What Are You? Before Religion Told You Who You Were

Somebody in my comments told me this week, "Some theology is not debatable." Earlier, somebody else had told me her husband could debate me, because he's a pastor.

I'm not going to name either of them. One question was sitting underneath both sentences, and it's bigger than any one comment thread. When did knowing the Bible become the same thing as knowing Reality?

This piece is the written version of Episode 38 of Prodigal, the podcast. It's built around one rule that I'm holding myself to as much as anyone else: studying a belief system can make you an expert in that belief system. It cannot, by itself, prove that the belief system describes Reality. Nobody gets immunity from that rule. Not the pastor, not the imam, not the professor, not the atheist who's certain there's nothing, and not me.

It Started With a Graphic

I posted a graphic called "Why Religion Is Bad." Five points: it teaches you that you're born broken, it sells you the cure for ten percent of your salary, it makes you fear hell more than you love people, it makes you hate the people you should love, and it protects priests, not children. The closer: born sick, commanded to be well.

It got a lot of likes and a lot of comments. Some were beautiful, some were ugly, and some came from people I hadn't talked to in twenty years.

I want to be fair to that graphic, because a graphic is a punch. It isn't a peer-reviewed paper. Here is the best argument from the other side, and it's a real one: churches feed people. They run food pantries, shelters and hospitals. Plenty of pastors have spent their whole lives protecting kids, and they do it quietly, and nobody posts a graphic about them. Tithing is voluntary in plenty of places, and plenty of that money goes to real people with real needs. I'm not here to tell somebody's grandmother to stop praying.

But I didn't take the post down, because the abuse point isn't a meme. In August 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury report identified more than 300 clergy and said more than 1,000 children had been abused across six Catholic dioceses, and concluded that bishops and diocesan leaders worked to shield the institution from bad publicity and liability. In May 2022, an independent report by Guidepost Solutions, commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention's own Executive Committee, found that a few senior leaders had focused on limiting the denomination's legal liability and had ignored, disbelieved or stonewalled people who reported abuse. That is documented. It isn't a hot take.

But the more important thing in that graphic isn't any of the five points. It's what they have in common. Look at the first one: you're born broken. Before you've done one thing, somebody has told you what you are. Every one of the five sits on top of the same move: someone tells you what you are, and then sells you the fix.

So before arguing about any of the five, I wanted to go underneath all of them.

Knowing the Book Isn't the Same as the Book Being True

Bible college teaches the Bible. Seminary teaches theology. A doctorate in theology proves you're an expert in theology. Good. Congratulations. None of that, by itself, proves the metaphysical claims being studied.

Here's an example nobody should be mad at. You could spend an entire academic career on Greek mythology. You could become the world's foremost authority on Zeus. You could read ancient Greek in your sleep, and fill lecture halls. And Zeus would still not be real. Your expertise wouldn't have made him real. Expertise tells me you understand the material. It doesn't tell me the material describes ultimate Reality.

I'm not saying Christianity is Greek mythology. I'm saying the logic is the same. "He studied it for forty years" is a statement about him. It isn't a statement about God.

And I'm not handing myself an exemption. Reading forty books about nonduality doesn't prove nonduality. Meditating for years doesn't make me infallible. Having an experience doesn't give me permission to stop questioning the experience. If my view can't survive a hard question, I don't want it. I'd rather lose it than keep it because it's comfortable.

Bringing My Father Into the Room

My father was Apostle Ernest Jackson Jr. He knew that Bible. I mean knew it. Scripture lived in his memory like his own phone number. He was a welder by trade, refinement by fire, and when I was fifteen he announced he was going to preach. That man had a Bible and a belt, and I got more of the second one than I wanted. One day he laid the belt down for good and said, "I'm gonna pray for you, Don."

I want to be clear that I didn't leave Christianity because I only ever met fake Christians. I watched a man give his life to what he believed, up close, in the house, when nobody was clapping. I honor him for it, then and now.

That's exactly why I can say this: if my father's title and devotion couldn't make his beliefs immune from my questions, nobody's title will. And I don't think he'd have wanted me to stop asking. Loving my father doesn't require me to inherit the limits of my father's understanding.

Honor is not intellectual imprisonment.

He gave me a map, and I'm grateful for the map. But eventually I had an experience that forced me to ask whether the map was the territory.

The Night My Heart Stopped

I had a heart attack, and my heart stopped. I was rushed to the hospital, into emergency surgery. I saw the doctors working on me. I heard them ask for a scalpel. I heard music playing in the operating room. I watched my own body on the table. I didn't die. But I got close enough to the edge that I couldn't pretend I hadn't seen it.

