Welcome to the liturgist podcast, everybody. My name is Michael Gunger. In this seventh season of

the liturgist podcast, we've been looking at Christianity through a non-dual lens.

And what that means, well, it's kind of hard to say actually. It's kind of hard to say what

non-dual means because the word is in itself a negation of something, of duality. So often we look

at the world in good, bad, left, right, black, and white, male and female. We divide up everything into two.

And to speak a little bit more articulately and beautifully about this, this is Alan Watts from

his book Myth and Ritual in Christianity. He says, today we have come to identify philosophy with

quote thought, that is, with a vast confusion of verbal opinions, to the extent that we mistake

the traditional philosophies of other cultures for the same sort of speculations.

Thus we are hardly aware of the extreme peculiarity of our own position and find it difficult to

recognize the plain fact that there has otherwise been a single philosophical consensus of universal

extent. It's been held by men who report the same insights and teach the same essential doctrine

whether living today or 6000 years ago, whether from New Mexico and the far west or from Japan and

the far east. To the degree that we realize its existence at all, we call it metaphysics or mysticism.

Okay, so then he goes on to talk about what this mysticism is a little bit more clearly. He talks about

how this way of viewing, way of experiencing the world is found through all of these ancient

traditions and Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism. It's found in Islam as the teaching of the Sufis.

In Judaism is found as the Holy Kabbalah. He traces some of its presence in Christianity.

You're going to have to forgive me for I'm sure mispronouncing some of these names.

What he traces it through the Syrian monk known as Dionysius the Ariapogite in the 6th century

through John Scotus Eregina. I don't know. St. Albert the Great,

Maister Eckhart and others in the mystic traditions. And he does admit that this doctrine,

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