I’m starting to wonder if Christianity and nonduality are pointing at the same territory — but that nonduality may stop one step too early.
I actually think the nondual insight is real:
the ego/self we normally identify with is constructed, unstable, and ultimately not what we are.
Meditation, psychedelics, contemplative practice, and even neuroscience all seem to point toward this in different ways.
But where I struggle is that many nondual frameworks seem to conclude:
because the ego is illusory, individuality itself is ultimately unreal.
And this is where I feel Jesus may have held both truths simultaneously in a way Eastern philosophy didn’t fully preserve.
Because Christ’s teaching doesn’t seem centered on ego survival either. It’s full of:
- death of self
- surrender
- losing your life to find it
- union with God
- “not my will but Yours”
But it doesn’t end in impersonal dissolution.
It remains deeply relational:
- love
- personhood
- communion
- recognition
- moral responsibility
- intimacy with God
And honestly, this also seems more aligned with many Near Death Experiences:
people report ego transcendence, but not annihilation into abstraction. Love and relational identity still remain.
So I’m wondering if:
- nonduality correctly identifies the false self/ego as illusion
- but Christianity preserves something equally important: that beneath ego there is still real being, real personhood, and real relationship
Not the ego.
But not nothing either.
Curious how people here would respond to that framing.