What hit me wasn't a judge. It wasn't a gate or a list of who's in and who's out. When my life flashed in front of me, I wasn't thinking about division. I wasn't just "Don." I was part of everything. And I didn't think it. I felt it.

I'm telling you that, and I'm telling you what comes next: an experience isn't proof. I hold it to the same standard I gave the pastor. Somebody can say it was a brain under stress, or medication, or anesthesia, and I'm not going to pretend that's a stupid explanation. The science here is unsettled. The largest study of awareness during cardiac arrest to date, the AWARE study, followed 2,060 cardiac arrest cases across 15 hospitals. Only a small minority of survivors reported anything resembling a near-death experience, and the authors themselves cautioned that sedatives and brain injury can erase memories, so the real number of people who have these experiences may be higher than the number who recall them. I can't tell you what that means. I can tell you it isn't the proof. It's the reason I couldn't stop looking.

What Are You?

Here's the question underneath Christianity, Islam, atheism, heaven and hell. Not who. What.

Walk it. Your name: somebody gave it to you. Your body: it isn't the one you had at five, since cells get replaced and shape and face get replaced. Your occupation: it can be gone Monday. Your religion: for most people it's inherited, a matter of geography and family. Where you're born is a huge predictor of what you believe.

Now go inside. Your thoughts: can you watch them? They show up and they leave. Your emotions: anger shows up and you watch it, fear shows up and you watch it. So if you can observe your thoughts, are you the thought? If you can observe your fear, are you the fear? If you can observe your identity, are you the identity?

What is doing the observing?

Before "I am Don," there is simply: I AM.

I know the pushback, and I want to state it fairly: isn't "I AM" just another belief you're asking us to swallow? I'm not asking you to believe it. I'm asking you to look. Don't take my word. Check your own experience, and if you find something else, tell me, and I'll want to know. And I'm not claiming science has proven it. Science hasn't proven my metaphysics, which is exactly why I'm putting it on the table with everything else. The eye sees everything in front of it except itself. I'm not handing you a proof. I'm handing you a question and a model for thinking about it.

The Piano, the Ocean and the Octopus

These are three pictures. They're metaphors, not findings.

The piano. The left hand plays one melody, low and slow. The right hand plays a different one, higher and faster. Listen to either hand alone and you'd swear there were two players. Then they play together, and somebody asks how many musicians are in the room. One. Many melodies, one musician.

The ocean. This is the strongest one. We point at a wave. Look at that big one. We watch it rise, move, break and disappear. At what moment did the wave stop being ocean? Never. There was never a thing called "wave" made out of something else. The wave was a temporary form the ocean took, and when it goes down, nothing was lost. Don is a wave. Daysha is a wave. My father was a wave. You are a wave. Different shape, same water.

The octopus. I want to be careful here, because people love to say every arm has its own brain, and that's not quite accurate. What's accurate is that an octopus has a highly distributed nervous system: it has more than 500 million neurons, and more than two-thirds of them are in the arms and body rather than the central brain. The arms can do a lot of local processing. But research from a team including Tamar Gutnick, then at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, suggests the arms and the central brain are more connected than people assumed, which is why she described the animal as "one brain and eight very clever arms." One organism, many centers of activity. That's the shape of the idea I'm reaching for: the One, appearing as the many.

I'm saying: here's a model. Try it on. Test it. If it breaks, show me where it breaks.

Now Bring God Back

If God is everywhere, where is God not? Christian theology has a word for it: omnipresent. I'm not arguing with the word. I'm taking it seriously. And if God is the Source of everything that exists, then what substance does anything outside God use to exist? If it comes from the Source, it isn't outside the Source. So what does it mean to be separate from the Source?

I'm not quoting some other religion at anybody. I'm reading their book. Acts 17:28: "In him we live and move and have our being." Paul says it in Athens, and he follows it by quoting Greek poets: "For we are indeed his offspring." Scholars generally trace the first line to Epimenides of Crete and the second to Aratus, though some attribute it to the Stoic Cleanthes, and the attributions are hedged. The point stands either way. The man speaking those words was borrowing from outside his own tradition.

So, Christian: I'm not handing you the Upanishads. I'm reading you your own book. If we live and move and have our being in God, explain absolute separation from God. I'm not asking rhetorically. I want to hear the explanation. I'm not mocking your faith. I'm asking it to go all the way. If God is everywhere, let God be everywhere.

Hell May Be Closer Than We Think

I'm not telling you "hell is a state of mind" as if it's a historical fact. I'm telling you where I've landed: I've come to understand hell less as geography and more as a state of consciousness.

