Thinking about my own spiritual journey, my involvement in Christianity was a stumbling block for me because of the way I over-personalized God. I took the metaphor of “God the Father” too far in my mind, conceptualizing ultimate reality/God as a supreme being with characteristics and qualities on par with myself as a human person. I expected to be able to relate to God like I would a close friend or significant other, and was routinely frustrated that I couldn’t get this to work.

On the other hand, my first explorations into Eastern and nondual spirituality seemed to be doing the polar opposite by depersonalizing God. Referring to ultimate reality as emptiness, essence or consciousness felt too cerebral, abstract, and detached.

Eventually I learned a third way. Ultimate reality doesn’t have to be a “person”, in order to be “personal” in deeply meaningful and profound ways.

I discovered that the way I thought about myself as a mind and body, existing as an independent, separate, and self-existing person was not an accurate depiction of who and what I am. How could I make God to be and act like a separate person when I was not actually this myself?

The whole subject-object paradigm crumbled for me. The idea that I was a subject reaching out to God as the object, and then God as the subject responding to me as the object, no longer made any sense to me. The notion that either God, ultimate reality, or my true self could be contained or housed inside a body and mind was no longer tenable.

Greek philosopher Plato was the first person I came across who was a theist that wed together the ideas of God as the fundamental essence of all things without entirely depersonalizing God. You could make the argument that the Bible indicates that “God” is fundamentally the essence or ground of being for all existence. There is a scripture that says, “In God we live and move and have our being.”

Many people cannot bring themselves to refer to this as “God” because the term “God” seems inseparable from the baggage of Christian Theism.

The implications of existence being understood as nonduality are staggering. It is a fundamental shift in how we understand the world, ourselves, and the totality of life. Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?

It’s easy to get tangled up and lost in the weeds of how the world’s religions can obscure and corrupt the deepest truths. If it’s true that there is only one ultimate reality, even religion can’t help but trip or stumble into it along the way.