The Place We Never Left

What an ancient Vedantic insight taught me about Jesus, belonging, and the illusion of separation

Preface

In the evangelical world I came from, contemplative spirituality was often regarded with suspicion, and Eastern religions were treated as spiritually dangerous territory. Christianity possessed the truth; other traditions represented error, deception, or human attempts to reach a God who had revealed himself uniquely through Christianity. There were entire worlds of human spiritual reflection I had been taught to avoid.

Leaving religion changed that. Once I no longer felt responsible for protecting a theological system, I became free to encounter other traditions on their own terms. I began exploring Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, contemplative traditions, and other streams of spiritual thought. This wasn’t because I was searching for a new religion to replace Christianity, but because I wanted to know what human beings across cultures and centuries had discovered about consciousness, suffering, belonging, identity, mortality, and the experience of being alive. I found ideas I disagreed with, claims I could not accept, and practices that did not belong to me. I also found insights of extraordinary depth that expanded my understanding of what spiritual inquiry could be.

That exploration continues to inform my work in existential health today. Existential health is not an attempt to construct a new belief system or combine religious traditions into a universal spirituality. It is concerned with the human questions beneath our systems of belief: how we make meaning, inhabit uncertainty, experience belonging, relate to mortality, develop self-trust, and find ways of living when inherited answers no longer hold. I have come to believe that no single tradition owns these questions, and no serious exploration of human existence should be afraid of what other cultures and traditions have discovered about them.

This article begins with one of those discoveries - an ancient Vedantic idea I encountered after leaving the religious world that once taught me to fear it.

The Startling Claim

There is an ancient idea I have never quite been able to leave behind. I encountered it years ago in Hindu philosophy, particularly in the Upanishadic and Vedantic traditions, and it gave language to an intuition that had already begun forming beneath the Christianity I inherited.

The idea is deceptively simple. Beneath the distinctions by which we ordinarily organize reality - self and world, sacred and secular, human and divine - there is a more fundamental unity. One of the great Upanishadic statements, or mahavakyas, expresses this with extraordinary economy: Atman is Brahman.

Brahman refers to ultimate reality, not necessarily a deity in the familiar Western sense, but the fundamental ground of existence itself. Atman refers to the deepest reality of the self. The startling claim is that these are not ultimately two separate realities. The ground of the self and the ground of existence are one.

I did not encounter this as a proposition I suddenly decided to believe. By then, I had already spent years dismantling the religious architecture through which I had understood myself and the world. What caught my attention was that this ancient idea inverted one of the assumptions upon which my former spiritual life had been built.

I had been taught that the fundamental human problem was separation.

What if separation was never the deepest truth about us?

The Metaphysics of Separation

Christianity has often organized its story around a great divide. God is there and humanity is here. Something catastrophic has occurred between the two. Sin names the rupture, salvation repairs it, and Jesus becomes the unique mediator capable of crossing a metaphysical distance human beings cannot cross themselves.

I lived inside that story for many years. I studied it in seminary, preached it from pulpits, and organized much of my understanding of human existence around it. The framework became so familiar that I rarely noticed the assumption beneath the entire structure: human beings begin outside the place they ultimately need to be.

Once that premise is accepted, much of the rest follows. Belonging becomes conditional because something must happen before we are reconciled to reality. Religious systems then become custodians of the conditions: what must be believed, confessed, received, obeyed, or experienced for the separation to end.

This is more than theology. It creates an existential orientation.

A person learns to experience existence itself as provisional. You are alive, but not yet fully at home. You belong to humanity, but your ultimate belonging remains unsettled. You inhabit the world, but your true home lies somewhere beyond it. Even your own interior life becomes suspect because desire, intuition, embodiment, and self-trust are interpreted through the prior assumption that something fundamental has gone wrong with you.

Religion becomes especially powerful when it controls both sides of this equation. It names the estrangement and then offers the path beyond it. It teaches us that we are metaphysically homeless and provides the map home.

