During the ten years or more it took for this other way of understanding to be gradually assimilated in me, I slowly awoke to the real “aha!” of the situation. The thing is, pantheism, panentheism, monotheism—all those other grand “isms’ of the Western philosophical mind—are purely functions of the operating system, the rational mind running its perception-through-differentiation program.

In the end, it’s all about seeing. But maybe not so much about what we see, as how we see. And that has been my most surprising discovery in recent years: to discover that this great, elusive nondual reality may have more to do with an upgrade in the operating system than any change in spiritual state.

As I began to pay more attention to the subtext in Christophany, what I began to see appearing before my eyes was something even more radical. Was I really understanding correctly that Panikkar seemed to be implying that Jesus was not a monotheist?

I had been slowly drifting toward a more unitive worldview for decades, but it was Raimon Panikkar who finally put me across the line.

The whole implicit collision course didn’t really hit home until years later—decades later, in fact; post Ph.D., post seminary, post ordination—when, by now a commissioned practitioner of Centering Prayer, I was regularly giving introductory workshops in local churches and seminaries.

Never during my own childhood would the thought have even crossed my mind that a human being might be a space where God was not. Raised in the rolling countryside of southeastern Pennsylvania, I grew up in an easy, natural intimacy between the divine and human realms, an intimacy intensified through the regular silent worship at the local Quaker school I was privileged to attend.