{"id":17686,"date":"2019-01-16T09:51:27","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T14:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17686"},"modified":"2019-01-16T09:54:12","modified_gmt":"2019-01-16T14:54:12","slug":"oneness-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17686","title":{"rendered":"Oneness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/hmFJkGEv3Lw\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Oneness<\/strong><br \/>\nWednesday, January 16, 2019<\/p>\n<p>Guest writer and CAC faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault continues exploring Jesus as a wisdom teacher.<\/p>\n<p>When Jesus talks about Oneness, he is not speaking in an Eastern sense about an equivalency of being, such that I am in and of myself divine. Rather, what he has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other.<\/p>\n<p>His most beautiful symbol for this is in John 15 where he says, \u201cI am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me as I in you\u201d (15:4-5). A few verses later he says, \u201cAs the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love\u201d (15:9). While he does indeed claim that \u201cthe Father and I are one\u201d (John 10:30)\u2014a statement so blasphemous to Jewish ears that it nearly gets Jesus stoned\u2014he does not see this as an exclusive privilege but as something shared by all human beings. There is no separation between humans and God because of this mutual inter-abiding which expresses the indivisible reality of divine love.<\/p>\n<p>We flow into God\u2014and God into us\u2014because it is the nature of love to flow. And as we give ourselves into one another in this fashion, the vine gives life and coherence to the branch while the branch makes visible what the vine is. (After all, a vine is merely an abstraction until there are actual branches to articulate its reality.) The whole and the part live together in mutual, loving reciprocity, each belonging to the other and dependent on the other to show forth the fullness of love. That\u2019s Jesus\u2019 vision of no separation between human and Divine.<\/p>\n<p>No separation between human and human is an equally powerful notion\u2014and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus\u2019 teachings is \u201cLove your neighbor as yourself\u201d (Mark 12:31, Matthew 22:39). But we almost always hear that wrong: \u201cLove your neighbor as much as yourself.\u201d (And of course, the next logical question then becomes, \u201cBut I have to love me first, don\u2019t I, before I can love my neighbor?\u201d) If you listen closely to Jesus however, there is no \u201cas much as\u201d in his admonition. It\u2019s just \u201cLove your neighbor as yourself\u201d\u2014as a continuation of your very own being. It\u2019s a complete seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals out there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other, or to extend charity to the other; there are simply two cells of the one great Life. Each of them is equally precious and necessary. And as these two cells flow into one another, experiencing that one Life from the inside, they discover that \u201claying down one\u2019s life for another\u201d is not a loss of one\u2019s self but a vast expansion of it\u2014because the indivisible reality of love is the only True Self.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2Vbg2dpX-EY\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oneness Wednesday, January 16, 2019 Guest writer and CAC faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault continues exploring Jesus as a wisdom teacher. When Jesus talks about Oneness, he is not speaking in an Eastern sense about an equivalency of being, such that I am in and of myself divine. Rather, what he has in mind is a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17686"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17686"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17689,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17686\/revisions\/17689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}