Eventually, I began wondering whether separation was the problem Jesus came to solve or an assumption later Christianity brought to him.

That question changed how I heard him.

Jesus Beyond Creeds

There is another way of approaching Jesus, especially if we allow ourselves to encounter him as a Jewish wisdom teacher and mystic before interpreting him through the doctrinal conclusions Christianity eventually constructed around him.

When Jesus says, “I and the Father are one,” traditional Christianity understandably hears a statement about his unique divine identity. Centuries of Christology have trained Christian readers to hear it that way. Yet a mystical reading notices something else happening in the same tradition.

Jesus speaks of mutual indwelling. He tells people that the kingdom they seek is already among them or in their midst. He is called the Son of Man, a title with a complicated history but unmistakably human resonance. Paul later portrays Christ through the imagery of Adam and renewed humanity. Most strikingly, in John, Jesus prays that his followers “may all be one,” drawing their lives into the same language of participation and communion used to describe his own relationship with the Father.

This does not prove that Jesus was teaching Vedanta in Galilee. He wasn’t. The attempt to turn every mystical tradition into a disguised version of every other one usually tells us more about our desire for synthesis than about the traditions themselves.

Something more interesting emerges when the differences are allowed to remain.

Jesus begins to look less like the exception who proves humanity’s distance from the divine and more like an embodiment of human life no longer organized around separation. His significance does not have to disappear in this reading. It shifts. Instead of demonstrating what no other human being could ever be, he illuminates a possibility for how human beings might inhabit existence.

This changes the sound of familiar teachings. The kingdom of God is no longer only another world waiting beyond this one; it becomes a transformed way of inhabiting this world. The invitation to the weary speaks differently when heard by people exhausted from trying to become acceptable to God, themselves, and reality. Even “I am the way, the truth, and the life” need not be reduced to possession of the correct religious system. A way is something walked. Truth is something lived. Life is something inhabited.

Jesus becomes interesting to me again not primarily because of what Christianity says he knew about another world, but because of how fully he seems to have inhabited this one.

What Vedanta Opened for Me

This is where the ancient Vedantic insight has remained important in my own thinking. I am not interested in replacing Christianity with Hinduism, substituting Brahman for God, or constructing a universal spirituality in which every tradition is secretly saying the same thing.

They are not saying the same thing.

The Upanishads, Advaita Vedanta, Christian mysticism, Jewish thought, Buddhism, Taoism, and other contemplative traditions arise from different histories and make different claims about selfhood, ultimate reality, consciousness, liberation, and the nature of existence. Those differences deserve more respect than the vague declaration that “all religions are basically one.”

Nor do I think contemporary science has proven what mystics discovered thousands of years ago. I am wary whenever quantum physics gets recruited as scientific confirmation for someone’s preferred spirituality. Quantum field theory does not establish that Atman is Brahman. Physics and mysticism operate with different methods and address different dimensions of human inquiry.

What interests me is not a grand synthesis but a convergence around a problem: the supposedly self-contained human individual becomes increasingly difficult to defend as an adequate account of what we are.

We are bodily creatures whose atoms belong to a cosmic history unimaginably older than our individual lives. Every breath depends upon an atmosphere and biosphere we did not create. Our bodies exist through vast networks of biological interdependence. Our identities emerge through language we inherited, relationships that formed us, cultures that preceded us, histories we did not choose, and places that continue shaping how we experience the world.

Even the private self is not entirely private. The words with which I conduct my most intimate internal conversations came from other people.

There is no human being standing outside reality looking in.

Whatever ultimate reality turns out to be, we are already happening inside it.

From Independence to Participation

I have become increasingly interested in participation as an alternative starting point for thinking about human existence.

Participation avoids some of the problems that come with grand metaphysical claims about oneness. I do not need to know that all things are ultimately One in order to recognize that no human life exists independently of the reality in which it occurs. Participation begins with something more modest and observable: existence is relational all the way down.

This does not mean the individual disappears. Quite the opposite. Participation gives individuality a context.

