humans (16:15)? Paul affirms that he has done this very thing when he says,
“Never let yourself drift away from the hope promised by the Good News,
which has been preached to every creature under heaven, and of which I Paul
have become the servant” (Colossians 1:23). Did he really talk to and convince
“every creature under heaven” in his short lifetime? Surely not, but he did know
that he had announced to the world the deepest philosophical ground of things
by saying that it all was in Christ—and he daringly believed that this truth
would eventually stick and succeed.
I have never been separate from God, nor can I be, except in my mind. I
would love for you to bring this realization to loving consciousness! In fact, why
not stop reading now, and just breathe and let it sink in. It is crucial that you
know this experientially and at a cellular level—which is, in fact, a real way of
knowing just as much as rational knowing. Its primary characteristic is that it is
a non-dual and thus an open-ended way of knowing, which does not close
down so quickly and so definitively as dualistic thought does.*2
Regrettably, Christians have not protected this radical awareness of oneness
with the divine. Paul’s brilliant understanding of a Corporate Christ, and thus
our cosmic identity, was soon lost as early Christians focused more and more on
Jesus alone and even apart from the Eternal Flow of the Trinity, which is finally
theologically unworkable.*3 Christ forever keeps Jesus firmly inside the Trinity,
not a mere later add-on or a somewhat arbitrary incarnation. Trinitarianism
keeps God as Relationship Itself from the very beginning, and not a mere
monarch.
To legitimate our new religion in the Roman Empire, Christians felt that we
had to prove that Jesus was independently divine. After the Council of Nicaea
(325), Jesus was independently said to be “consubstantial” with God, and after
the Council of Chalcedon (451), the church agreed on a philosophical definition
of Jesus’s humanity and divinity as being united as one in him. All true, but such
oneness largely remained distant academic theory because we did not draw out
the practical and wonderful implications. As a rule, we were more interested in
the superiority of our own tribe, group, or nation than we were in the
wholeness of creation. Our view of reality was largely imperial, patriarchal, and
dualistic. Things were seen as either for us or against us, and we were either
winners or losers, totally good or totally bad—such a small self and its personal
salvation always remained our overwhelming preoccupation up to now. This is
surely how our religion became so focused on obedience and conformity,
instead of on love in any practical or expanding sense. Without a Shared and Big