerable, intimate openness of the Living Presence through body, mind, and speech. We, in witnessing to Christ, are embodied extensions in time of the Incarnation of the Word in the historical dimension. We are participatory in being with Christ, not simply witnessing of Christ. We are living words wording the Word, now.
We speak in dualism, for we think that way, and that is okay. Awareness, not abdication of dualistic thought, is what we need to be whole persons.
Persons in contemplative awareness speak the same way everyone else does. They see different genres of flowers, they see male and female, they enjoy poetry and prose as distinct forms, they are devoted to particular religions, they fall in love with particular persons, they marry, they work at specific jobs, …
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The contemplative, however, knows the differences are not the whole Fact. She knows this in consciousness, in immediacy, as lived Truth, not as theory. Most thoughtful persons can conceptualize nondualism; the contemplative “knows” nondualism. The contemplative understands, immediately, what I am writing in this treatise; for others, this writing can encourage toward the realization. Indeed, what I write about cannot be taught, it can only arise in immediate realization, either, potentially, spontaneously through Grace or through sustained spiritual discipline.
Meditation, as well as all spiritual practices, is a dualistic practice. Meditation is dancing with the historical and ultimate. Contemplation is that Simplicity wherein we know the historical and ultimate as the Real. We no longer aspire to otherness or enlightenment, salvation, heaven or nirvana, liberation, or for God. We already have all this, are with All!
There is no ladder to climb, there is no Center to get to. There is no destination to reach on a Journey. Now, here, one has arrived, to find she has arrived where she began. Only now, she “knows” where she is, and where all are, also. She comes back to the place she has never left, though now she knows it as for the first time. Or, does she remember what she forgot through the plunge into time? However, she knows time, the historical dimension, in which she lives daily, growing in insight, love, and compassion, using the very stuff of this world to deepen the realization of her oneness with everyone else and all beings.
Spiritual Exercise
1. Can you see how nondual teaching can help reshape much of our thinking on death?
2. What is the one difference between all spiritual disciplines and contemplation?
3. Have you experienced a time of unitive awareness? Where? What preceded it? What was it like? What happened afterward?
4. Reflect on this: Unitive awareness cannot be caused, it can only arise from the transformation of all prior consciousness.
5. Do your daily meditation.
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