I am this particular human being, with this body, history, consciousness, set of relationships, failures, loves, memories, wounds, possibilities, and eventual death. Nobody else occupies precisely this place in existence. My particularity matters precisely because I am not interchangeable with the whole.

But particularity is different from isolation.

Western culture has often confused individuality with separateness. We imagine the self as an autonomous unit that subsequently enters relationships, joins communities, encounters nature, constructs meaning, and decides what to believe. In reality, there is no pre-relational human self waiting somewhere backstage. We become selves through participation.

This is true biologically, psychologically, socially, linguistically, culturally, and ecologically. Whether it is also true in some ultimate metaphysical sense remains an open question for me.

I no longer need to settle that question before learning how to live.

The Existential Consequences of Separation

Ideas about ultimate reality eventually become ideas about ourselves.

This is why metaphysics matters even to people who have little interest in metaphysics. A civilization’s deepest assumptions rarely remain confined to philosophy departments or theological texts. They migrate into institutions, moral systems, relationships, identities, and nervous systems.

If I begin with separation, belonging becomes something I must secure.

For much of Western religious history, this has meant belonging to God if I believe correctly, belonging to the community if I conform sufficiently, and belonging to eternity if I satisfy whatever conditions my tradition places upon salvation. Underneath the doctrines lies a message about human existence that is easy to miss because it is so deeply embedded in the system: you are not home yet.

Something stands between you and reality, between you and God, possibly even between you and yourself.

I have spent enough of my life around people leaving religion to see what happens when the theology disappears but this existential structure remains intact. Someone stops believing in hell but continues living as though their belonging could be revoked. They reject divine judgment while relentlessly judging themselves. They abandon the doctrine of original sin but retain the suspicion that something is fundamentally wrong with them. They leave the institution without leaving the experience of metaphysical homelessness the institution taught them to feel.

Deconstruction at the level of belief does not automatically become reconstruction at the level of being.

This is one reason the question of separation matters so much to me. It reaches beneath what we say we believe into the felt relationship we have with existence itself.

Belonging Before Belief

What happens if belonging does not begin as a religious achievement?

You belong to existence because you exist. You belong to the earth because you emerged within it, are composed through its materials, and remain dependent upon its living systems. You belong to humanity because your life is one expression of a human story that began long before you and will continue after you are gone.

None of this requires a supernatural belief or metaphysical guarantee. It begins with participation.

This does not mean every form of belonging is automatic. Communities have boundaries. Relationships rupture. Families reject their own members. Nations exclude. Human beings inflict terrible forms of alienation upon one another. Social and relational belonging remain fragile human achievements that require justice, reciprocity, care, and repair.

Existential belonging is different.

No institution granted your existence, and no institution possesses the authority to revoke it. No religious system placed you inside reality. You did not believe yourself into the web of life. Long before anyone taught you what your existence meant, you were already here, breathing air you did not make, held by gravity you did not request, dependent upon a world that preceded every explanation you would later receive about it.

That strikes me now as a more compelling starting point for spirituality than metaphysical homelessness.

Belonging is not necessarily the destination of the spiritual journey. It might be the ground from which the journey begins.

The Problem With “Everything Is One”

There is a danger in all of this that deserves to be taken seriously.

Nonduality easily becomes another spiritual escape hatch. “Everything is one” sounds profound until it is spoken to someone whose suffering depends upon real differences being acknowledged. The abused person and the abuser are not interchangeable expressions of a cosmic whole. Neither justice nor love survives if difference is dissolved into metaphysical abstraction.

Human beings need boundaries. Moral responsibility requires agency. Justice requires naming what one person or institution has done to another. Grief exists because this particular person mattered in a way no abstract declaration of universal unity replaces. Love itself depends upon two people remaining sufficiently themselves to genuinely encounter one another.

A mature account of non-separation therefore has to preserve difference rather than erase it.

The deeper possibility is not the erasure of difference, but the recognition that individuality does not require absolute separation.

