The Duality Boogeyman
By John Gavazzoni

A big, bad Boogeyman has appeared on the path to right-thinking among mystically inclined Christians. "He's" the Boogeyman of dual consciousness, dual mindedness, or simply, duality. It seems that for the believer to be spiritually pure in his thought life, he must not give in to perceiving reality having about it, in any way, a dimension of---shall I say---twoness. Everything must be perceived as one and only one. Oneness is the only way forward on the path to God. Really?

Is one to be thought of as being out of sync with the mind of God when one dares to entertain any thought that God just might be into twoness along with oneness? Ideas become religiously fashionable from time to time within the believing community, and folks jump on the bandwagon, not wanting to miss out on where the wagon promises to take them. When I became aware of this latest fashion, it just didn't ring true in my spirit. It promised clarity but dripped with obscurantism.

Any overview of scripture's teaching on the Oneness of God, reveals clearly t it was the delight of God to give birth to One uniquely, and from that uniquely begotten One, to birth many, and that they together should experience, not just one dimension of Reality, but two. Allow me to explain: We all have, according to Paul, our being within and out from within the Being of God. That Being is two-dimensional. As our brother J. Preston Eby has put it, "God was once All, then He created another all, so that He might be All in all."

There is first the dimension of us all sharing in God's uncreated life, but secondly, of sharing together with Him--yes WITH Him---the experience of the dimension of created life, life AS created. As those born of God, we share in union with Him, by and in His Son, His uncreated life. But God desired another dimension, the dimension of timeliness, of material formation, within the ages of His forming.

Having created the heaven and the earth, God created one man, and made two out of him. Twoness. There it is again. In the creation of Eve out of Adam, Adam was introduced to a dimension of His being that he never could have known if Eve had not been separated out from him to complement his oneness by her secondness. Adam could never have know the full beauty of his humanness without Eve being brought forth from him to him. She was until that moment of her being brought forth, the hidden fullness of him from whom all humanity proceeds. In order to know ourselves, we must know another of ourselves, as one with us, but other than us.

Then there is another matter that must be faced in order to understand the administration of God in a mature way. God made way for a sub-dimension within the dimension of our creaturehood. He split that dimension into two, e.g. "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and the two are contrary one to the other." "...one to the OTHER." There must be an other of contrariness for a season. The adversarial had to be introduced, so that when it is healed, and returns from its season of enmity, great and glorious will be the reunion. Of that which is adversarial, of that which raises its fist against God with hostile rage, death, wrote Paul is the last, the final. "The last enemy which shall be defeated is death."

Before the manifestation of death's defeat, we shall all be subjected to, and feel, its existential actuality. We must know it in its enmity in order to fully experience its conversion. Death will be swallowed up in victory. That is, death will undergo being digested and made to be a life-nutrient, made to be a glory-enhancing element of life's "telos," it's goal. Being something of a supplement freak in this my octogenarian decade, I think of death as being, in its digested and thus converted form, the ingredient within God's glory-delivering supplement. Make no mistake, before then, it has power; it will bare its fangs and stare us all in the face.

Life is---well, duh---prolific. Life loves to bring forth many out of the depths of its essential oneness. Life loves otherness. One of the greatest challenges to growing in God's relational essence, is coming to accept the place of the other other than one's self. To participate in God's I AM, we must fully recognize the other as YOU ARE, as integral to my own I AM. However we may define the meaning of soul, or the soul, in whatever sense it is distinct in its relationship to the spirit, one dimension of soul is its distinction among others. I am I, and you are you, and that fact is not, in fact, to depreciate our oneness, it enriches it. I am more of who and what I am, because you are.

Those most suffering from life's psychoses, are those for whom others exist only as extensions of themselves, meant only to be used for self-gratification. The other person, for the sociopath, has no dignity of being. He or she is an object that the sociopath can not recognize subjectively as being of equal worth. "The Beginning," to which all things trace their existence and continuance, is Deity's recognition of its own Otherness. "I AND the Father are one," said Jesus (emphasis mine). What is it about AND that oneness obsession doesn't get.