Look at what it's made of. Separation. Fear. Shame. Hatred. Alienation. The belief that God is somewhere else. The belief that the person across from me is fundamentally disconnected from me. Think about the five points on that graphic: fear of hell, hating who you should love. Those aren't just doctrines. Those are experiences, and people live there right now.

Maybe hell begins the moment the wave forgets it's ocean.

And maybe salvation isn't convincing God to let you back into something you were thrown out of. Maybe awakening is realizing you never left.

That's the prodigal story. It's also the title of my book. I wonder now whether I was ever finding something that was missing, or whether I was removing the ideas that kept me from recognizing what was already here. And the father in that story doesn't stand at the gate with a lecture. He runs down the road.

Jesus, Without the Religious Machine

I want to be careful, because scholars do not agree on this. I'm not going to tell you "Jesus taught nonduality" as if it's settled. It isn't.

What I'm asking is what happens if we read certain sayings attributed to Jesus through this lens instead of automatically through Paul, Augustine, Luther and modern evangelical Christianity. "The kingdom of God is within you," or, in some translations, "among you," and scholars argue about that translation, and I'll admit it. "I and the Father are one." And in his prayer, "that they may all be one." Not one more religion. One.

Then look at what the man did with religious authority. Over and over, in the story, he collides with the people who are certain that knowing the scriptures means they understand God. The experts, the ones with the titles. And he's the one who gets in trouble with them.

Maybe the tragedy isn't that Christianity ignored Jesus. Maybe Christianity sometimes got so busy worshiping Jesus that it stopped investigating what Jesus was pointing toward. That one will start some Sunday dinner arguments. I hope it does, but I want it to be a good argument. Not "you're going to hell." Not "you're angry." Bring your best reading, and I'll bring mine, and let's see which one survives.

The Comment That Started It

"Some theology is not debatable."

I smiled when I read it, and I thank whoever wrote it, because that sentence inspired this whole episode. Theology is humanity talking about God. Christians have debated it for two thousand years: the nature of Jesus, the Trinity, salvation, grace and works, predestination and free will, baptism, hell, who gets to preach, and slavery, with both sides quoting the same book. After councils, schisms, denominations, heresies and contradictory interpretations, someone says some of it is not debatable.

That's where belief announces that it doesn't want to be examined. And anything I'm forbidden to question is exactly what I'm going to question. That goes for Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, materialism, atheism and nonduality. It goes for me.

If what you believe is true, my questions can't hurt it. Beliefs need protection. Identities need defense. Truth just is.

The Landing

Maybe you were born Baptist. Maybe Pentecostal, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu. Maybe atheist. Maybe nothing. But before anybody gave you any of those words, you were. Before somebody told you what God was, you were. Before somebody told you whether you were saved or lost, you were.

I AM.

If you came to hear me argue about Christianity and you're now questioning who the hell you are, good. That might be the most honest place a person can stand. Questioning who you are without everything you were told you were can feel like dying. I know. If you've preached it, taught it, defended it and built your friendships and your family on it, questioning the belief can feel like questioning you. That's terrifying for anybody, not just pastors. On that table, there was nothing to defend.

So be gentle with yourself. Be curious. And be willing to let a belief die if it's not true. May we have enough humility to let the belief die before we do.

Maybe enlightenment isn't becoming something spiritual. Maybe it's remembering what you were before everybody started telling you what you were supposed to be.

The wave spent its whole life looking for the ocean, only to discover it had never been anything else.

Notice the pattern. Interrupt it. We are Source. Ashay.

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Sources and notes:

• Pennsylvania grand jury report on six Catholic dioceses (Aug. 14, 2018): more than 300 clergy, more than 1,000 children, and a finding that leaders shielded the institution; coverage by the Philadelphia Inquirer (Associated Press wire) and Bishop Accountability.
• Guidepost Solutions, independent investigation commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee (released May 22, 2022); coverage by NPR member stations (KPBS) and the Christian Science Monitor.
• AWARE (Awareness During Resuscitation) study led by Dr. Sam Parnia, 2,060 cardiac arrest cases across 15 hospitals (2014): Stony Brook Medicine news release.
• Octopus nervous system: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) on research by Tamar Gutnick and colleagues, Current Biology; University of Notre Dame biomechanics blog.
• Acts 17:28 and the Greek poets: commentary tracing the lines to Epimenides and Aratus (with Cleanthes proposed as an alternative for the second line); the attributions are scholarly inference, not settled.
• Luke 17:21 ("within you" / "among you"): the Greek entos hymon is translated both ways, and scholars disagree.
• The piano, the ocean and the octopus, and "hell as a state of consciousness," are Don Jackson's own models and conclusions, not settled science or settled scholarship.
• The near-death account is Don Jackson's personal experience, told in his book Prodigal: Leaving Church and Finding God.