The old metaphor of the wave and ocean remains useful despite its limitations. A wave possesses a recognizable form, history, movement, and duration. It is distinguishable from other waves. Yet there is no point at which the wave becomes a substance independent of the ocean.

Something similar interests me about human existence. Individuality does not need to be denied in order to question isolation. Being a particular human being—a body, a history, a consciousness, a brief and unrepeatable life—might be understood as one of the ways reality becomes particular.

That does not diminish the self. It places the self somewhere.

Living Without Metaphysical Certainty

My thinking has changed considerably over the years, but one of the most significant changes is that I feel less compelled to construct another final explanation of reality.

I once lived inside a system that answered the largest questions with remarkable confidence. It told me who God was, what human beings were, what had gone wrong with us, what happened after death, why Jesus came, what salvation required, and where history was ultimately going.

Leaving that certainty did not make me eager to find another system capable of doing the same thing.

I don’t need to replace the Christian God with Brahman or one absolute explanation with another. I do not know what ultimate reality ultimately is, and I have become suspicious of any human system that seems to know too much about it.

There is a humility in admitting this that I once mistook for spiritual deficiency. I now experience it differently. Not knowing does not prevent participation. I do not need a complete theory of existence before I am permitted to exist.

This has shifted spirituality for me from doctrine toward posture.

The central question becomes less “What explanation of reality must I accept?” and more “How deeply am I capable of inhabiting the reality in which I already find myself?”

That is a very different spiritual task.

Jesus After Christianity

It is also one of the ways I am still able to hear Jesus after Christianity.

I no longer need him to stand across an infinite metaphysical divide as the supernatural exception to humanity. Nor am I especially interested in turning him into a first-century teacher of my own contemporary worldview.

I am interested in the possibility that the force of his life lies partly in his refusal of estrangement.

He seems profoundly at home in existence. He touches bodies religion considers unclean. He eats with people moral systems have placed outside. He finds sacred significance in seeds, soil, bread, birds, weather, children, bodies, meals, and ordinary human encounters. Whatever else one believes about him, his spirituality repeatedly moves toward incarnation rather than escape.

That is a Jesus I still find compelling.

Not a Jesus who teaches human beings how to become worthy of reality, but one who exposes how many of the barriers to belonging were constructed by the systems claiming authority over it.

Seen this way, awakening is not an escape from human existence. It is an increasingly intimate participation in it.

The Place We Never Left

After all these years, I remain fascinated by the Vedantic declaration Atman is Brahman, though I hold it differently than I once might have.

I do not need to defend it as a metaphysical fact that I possess or prove. Its enduring power for me is the question it places before my life: What if I am not fundamentally separate from the reality I have spent so much of my life searching for?

That question reaches far beyond comparative religion. It touches the way we understand spirituality, identity, belonging, embodiment, mortality, and the strange human compulsion to search elsewhere for what our existence already implicates us in.

We spend enormous portions of our lives trying to arrive. We search for the belief that will finally settle us, the achievement that will validate us, the community that will certify us, the spiritual experience that will connect us, the explanation that will make reality feel secure.

I understand that search because I have lived much of it.

These days, something quieter interests me. Rather than rushing to explain reality, I want to become more capable of inhabiting it. I want to know what changes when belonging is no longer treated as a prize waiting at the end of the spiritual journey, but as the ground from which a human life begins.

Spiritual awakening, from this perspective, is not an arrival somewhere else. It is the gradual relinquishment of the conviction that we were ever outside reality to begin with.

The ground beneath our lives was not waiting for us to find it. We were standing on it while we searched.

The place we have spent our lives trying to reach is the place we never left.

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For Further Exploration

Additional articles I have published related to Eastern spirituality.

📄 The No-Self: Making Sense of The World’s Most Perplexing Buddhist Truth

📄 Philosophers You’ve Never Heard Of: Is there a cure for human suffering?

📄 Jesus and Buddha Walk into a Bar: Can you be Christian and Buddhist?

📄 unChristian: Deconstruction For the Rest of Us (Part Two): Hindu philosophy as a useful deconstruction framework

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